On the Exchange of Tenderness

March, 2016

If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust. - Alan Rickman

My husband has been riding the same 1200 Suzuki Bandit motorbike for the past 15 years. By 2015 there were 142,000kms on the odometer. It’s really not surprising that despite looking after the bike, it began to falter last year and wound up in the shop for one thing and another.

The thing about motorbikes is it’s really the reason my husband of 20 years spoke to me in the first place. He was 20 years old at the time. I was 25. We were at an Aussie church bush-dance in a small town outside Brisbane, Queensland. He had noticed I walked in holding a bike helmet. I was there for the dancing. To this day, I’m not sure what he was doing there at all.

Because I had that bike helmet, he managed to start a conversation with “Do you ride a bike?”

“Yes” I smiled, “Just a Yamaha 250. Do you ride?”

“Ah, no, I don’t have my licence yet, but I’m going to get it”. Small awkward pause.

“Yeah, well, it doesn’t run very well,” I quickly responded. I was always pretty quick to fill the silent spaces then. Now I tend to wait a bit.

He offered to have a look at the bike and see if he could fix some of the problems. Turns out he was really good at fixing things, and very soon the bike was running a lot better and we were spending more time together. In the first few years of marriage, we had a bike each but I stopped riding during the years I was pregnant and/or breastfeeding babies. It just didn’t seem worth the risk.  As our children grew however, the old hankering for my own bike flared up and I began to talk wistfully of riding again.

The Bandit was in the shop for 6 months towards the end of last year and although my husband became used to getting the bus to work, we both could not believe how long it was taking for simple repairs. But it’s always good to remember that this is a man strategic and clever; very good at fixing things. He did some research on bikes and then negotiated with the blokes in the shop to trade in his old Suzuki Bandit for a new Triumph Bonneville - for me to ride.

The tenderness in the gesture came because he actually didn’t want me back on a bike. He holds a crazy notion I’ll crash and kill myself, and more than ever he doesn’t want that to happen. So for some time he had been resistant to me getting back on a bike. But he also knew I was missing riding. So while his old bike sat in the shop, parts delayed again and again, he battled with his own preferences. Eventually he came to a resolution, and made the decision to exchange his old bike for a new one for me.