THE LONG RIDE | MAY 2026 - Volume 4
Running a motorcycle shop, you start to read people pretty quickly.
Some tell you everything.
Some tell you nothing.
And then there are the ones who give you just enough to know there’s a whole lot more underneath.
One afternoon, a man in his seventies pulled up on a sportbike — a Hayabusa, the kind of machine pushing close to 200 horsepower.
The kind of bike most people respect from a distance.
He didn’t.
He rolled in like it was just another ride.
Shut it off. Set the stand. Walked inside.
Nothing about him felt like someone slowing down.
His movements were steady. His voice calm. His hands looked like they’d spent years working, gripping, holding onto things — the kind of hands that don’t shake easily.
He didn’t say much at first.
But within a few minutes, he and my husband were talking like they had a shared understanding. Not loud. Not animated.
Just easy.
Like they didn’t need to explain certain things.
They talked about bikes. Roads. Places they’d been.
He didn’t tell long stories.
Just pieces.
But you could hear it — the kind of life that doesn’t need to be fully explained.
Then the conversation shifted to insurance.
He mentioned his rates were high.
Not complaining.
Not confused.
Just stating it.
My husband asked, “How many tickets have you had?”
The man paused for a second, like he was flipping through years in his head.
Then he started listing them off.
One from a highway outside of town.
Another from a back road.
A few more scattered across different years.
Calm. Casual. No hesitation.
At one point he mentioned getting pulled over for going nearly fifty miles over the speed limit in a school zone.
My husband just looked at him.
“What happened?”
The man smiled — just a little.
Said the officer walked up expecting a kid.
Instead, he took off his helmet.
Seventy years old.
The officer just stood there for a second, then asked:
“Sir… are you going through a midlife crisis?”
The man told him no.
Said he’d been riding like that his whole life.
That’s the part that stuck with us.
Not the speed.
Not the ticket.
Just how normal it all felt to him.
That’s something we’ve learned in the shop.
A lot of people come through our doors carrying stories you’ll never fully hear.
You catch glimpses of them in small ways — in how they talk, how they move, what they choose to say… and what they don’t.
Some of those stories are probably wild.
Some are probably hard.
And most of them stay unspoken.
But every once in a while, someone gives you just enough to understand something about them.
That motorcycles weren’t something they picked up along the way.
They’ve just always been there.
And for some people…
they always will be.
Of course, not every story we experience at the shop happens in the middle of the day.
Some happen when the lights are off… the doors are locked… and no one is supposed to be there.
Next month, we’ll tell you about the night our alarm went off at three in the morning — in the middle of an ice storm.