I can hardly believe what my seventy-three-year-old dad just did. After working his whole life in that dirty little motorcycle shop—hands always black with grease, clothes smelling of gasoline and old cigarettes—he finally sold the place for a decent sum. I hoped he would use the money to help me the way good fathers do. I hoped he would pay down my student loans or help me buy the condo I have been eyeing. Instead, he spent thirty-five thousand dollars on a brand-new Harley-Davidson and calls it his “last big adventure.”
That is not an adventure; it is a selfish crisis. For years I felt embarrassed whenever he arrived at my school events wearing his worn leather vest, faded skull tattoos peeking out from under rolled sleeves. He never seemed to fit in among the well-dressed parents. Now, instead of trying to look respectable at last, he wants to roar across the country on a flashy bike like some old rebel in a movie.
When I tried to talk sense into him yesterday, he actually laughed and said, “Sweetheart, at my age, every crisis is an end-of-life crisis.” He thinks that line is clever. He thinks his duty to me stopped the day I turned eighteen. News flash: I am still drowning in debt at forty-two. I could make good use of that money for the next thirty years, while he will only ride until his heart or his knees give out somewhere in the desert.
Most of my friends agree that parents should help their kids when they can. If you have the means, you keep supporting your family. It is simple. But Dad keeps talking about the “call of the open road” and how he has already mapped a three-month trip to see every place he missed in his youth. “I want to feel the wind one more time before it’s too late,” he tells me with shining eyes.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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