i’m a beginner again…
James looked uncharacteristically pale when I stopped beside him and behind my POS car that’s parked in front of my house.
“I thought you were going to go to the end of the street and come back,” he said. “And then you disappeared around the corner.”
“Well, I couldn’t make a U-turn,” I replied.
Holding the bike upright and remembering how to get rolling and then stop and then get rolling again was enough of a challenge. A U-turn was out of the question.
“Yeah, I get that,” he said. “But I felt kinda’ nervous.”
There was a hint of anxiety in his voice. This is the same James who hadn’t batted an eyelash when, in May 2023, I rode solo to Sunridge and back: a two-day, seven-hundred-and-eighty kilometer round trip on back(ish) roads. More recently, he had been assuring me for weeks there was no question I would be able to ride again. But when he said he felt nervous, I knew he hadn’t been as certain as his assurances suggested.
Neither was I.
Despite my determination and positive attitude, I too had doubts about my ability to ride again. Having a brain injury can seriously impair one’s capacity to do even the simplest of things — as I have discovered since I had two small strokes in early February.
“You were anxious? How do you think I felt?” I laughed about being terrified of taking the shortest of rides around the neighbourhood after having logged 82,000 kms in my first three motorcycling seasons.
It’s true I’m not quite starting from scratch as I did in the fall of 2021 when I bunny-hopped TheFox down to the first stop sign on my street and ended up in tears. I didn’t know then that first gear tends to be ‘jumpy.’ I also didn’t know how to shift into second.
This past Thursday, I was able to get into second gear and I didn’t drop Kit (short for Kitsu) despite going not once but twice “around the block,” which actually consists of three blocks that include seven stop signs, potholes in some parts, a long newly paved stretch (yay!), lots of parked cars, pedestrians and kids on bikes. Not the parking lot I had planned to be in for my test run, but James was short on time and we (read he) had had to replace Kit’s dead-as-a-doornail battery before I did anything.
So, the neighbourhood it was.
James adjusted the shifter after the first go-around. That made it easier for me to reach it, though I still found it difficult to make my left quad do the needful to get my toe under it – yes, that’s the level of basic we’re talking.
Stay tuned.
© 2025 Susan Macaulay. I invite you to share my poetry and posts widely, but please do not reprint, reblog or copy and paste them in their entirety without my permission. Thank you.
