Family – Amy Liming

Saturday, September 29—2012

I wore pink. Part 2.

see part 1 here: https://amyliming.wordpress.com/2022/09/17/saturday-september-29-2012/

“Why the hell not” turned into a series of brief interviews, during which we talked about everything that happened during these last two years. The good folks from Harley asked mom about the experience with cancer, and right away, I think they knew that we weren’t going to be average.

Mom talked about the diagnosis very quickly and the treatment even hastier. She spoke of not wanting to join a support group because, in general, it was a bunch of sick people talking about being sick.

Instead, she wanted to get through it fast and be surrounded by healthy people that reminded her of the future, not the present. The Harley folks were smiling. We talked about how far we were willing to go, even thinking about running to Mexico for coffee enemas and juice therapy. They laughed; they loved that we were laughing together.

They asked me why I started riding, and I wasn’t lying when I pointed at mom and said, “because of this, because of cancer.” I know that was the answer they expected, but as I explained, I hope they knew it was genuine. I had been enamored but highly fearful of motorcycles. Involving myself in the car industry meant I got plenty of adrenaline, but bikes—nope. It wasn’t until mom’s diagnosis that I looked at my list in an old journal titled “things I want to do, but probably won’t, because they’re scary.” So many of them had been checked off, surprising things I couldn’t believe I was actually afraid of, but there were a few that remained. “Ride a motorcycle, ” and a few odd ones here and there about love and my intense fear of commitment. I decided to tackle the motorcycles.

They asked my mom what bikes she liked, and she smirked and remembered the bikes I’d been showing her, rattling off. “Fatboy, Softtail.” Wow. No wonder we were cast.

On Wednesday, we went to Leo Carillo Beach and met the crew of the print ads. They fed us a fantastic breakfast, put us through hair and makeup, put us on a Sportster and shot pictures for about an hour, fed us lunch, and called, “that’s a wrap.” Before we left, the rep from Harley hugged my mother and me and gave us Pink Label riding jackets.

Harley Davidson treated my mother like a superstar.

I have always admired the brand, loved the rumble of a Harley V-Twin, always secretly wished I was a little bigger so I could ride the bigger bikes, and now…I fully respect them more than I could ever put to words appropriately. The people in their ads were real riders, not just pretty (although Holy Christ, they were pretty, too!!). The causes they support aren’t just on paper. Their brand ethos isn’t just marketing.

As for the word ‘cancer’ in our house—it’s not a death sentence, it’s not something we talk about often, and it’s not something we dwell on anymore. As Breast Cancer Awareness month rolls out and everyone sells something pink, we haven’t ever participated. It’s been very under the radar. Now we’re about to be on posters and online and wherever else, the faces of people affected directly by cancer, the faces of a brand all about “pink.” And both of us will now make the exception to wear the color, so long as it’s on our Harley Davidson jackets.

To shop H-D Pink:

https://www.harley-davidson.com/us/en/shop/c/collection-pink-label?format=json;i=1;locale=en_US;q1=collection-pink-label;sp_cs=UTF-8;x1=superCategoryCodes

Saturday, September 29—-2012

I wore pink. Part 1.

Pink—it’s become the color chosen to represent a fight with or surviving breast cancer. It’s also been a color that I always found dreadful for the girliness attached to it and simply because I hated it. As a symbol, I hated it also because it reminded me of the very, very vicious disease that has, for decades, been picking my family off one by one. Not just breast cancer, of course; I have a virtual medical degree just keeping up with the diseases from which my relatives have died. But breast cancer, indeed, was among them.

It’s a fact of life, partially from having a huge family.

It hit home when my mother called me on my way home from work over a year ago and told me, with weakness shaking a voice otherwise powerful and opinionated, that she was diagnosed with breast cancer herself. In the months that followed, I jumped a plane countless times on the trek from LAX to CVG Cincinnati, read numerous books about cancer on the journeys to and from, and spent days and nights with my mom as she was operated on, bits of her removed, stuck with needles, chemotherapied, and on and on all countlessly. Medical—very medical. Very clinical. The smell of antiseptic sends me back sometimes to swabbing her sutures, to watching bags of blackness slowly drip into a port in my mother’s chest, to waiting awkwardly in a room with other cancer patients who didn’t speak to each other for fear of not seeing them again next week and knowing why.

If I were an only child, it probably would have broken me. But I am not an only child, and my brother and I switching on and off with my mom meant we both got to spend time with her; we got a break from the medications, hospitals, and heartache.

My mom, of course, never got a break. She lost her hair, her eyebrows, and eyelashes. One never fully appreciates those things until the sweat beads from a torturous Ohio summer stream into your unprotected eyes or until the snowy winter months leave your home encased in a snowdrift, the heater barely warming your sensitive, bald head. All of this, I observed as a spectator. My mother…well, she had to survive it.

And she did, and she’s here, and we don’t talk about it a lot because we all agreed to get on with life and leave the past to the immense universal shredder. And we don’t wear pink.

Just this once, though, I decided to go backward for a minute and asked my mother’s permission. Harley Davidson, which grew on me through the years as a popular brand and company and a helluva motorcycle, needed real riders and cancer survivors to be poster girls for their Pink Line. They donate to cancer research through the proceeds of this line, and their donations may well have touched my mom’s life and my life without us even knowing it at the time. In any case, I thought, “why the hell not??”

Don’t forget to check out part 2 here: https://amyliming.wordpress.com/2022/09/17/we-wore-pink-for-breast-cancer-harley-davidson-and-my-mother/

Comfort

Did I tell you about the last two years of my life?

