Born to be--Wise

 HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I have two step-kids, and they are awesomely awesome, but one thing about my life, and I think about this sometimes, is that it was never my responsibility to say to a child:  No tattoos! No staying out late! No MOTORCYCLES.  Which I would, indeed, have said.

For ten million dollars, I would not get on a motorcycle. And I cannot remember ever having been on one.

So, that said. I looked today at the Jungle Red stats, and found we've had more than four million views. Yow. 

And in those four million views, we have never ever had a post like this one.  

First, You know Lori Rader-Day, right? You know she's the marvelously talented, Mary Higgins Clark award winning author, whose brand new THE DAY I DIED comes out next week! You might know Library Journal said it will "thrill readers who can't get enough of the psychological suspense genre." 

 But you certainly did not know--until know--about Lori's past.

My biker years

By LoriRader-Day

You might not know it to look at me, but I’m a former biker. Yeah, I come from a short line of serious motorcyclists. The whole pack of us used to take off on trips,  an afternoon here, a day-long ride, a weekend away, a ride over to Ohio to meet up with at a family reunion—in the rain. Once the whole family went to Niagara Falls on our bikes.

Do you have a picture in your mind when I say that? Duck Dynasty beards, leather, tattoos? Like...

A little younger, actually. How about...

(Thanks to this post, that photo is going to come up when anyone ever Googles my name.)

Not hogs, though, because we didn’t ride Harleys—my grandfather was not a fan, and so we all rode Hondas. 

So maybe not so many tattoos, but a real leather jacket with the collar popped...

No, we were never that cool.

Maybe a little cooler than that. Wait. Look at that dog. That’s pretty cool.

Not quite.

No, my motorcycle family history is a little more... boring.

As a kid, it was just a thing we did. As a small child, I got the occasional chance to ride in front of my dad, literally falling asleep on the warm gas tank (and strapped to the driver, obviously). When I was older, my mom got her own bike—a Honda 900 series just like my dad’s, only with a smaller fairing on the front to keep it lighter. I rode behind my dad; my younger sister rode behind my mom. The four of us would coast around the countryside, zip up and down state roads, and sample the wares of many a small-town Indiana ice cream shop.

Sounds like a pretty amazing childhood, right?

I hated it.

Really hated it.

I was such an ingrate. Here’s the chance to ride all over town on the back of a motorcycle so that my friends can see me—do they have a motorcycle? No, they do not—and see the world with the wind in my face. The freedom of the road. The call of the wild. And all I wanted to do was... be home, reading.

See, motorcycle riding might be exciting for the driver, who has the job of keeping the thing upright, leaning into curves, mapping out a route or winging it (Gold Winging it) when something interesting pops up on the horizon. But for the kid stuck behind her dad, the view is pretty limited. I could only see to one side or the other, not ahead. How many cornfields can you stand to look at? How many abandoned buildings and tidy country churches? How much asphalt passing below your feet? Yellow line, double yellow line, dotted yellow line. The wind whips at your eyes. Oh, and it’s hot, and you’re wearing long pants to help protect your skin in case of a lay-down or accident.

Also, real talk: your butt hurts. You’ve got saddle-butt, and there’s not a horse in sight.

And that’s just a few hours up to visit family or to ride around the county a bit to end up at the local Waffle House. Imagine going to Niagara Falls from central Indiana. My mother wondered why she couldn’t get a single good photo of us, that trip. My guess? Our little pre-teen butts hurt.

(Our mother literally threatened us to smile for this photo, the only photo from this trip where we don’t look like sad Soviet children dragged to Niagara Falls.)

I don’t ride anymore. I never transitioned from the kid on the back to the adult with my own bike, the way some of my cousins did. Sometimes I wish I had, because now, as a driver of a car, I know the joy of a leisurely jaunt, nowhere special to be. I get it. Whenever I’m driving along an Indiana highway, I see roads pass overhead or dive away alongside that would be best traveled not by Ford Fusion but by bike.

Now that I live in Chicago, “going for a drive” is not a thing. But I’m often on the road for events and have found that a drive on a nice day, when the traffic is flowing, is as generative a writing activity as any I’ve found. I always have a new idea for what I’m working on; I always think of a way to unstick from some spot I’ve written myself to. 

And, in fact, when I was kid on the back of those boring rides, that’s how I passed the time. I told myself stories about those abandoned buildings and tidy country churches, making up people and moving them around in my head. The open road is better than any writing prompt. I should remember to keep a notebook handy.

I should remember to get on the bike I do have: a blue Giant bike named Betty that will never see Niagara Falls.

I’ll never be a retiree on a Gold Wing, the way my grandparents were up until the day my grandfather passed away. I’ll never be as cool as James Dean. 

I was not, as it turns out, born to be wild. 

There’s a part of me that’s a little sad I didn’t enjoy my biker years fully while I lived them. I enjoyed the ice cream. But at least they taught me, if not how to lean into curves, how to tell a story. And that’s a ride I take all the time.

HANK: Truly, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. But you are endlessly fascinating, and hilarious, and the conflicts of childhood are never-ending. (You have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I hope, one of my faves.) 

So, Reds, how do you feel about motorcycles? (And Lori--you are a rock star!)

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Lori Rader-Day, author of The Day I Died, The Black Hour, and Little Pretty Things, is the recipient of the 2016 Mary Higgins Clark Award and the 2015 Anthony Award for Best First Novel. Lori’s short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Time Out Chicago, Good Housekeeping, and others. She lives in Chicago, where she teaches mystery writing at StoryStudio Chicago and is the president of the Mystery Writers of America Midwest Chapter.

About THE DAY I DIED

From the award-winning author of Little Pretty Things comes this gripping, unforgettable tale of a mother's desperate search for a lost boy.

Anna Winger can know people better than they know themselves with only a glance—at their handwriting. Hired out by companies wanting to land trustworthy employees and by the lovelorn hoping to find happiness, Anna likes to keep the real-life mess of other people at arm’s length and on paper. But when she is called to use her expertise on a note left behind at a murder scene in the small town she and her son have recently moved to, the crime gets under Anna’s skin and rips open her narrow life for all to see. To save her son—and herself—once and for all, Anna will face her every fear, her every mistake, and the past she thought she'd rewritten.