Harley and Me (19 page)

Taking a risk and finding out we can do whatever it is we endeavor, even if we fail on the first or third or sixth attempt, shows us that tenacity pays off. Eventually we will nail it. We must develop embodied wisdom in our own abilities; we must trust that even if we're not good at something right out of the gate, that we have the ability to learn and develop and grow. We must feel the muscle memory that can come only from hard-won experience. From that place of visceral understanding of our own potential and abilities, our confidence takes root and begins to bloom.

Any bookstore sells countless books on how to develop self-esteem, and women consume these tomes like Skittles. But confidence doesn't come from a book, any more than self-esteem, self-love, or any of the traits that make us into whole and strong people can be achieved with our intellect alone. We simply cannot think ourselves into that space. If we could, I would have mastered self-possession decades ago. Confidence develops organically out of our lived, embodied experience. We must act our way there.

If I want to gain self-esteem, I need to perform esteemable acts. If I want to feel brave, I must do things that scare me. If I want to develop confidence and I engage in an activity in which I have not yet developed self-assurance, I get to watch as my poise takes root and then begins to grow.

But I have to be prepared to wade through the fields of failure first. My wish for all of us, but for women in particular, is that we
learn to let go of the perfectionism that teaches us to spell correctly, to always be on time and polite, to take care of the emotional needs of others, to avoid conflict and errors, to be “good girls” who get along with everyone. Enough! Those skills are not serving me, are not serving women.

Do you know women who reflexively apologize all the time? If you step on their feet, they apologize to
you
? They take on an overwhelming sense of responsibility and make it their business to make sure everyone is nurtured and cared for. I'm tired of being that woman. What about my own desires? My own unique self? When does the real me get to come out and play?

Never—unless I make time and room for play and lightness and begin to treasure my true self. And when I make that room, I learn to take myself less seriously. To laugh and make fun of my own failures. To embrace the flawed nature of my humanity. I still have trouble with appearing more conciliatory than I really am in order to not make waves, and with my excessive punctuality. My dad used to joke that I'd be early to my own funeral. But I don't want to be perfect like that anymore. I want to be fully alive.

And failure, I'm finding, is the path there.

But the side benefit of this aliveness, one I didn't even realize I was pursuing, is the ever-expanding well of confidence inside of me. Learning that I can handle this macho motorcycle machine gave me the courage to confront my spouse. Discovering I could backpack through days of rainfall and treacherous terrain emboldened me to ask for a raise. “Taking action bolsters one's belief in one's ability to succeed,” Kay and Shipman write. “So confidence accumulates—through hard work, through success, and even through failure.”

You don't have to backpack or scuba or rock-climb to learn these lessons. You don't have to be a woman either, as men struggle under similar crises of confidence at different times in their lives. You have only to act.

• • •

Before our rendezvous with the Uglies, we have breakfast and meet up with Donna, a friend from L.A. who flew to Chicago yesterday, then rented a bike so she could ride into Milwaukee and join us for the weekend. On first impression, Donna fits the prototype butch biker chick. She's a large woman by any definition—big personality, huge laugh, always accompanied by the throbbing sound system on her bike. She favors a leather vest with chains, baggy jeans, a bandana wound around her forehead. Tattoos wrap almost any exposed bit of skin, a cigarette never far away.
Large
also describes the size of her heart. When Rebecca and I decided to undertake this trek, Donna stepped up as our leather-clad godmother. She accompanied us to the Laughlin River Run, suggesting that we take turns leading the ride while Donna hung back to assess our road-handling skills. She reminded us to keep a steady pace, to watch out for our sister rider, to ride whenever possible in the number-two lane and coached us on how to be a good partner when riding two by two. After Laughlin, she invited us one evening for dinner, rolled out maps, and reviewed every possible route to Milwaukee.

Now that Donna's arrived, the first stop will be the Harley-Davidson Museum. George and Edna join us, and with Donna, we point the bikes toward downtown Milwaukee. The syncopated roar of our five bikes seems a rude intrusion on this peaceful Thursday go-to-school-and-work morning. I want to get out of the tranquil neighborhood as soon as possible so as not to disturb the quiet people who make their lives here.

