Literary Profile

            Commute in the city had always been bogged down by heavy traffic, lack of blinker users, and the inability of most people (driver and pedestrians alike) to follow signal patterns.  It came as no surprise that accidents occurred.  Pedestrians ran the risk of being clustered together on slow moving sidewalks, and times they even risked the chance of being hit by approaching vehicles.  Drivers were no exception to this; they were usually piled upon each other in traffic jams, and in rare occasions they were a part of accidents and collisions.  When I was a child I would go along with my mother to the Providence market place as she shopped.  I was the miniature shopping cart that carried everything while she went from shop to shop, from stall to stall, gathering foods and merchandise for the week.  That day she had decided to visit a market in Cranston.  I remember it well because of our drive back home.  Forever embedded in my mind is the scene of the man clad in yellow who hopped across car rooftops and landed beside ours window.

            Mother drove us back home using Elmwood Avenue.  Traffic was dense; our car inched forward every couple of minutes.  But not all cars were satisfied waiting around for the junction ahead to speed up.  Our car was stopped in front of a side street where several drivers were merging onto the main traffic.  Speeding down the breakdown lane was an off-white sedan, while coming off the side street was a yellow sports motorcycle.  The driver in front of us had pardoned the motorcyclist to merge, but unbeknownst to them was a speedy Gonzales who was on a one way course to a collision.  As most witnesses expected, the sedan came to a loud thud into the yellow sports motorcycle.  The motorcyclist leapt off and ran across the rooftop of the sedan, and the other cars who had attempted to follow it, and landed to his safety.  It was both a scary and an amazing memory that led to me wanting to ride motorcycles.

            I was seventeen years old when I first found myself prancing around on top of motorcycles.  Up until this point in my life I had only driven automatic shifting cars and I had assumed motorcycles, in one way or another, operated the same way.  I was wrong.  Motorcycles were a vehicle that required the different parts of my entire body performing different functions all at the same time in order to operate it. My first time on motorcycles ended up with me on the ground with countless scars to show for it.

The first step in learning how to ride a motorcycle was learning all the controls and their functions.  I was seventeen and didn’t understand the concepts of a clutch and it’s relation to a throttle, nor did I understand how a clutch engaged or disengaged an engine, nor did I know what a shifter was.   I knew what brakes did, but I didn’t understand why there were two sets of brakes to operate.  While I was learning the mechanisms I was also making a list on how-to’s.

1.      Engage the engine by pulling in the clutch and twisting the throttle.

2.      Click the shifter up with your left foot while slowly lifting the right foot off the rear brake while slowly releasing the clutch.

3.      Twist the throttle while simultaneously pulling the clutch back in and clicking the shifting up again.

4.      Re-release the clutch and twist on the throttle to rev the engine with kinetic energy so the bike balances out and you don’t fall.

5.      When braking, pull in both the front brake within your right hand and press the rear brake under your right foot with equal pressure.

I had made a 5-Step guide on how to kick a motorcycle into motion, and I would have to practice these 5 steps for over six months until I gradually grew more comfortable to ride a motorcycle.

Riding a motorcycle involved intricate steps that were more instinctual and exponential in their learning and growth patterns.  Comparing a four-wheeled vehicle—such as a car—to a two-wheeled vehicle—such as a motorcycle—turning into a curve or turning into a corner took a different approach.  Four-wheeled vehicles steer with their front tires and the direct motion of the hands-to-arm relationship.  Two-wheeled vehicles require the entire body to lean in order to create momentum for the tires to fall and rebalance as they turn.  And moreover, turns on a two-wheeled vehicle occur with where the eyes look because the body instinctually leans with the eyes.  I learned that by falling off and tearing my arms several times through the course of a year until I learned how to lean, how to balance, and how to “Look where I want to go.”

Experimenting with that year of motorcycle riding ended up doing something for me that most other past activities couldn’t: It created a habit of practicing and perfecting.  What I mean by this is that the skills I’ve come to accumulate over the course of my college career (and even with my life at work) have only become because of my own strive to learn, practice, fine tune, and perfect them.  When I was a secondary school student I hardly ever had to study for tests or exams because I had a great memory (or the material wasn’t hard enough to challenge me to dedicate time to studying).  As a working college student, however, material that I once thought to be easy or unworthy of my time studying suddenly required allocated study periods.  I had to study because I didn’t just need material for one or two classes, I needed to learn because I had a deeper and higher goal in mind: I would someday have to teach what I knew to students who didn’t know.  Like learning how to ride a motorcycle, everything I do as a college student comes in steps, and sometimes instinctually.  But someday I’ll have to teach even those as skills.