BURNT GLOVES

Okay. I was jonesin for a ride. Last week in February. I forgot to tell ya'll about this.

Well, I take the subway ride and 1/2 mile walk out to Queens to fetch Tigerlily where she was staying for a little bit. Tigerlily is my Harley-Davidson motorcycle, in case you didn't know.

It was freezing that day and windy. But I had to go get her, and I wanted to ride. This was the first time I had ridden her in awhile and my heart was aching.

See, I get really out of sorts, or out of tune, without my Tigerlily wings roarring beneath me. I have to ride to live. Honestly. Riding is my breath.

Anyway, look, it's freezing cold and my hands within blocks are ice blue cold in my thinsulate leopard gloves. Though, I've got my fleece on, leather pants, leather jacket, scarf...I'm warm everywhere else BUT my hands and in NYC, honey, you are using your hands A-lot because you've got to do the dance with the clutch and the break in this insane traffic.

Well, I got caught in traffic at the 59th Street Bridge...and there is NO where to go. Enroute to the bridge, me and Tigerlily nearly tumbled into all kinds of road crators and I kept wondering where the hell the metors were and why weren't they reported when they hit the pavement out here in the borough, and then I thought, oh, wait, these are potholes.

But, my girl bike Tigerlily is such a traffic diva, she just dipped and dove around those gullys while we laced through the kissing bumpers surrounding us. But my hands were COOOOOLLLLLD. So, when we'd get to those scarlet lights, I'd place me hands on her engine and defrost the paws. I did this at every stop light. The feeling was draining fast from my hands in those cold temps. BUT OH WHAT FUN TO RIDE RIDE RIDE Again!

Well I smelled something burning and I'm thinking oh crap, did I burn these nice leather pant legs? Nope? Okay, I toasted the heel on my boot on the pipes somehow? Nope. Better not be having some kind of internal bike organ problem here, because she just had to get repaired. Checked around looked for drips. Nothing.

Then I realized my gloves were burning.

Yep, folks, my favorite leopard furry (fake of course) street gloves (bought 'em from a vendor off the street) were singed. But not too bad. The crazy thing was, my fingers weren't burnt and I never felt that much heat from the engine through the gloves.

The little Tigeress bike may have tried to warn me, too. She's so much a part of me, this bike speaks to me. NO, really. She does. She watches out for me. My road angel and me made it over the 59th Street bridge and into our temporary digs.

We didn't make it to Daytona as planned, however, the day I had planned to leave it was a mad ice and snow storm and then it froze, deep freeze for several days on end.

But I'll be riding her this weekend. I must. She needs me and I need her. I can't wait to someday have a REAL home with a garage way out West somewhere so that she and I can live together.

See, in NYC you can't live with your bike. Your bike has to have its own place somewhere else in some multi-garage or make shift hang. And that sucks. I like to say goodnight to my Tigerlily, make sure she has a blanket, talk to her. Tell her how much I love her. Then I wait for her to purr, and then I go on about whatelse I need to do.

I'm not kidding.

That's how much I love my motorcycle. And that's how much I'll love ALL my future motorcycles, too. Because someday I will have a garage filled with all kinds of awesome motorcycles.

And we will always be together. Me and my motorcycles. We will live happily ever after.

And I'll continue to ride in the freezing temperatures with my burnt gloves.