Soccercomplexity > Soccercomplexity's Blog Posts > Aunt Doris

February 13, 2007 22:06

Aunt Doris

The accident was family folklore. My father was in his early forties and he rode a Harley. I don’t know the model or year, all I have are mental images of the huge gas tank on which we took rides snug in his lap with the gas tank in front and the gear shift lever on the side. Color doesn’t register, just the bulk, the steel and the huge dial of a speedometer. And ultimately, the large white bandage that encircled his head. The fragmented images of a four year old.

My father had ridden for years with his sister and her husband many times cross country from Ohio to Memphis or south to the Blue Ridge Mountains. On this day he ventured out with some neighborhood friends for a short ride. The year was 1954 and Ohio licensed bikers at the tender age of fourteen.

I was with my mother in an old Chevy and she was learning how to drive. As we crossed the “old wooden bridge” on the edge of town and turned onto the highway, there was my father and three other bikes lying on the road. Fortunately, my mother stopped short before hitting anyone. While the details remain unknown, my father told me repeatedly that the four bikes were riding together including a new rider, a fourteen year-old young man. The young man swerved unexpectedly into the path of another bike and my father swerved to avoid the accident. In the end, the young man was severely injured being thrown into a ditch and my father suffered a large cut on his head, some seventy-two stitches worth. It’s funny how the details of such an incident get characterized in such ways, the bandage on his head, mom avoiding hitting him, seventy-two stitches. My father probably characterized that day as the last day he rode. His roaming days with Aunt Doris and Uncle Leroy had abruptly come to a close.

But Doris would ride on. She had bought her first new Harley in 1936 and she and Leroy rode. My memory of Aunt Doris and Uncle Leroy is as eccentric relatives we would occasionally visit but would not invite to weddings, graduations or other social functions. Not out of meanness. They would not want to come, They lived a simple life, in a house above a two-car garage on a parcel of land that was enclosed with an electric fence, to keep the donkey in and visitors out.

Upon arrival, we would honk our horn and Aunt Doris would shut off the fence so we could enter. The word parsimonious was invented to describe them. They drove a 1949 Dodge until 1969 when they replaced it with a new one. Since one half of the garage doubled as the kitchen, Aunt Doris would push the ‘49 Dodge out of the garage, pick up the newspapers on which it was parked, move the table into place and prepare meals, and yes, she would push the Dodge back into the garage when finished lest any fumes invade the house. As if that wasn’t unusual enough, their phone was mounted high on the kitchen wall only within a couple feet of the ceiling with a trap door above it so that the phone could be reached from either floor without the added expense of paying for an “extension”. But my favorite thing about Aunt Doris was that, in her will, she left me, and others, rare coins that she had collected, Indian Head pennies, dimes from the 1800’s that sort of thing. Except that she had drilled holes right through the center of each of the coins! I always interpreted that to mean that money was only worth its face value and absent that, it was nothing but a piece of metal.

The piece of metal that she truly cherished was her last bike, a green seventy-four cubic inch Harley with matching green leather saddlebags. However, when Doris was in her seventies she reluctantly decided to put her Harley up for sale and fortuitously Don Wrench came by to see it. She explained to Don that she was going to buy a Honda with an electric start. To his astonishment, Doris wasn’t giving up on riding, as she put it, she had suffered from polio as a young girl and the Harley was becoming too hard to kick-start so she would ride an electric start Honda. Fortunately for Doris, her newfound friend Don wouldn’t hear of it. Rather than buy the bike, he offered to come over any time and not only start the bike, but ride with Doris wherever she liked.

With Doris in her seventies and Don in his forties the two began a relationship that lasted a number of years. They spent their time riding as far as a hundred miles at a time. Don chronicled their relationship in a small Ohio club newspaper, including pictures of Doris and Leroy on their bikes in their prime. Apparently, Doris was known for mentoring young riders and taking them to Wellsville, Ohio in the southern part of the state to run Irondale Hill as a test of their skill. To Don’s credit, he honored my aunt as a true friend and gave her great joy as a riding partner. And as her body started to fail from cancer, she honored his commitment with a gift of the green Harley. While regrettably I was not near home at the time, Don rode the Harley fully dressed in leathers as the lead vehicle in Doris’ funeral procession.

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