Though this kind of neighborhood would have been where I belonged when my kids were young, I'm not living such a retiring life any more. I have settled into my little guest cottage in Los Feliz and taken on outings like motorcycle journeys, backpacking treks, white-water rafting, and marathon runs. I wrote about many of them in essays that eventually showed up on Facebook. Friends in unhappy marriages contacted me in private messages. “I'm afraid I'm going to be exactly where you are in five years and I don't know how to change things.” A cousin in Ireland wrote: “I
so
understand what happened
with you. The same is happening with me. And I'm afraid. I don't want this path to unfold.” Few of these conversations took place in person, or even by phone. They seemed safe only when mediated by a computer keyboard, kept in the realm of the hypothetical, kind of like Googling “deteriorating marriage” to see what shows up.

I never aspired to this position, the one people seek out when pondering a divorce or dealing with life difficulties. I'm also held at a distance because embracing my life somehow threatens others' peace and security. But here I am.

The feeling echoes my high school pregnancy and being ostracized by my peers. When my pregnancy became known, my older brother Frank was away at college and wrote me a deep and thoughtful letter. Frank is laconic. Getting him to say much more than hello sometimes requires a cattle prod. But in this letter, he told me of his own experience being adopted, how he loved our family and felt an integral part of it and believed that I could give that same opportunity to the child I was carrying. There was no pressure, just information. I could certainly have chosen to have an abortion, but this option made sense to me in a deep way. I was still burdened with the Catholic guilt/saint stigma, and believed that by having the child, I would somehow repay the gift that Frank had been to my parents, my siblings, and me. It made me feel that my difficulties were worthwhile, that my struggle mattered. Some thirty-two years later, I still think the choice to give my baby up for adoption was the best decision for me.

But it was a decision that antagonized my peers, my pregnancy all too visible and maybe causing others to question their own choices. Some friends told me I was brave, as if I were
choosing
to be brave and not just trying to survive.

Looking back on that experience now, I'm grateful. I learned from that social exile how to make my own life and that my decisions were mine alone and did not need to be vetted by my peers. And though I have spent the last twenty-five years making a stable, quiet, and in some ways falsely secure life, I know I can craft a new one. I am doing so at this very moment as I ride into Milwaukee, acknowledging signs
welcoming home the adopted sons and daughters of the city by virtue of our Harleys.

This 110th Harley anniversary is a point of self-respect for this city, the name
Harley
woven into Milwaukee pride. People wave. A bed sheet, spray-painted into a banner reading welcome riders, hangs from a freeway overpass.

We weave through an unexpected maze of road construction and wading pool–size holes in the asphalt. The directions we'd gathered before leaving the house quickly become useless. We wind and wend our way as the streets fill with motorcycles. The bikers we pass signal greetings to us. Eventually, the density of bikes grows until we're in a sea of motorcycles. I'm fighting back my own nervousness. What if I stall the bike now or put it down? Make a wrong turn and lose my group? Then Donna signals a turn to the right. We follow onto a large grass lot filled handlebar-to-fender with bikes. Parking attendants hand us plastic guards to place under our kickstands to prevent them from sinking into the grass and setting off a domino effect of tipping motorcycles.

I think this must be the main fairgrounds, but no. It's the overflow parking for the museum. All these bikers have come to pay their respects to the evolution, artistry, and iconography that is Harley-Davidson.

“Good thing we got here so early on the first day,” Donna says. “The line will be a block long soon.” It already looks a block long to me. We tour the museum, taking in some 450 motorcycles, dating from the early 1900s to the present day. Stories about the history of motorcycles, the people who have ridden them, and Harley culture line the walls. The museum overlooks the Milwaukee riverfront, with views of the city. I find myself hanging out near the windows, escaping as best I can the crowds of people exhibiting contemporary biker culture. I've never been comfortable in large gatherings. Outside, there's a gift shop filled with Harley paraphernalia as well as temporary structures in which to buy 110th anniversary T-shirts at inflated prices. Yet bikers keep buying and buying. We stand in yet another
line to get our HOG chapter pins saying we've made it to the 110th. This is another ritual of this world I don't quite get. Donna tells me I absolutely must claim my pin; it's valuable. Sitting on the lawn, we eat bratwurst and popcorn, mandatory Milwaukee nosh, though not exactly suited to one-hundred-degree heat.