Mr. Manne died. I moved to Ohio. My mother died. My father died. I married the love of my life, with whom I had only spent four weekends since 2005.

So it goes, right? That’s how everyone rolls through life, right? Life seems uncertain, and then BOOM—you hit forty and do everything all at once, No? Just me? Okay.

Just after the wedding, I started this experiment of purchasing nothing. I decluttered (and am still decluttering), reviewed my finances, and realized that, oh CRAP—it’s a mess. It’s always been a mess.

I looked at everything except vehicles; my vice and passion were left off the table for scrutiny. I had trimmed the excess fat off every other expense and bad habit. I’ve even cut out 90% of my eating-out and take-out coffee. It’s not perfect, but I sincerely thought I’d do worse with this.

Then came the honesty—I’ve always spent too much on my cars. I’ve typically had more than two cars for my entire adulthood; usually a classic (or 2 or 3) and my daily driver. All of these cars would be purchased, registered, and insured and start the lengthy, neverending, expensive process of modification. What can I say? I am, always have been, and always will be a gearhead.

I remember when I found my Roadmaster in a field in Pensacola during my Freshman year of college. She practically mesmerized me, and I thought about her nonstop until she was mine. At that point, I had the Nova, a little 5sp V6 Ranger, and then added the Buick into the stable. I was the only college Freshman I knew that had multiple cars.

It wasn’t like I easily had the money to do this. College was spent living with family, forgoing parties, bringing my lunches with me, and living like a miser in every other way. Then at night, I’d plug in the work light and tinker under the hood until my body ached with fatigue. Everyone else was partying, networking, drinking, and creating social bonds. In hindsight, I can’t say this was the best way to spend my college career, but it kept me out of trouble.

So now I look at these expenses, and the blaring cost is my Raptor. These days I only have 2 vehicles: the Raptor and the Roadmaster. I reluctantly put the Roadmaster up for sale. She’s a challenging sale to anybody but the most fearless of us petrol-headed type people. While the big stuff like engine, transmission, brakes, and suspension are present and accounted for, countless things need to be finished, installed, and buttoned up. If she weren’t mine, I would read that ad and think, “Yikes, too much work.”

My Raptor, though…

I decided to trade her in on something cheaper, reducing payments and overall cost-to-own. Cost-to-own is one of those sneaky topics that is easy to overlook. For me.

I test-drove. I tried. Folks—I’m skeptical that this part of me could ever…EVER…be subdued. The minute I started driving these potential replacement vehicles, I was picturing the mods. A tune, no doubt. Maybe lowering. A wrap? Yeah—I didn’t really like the color. Turning that part of myself off seems like an impossible task.

So, I have backtracked on this part of my expenses experiment. These last two years have been chaotic, and feeling like one thing is staying the same brings comfort. Sometimes that alone is worth hanging onto, even if the actual cost is monetarily higher. This has been the one constant in my life since I was three years old, and I’m okay to pay extra for this one thing.

I guess my silly ass will just accept the expense.

Skeptically Yours,

Bigskeptic

Who We Were

I come from a small town that revolved, for me as a kid at least, around the beach. I was allowed to roam free, mostly as a child, carefree on my pink and grey ten-speed bicycle that I received on my 9th birthday. Some things about that world, as I have learned in my adult life, were not as I remember them, and the world was not as safe as I believed. Perhaps my free roaming rights should have been a little more restricted, but if that were the case, I wouldn’t have had those long sun-filled days burning the bottoms of my feet and picking sand spurs out of them at Englewood Beach, grabbing a hot dog and Coke lunch at Circle K; or spent my evenings at Pelican Pete’s Playland earning enough tickets for a slap bracelet or some other useless plastic bit and running the go-carts until I was out of the money my mom had handed me in the parking lot.

Englewood is where I was a kid at Englewood Elementary watching the Challenger explode, where I was re-zoned into Vineland Elementary and became a Pop Warner cheerleader, and where I suffered through middle school at L.A. Ainger, where I was both bullied and the bully at one time or another and our class of hooligans was denied the benefits of the classes before and after. Lemon Bay High School, by comparison to high schools in the city, was a tiny school where essentially everyone knew everyone, and you’d run into them eventually at the beach because it was really the only place to go in town.

For that reason, when we lose someone that ran the same roads in high school, that hit the beach on the same weekends, that you can trace all the way back to elementary school—it hits home in a different way than people you lose from your adult life alone. It’s happened again, and it’s happened all too often.

It’s different because when I see his face, I see the 11-year-old Darrell Baxter that used to run me into the wall on the slick track at Pelican Pete’s but still let me win in the end. I see the Darrell Baxter with spiked hair giving me a Suicidal Tendencies CD for my 11th birthday, after which “All I wanted was a Pepsi” became a running joke. I see Darrell Baxter spinning himself on a bar stool until he puked just to make my brother laugh. I see the Darrell Baxter that made me watch bad horror movies and then secretly held my hand when he thought no one was looking. Even in High School, during Mr. Pearcy’s History Class, I saw 11-year-old Darrell when we’d talk. He was definitely still in there.

Who we were back then, in a small beach town with nothing to do, set us on our paths towards the places we’d go and the friends we’d keep. It also means that when we lose one of the pack, looking back is inevitable and hurtful. I’m looking back a lot today at the moments I had with my friend, with all my friends in the storied beach town of my childhood, sentimentalized as it may be in my head. I’d rather look backward with fond memories and forget the harsh realities that must have co-existed. And I’d rather remember Darrell as that 11-year-old boy, digging in the sand on Englewood Beach with 11-year-old me, still mostly sure that things would turn out okay.

Skeptically Yours.

Our friend Darrell took his life on February 27th, 2013.