Rebecca tells us that we need to go to Harley headquarters a few miles away to pick up our parade passes. I don't quite understand the logic involved with who does and does not get a parade pass allowing us to ride in the huge pageant Saturday morning. But from the numbers of bikers showing up at Harley corporate headquarters, it looks as though there will be more people riding in the procession than watching. We meet up with some other female bikers we know from home: Marie and her friend Liz. We're now a group of six women bikers, plus George, a good sport, even when Donna starts calling our group “George and the Pussy Posse.” We take a photo outside of Harley headquarters to mark the occasion.

The day is more of the same—bikers in sporting their “colors,” drinking beer, getting sunburnt, wandering the Summerfest grounds. Riding back to Sue's late that evening, we get completely lost, Donna and George taking turns leading us farther and farther astray. We're trying to find the Dairy Queen that Google tells us is near Sue's house, but we keep ending up going the wrong direction. Eventually, we settle in with ice cream cones, happy.

•
    
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    
•

BENEDICTION

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”

—MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN

Day Eight:
Friday, August 30

Rural areas surrounding Milwaukee

Rather than join the Harley celebrations today, we decide to go off-script and explore, hoping to find Holy Hill, a basilica a short ride from Milwaukee. Later we will meet a group of Uglies out at a farm one of them owns.

The ride takes us out into the countryside and we ease our way—up and down and around—through the green lushness surrounded by farmland. At the lane that leads to Holy Hill, a sign welcomes us, but I fly by so fast I think it says the basilica is run by Disgraced Carmelites. I know that that can't be true, but it makes me smile. If this place is indeed run by the disgraced, maybe there's room for those of us who find ourselves in the realm of imperfection, the struggling, the all-too-human

The full name is the Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary, Help of Christians, at Holy Hill. Established in 1906, the handsome
neo-Romanesque church was built in 1926 and sits amid 435 acres of pastoral and woodland exquisiteness. Holy Hill draws some five hundred thousand visitors each year. Once we enter the church, I find out that it's run by the
Discalced
Carmelites of Bavaria. I'm kind of disappointed that they're not disgraced and learn that
discalced
means without shoes.

The chapels, with their hushed bearing, are a reflective retreat from the thunder and fumes of the Harley stampede. I breathe in the quiet of the echoey spaces and the waxy perfume of votive candles. All the prayers that have ever been uttered here, some expressed in wordless groans and sighs, are present. Ecstasy and grief, all rolled together. Reverberations of the countless choristers who have lifted their voices in praise and lament over the ages are nearly audible. The wood of the pew backs has been polished by the hands that have rested here, that have gripped on for reassurance, for courage.

In recent years, my spiritual journey has taken me from the rigid Catholicism passed on from my parents into a more open-ended direction. Huston Smith, the religious studies scholar and author on comparative religions, once said that if you dig deep enough into the traditions of any particular faith, you'll hit the “water table of our common humanity.” I love the idea of this water table, that aquatic reservoir within the earth that sustains life, burbling beneath the individualities we think separate us, superficial differences like gender, socioeconomic status, education, and race. At the water table level, we are all more human than sinner, united in our essential loneliness and our longing for community, connected by our flaws and faults more so than by our accomplishments, all of us searching for the transcendent meaning we feel
must
be part of human existence.

I soak up the dark softness of the quarter light, the muted colors of the stained glass, the beatitude of the statutes' faces. The sculpture of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux beckons. I find myself standing at her feet, talking to her, asking for a blessing.

When my father was dying, he asked me to buy multiple copies of Thérèse's autobiography,
Story of a Soul
. He gave them as gifts to the
hospice nurses who cared for him. He wasn't trying to convert them as much as he wanted to share a source of comfort with those who were so generous in their care. It was his way of offering a blessing. Though Catholicism was never able to comfort me in the same way it soothed my father, I shared the sense of tranquility he found there. My mother, whose middle name was Theresa, also had a special devotion to the saint. Though my childhood, like my experience of Catholicism, came with difficulties and pain, as does everyone's, I have finally come to see the gifts I received from both experiences.

Rebecca and I climb the 178 stairs up the basilica's 192-foot scenic tower where we drink in the 360-degree vista of checkerboard farmlands with patches of forest interrupting the symmetry of tilled rows. The winds buffet us; the height is dizzying. But if I keep my eyes on the distance, watch a bird as it lofts on the currents, feel the sun warm my arms and let the air ruffle my hair, I am able to absorb the beauty without the panic I normally feel with heights.

Studying the orderly farmlands below and feeling the calm of the chapels, I think of my Auntie Betty, my father's youngest sister. Betty became a nun in Ireland, joining the Franciscan Sisters when she was nineteen, going against the vehement wishes of her family. My father came around by the time she took her vows, but her other brothers and mother remained opposed. She served more than sixty years in Africa: under Idi Amin's terror regime in Uganda, providing teacher training to the young women there; in South Africa just prior to the abolishment of Apartheid, caring for AIDS orphans; and most recently in Zimbabwe under the crushing dictatorship of Robert Mugabe, working to prevent HIV. Now in her eighties, she's recently retired and returned to Ireland. She has lived what appears, to outsiders, to be a calm and ordered life: that of a nun. But it's been an existence of adventure and service and boldness and great wells of courage. But I didn't know that about her for a long time.

I grew up saying evening prayers with my siblings and parents, kneeling before an altar created on a wainscoting ledge in the dining room of our California Craftsman house, reciting the rosary and
other formal devotions. Every night, I joined in communal prayer for
Auntie Betty in Africa.
By the time I finally got to meet her on her first trip to California on leave from her work, it was at the most inopportune moment. My mother was institutionalized again, and I, praised in letters to Auntie Betty for my devotion to my family, was now a disgrace, pregnant at sixteen. What would this holy woman think of me? I prepared my bedroom to share with her and braced for the lectures that would certainly ensue.

I needn't have worried. Betty was full of light and joy and acceptance, never once questioning how I ended up in this predicament, just dispensing love and support. She didn't pressure me to make any decisions that would have pleased her or my father regarding the pregnancy. Instead, she let me come to the decisions I needed for myself.

Over the coming years, we spent hours together in California and Ireland discussing and debating tenets of Catholic theology and speculating on the origins of my mother's illness. I was terrified I'd become mentally ill like her, and while my father would dismiss my concerns, Betty took my fears seriously and filled in pieces of the puzzle that had long been missing. So many topics had been tacitly forbidden from conversation in my household, yet Betty described my father's young life in an orphanage and helped me to understand my own place in my family narrative.

When my second book came out, she was again in California on leave. She knew my father had stopped talking to me for two years after the publication of my first book. While my father and I had tentatively reconciled, it was predicated on not discussing the details of our détente and what had caused it. At a family gathering, Betty showed him my just-published second book, something I had been understandably reticent to do.

“Look, Eamon. Bernadette has a new book out. Aren't you proud?”

His response was gruff and dismissive.

This tiny nun in her late seventies, no more than five feet tall with her puff of white hair, morphed into a tiger. She got in his face and with a calm but braced voice spoke to her big brother whom she
adored and brooked only when provoked. “Just because you have been unable or unwilling to examine your own past and the ways you were hurt does
not
give you the right to stop her from speaking out about her own truth. Don't you dare try to take away from her the joy of her work.” She put the book in his lap and walked away.

My father never did come to appreciate or acknowledge my work. But that moment of hearing her speak to him in a way I could never garner the strength to myself was one of the most healing of my life. It was the first time I could remember someone standing up for me. I realize, as I stand on the top of this basilica tower in rural Wisconsin, that she modeled for me the kind of badass woman I'd like to be. That it's not about the motorcycle and the leathers, or looking tough, or taking chances that other people admire. It's about standing up for who I am and creating space for the people in their lives to do the same. I don't think she ever planned to be a patron saint for female motorcyclists
.
I wish I could mint a little medallion of Aunt Betty, like a Saint Christopher medal, that I could glue to the tank of my Harley.

• • •

Rebecca and I meet the others in the basilica parking lot and I'm about to strap on my helmet when Donna approaches.

“I got you a little gift.” She hands Rebecca and I each a small brown bag. Inside is a devotional scapular—a small felt rectangle attached by cords to another felt rectangle, both imprinted with images of saints. The scapular, dating back to the eleventh century, is worn on the shoulders generally under clothing, one rectangle on the chest, the other on the back. It is meant to remind the wearer of a commitment to a holy life. My parents, siblings, and I wore these at points during my childhood. I haven't seen or held one in years. In find this a remarkable gesture by Donna, a nonobservant Jew. My feet sink deeper into the water table of humanity.

We ride on to the homestead and farm owned by Ugly Verne Holoubek and his wife, Terri. J's family ran dairy farms in Minnesota,
but they were nothing like this. Those farms were dedicated to productivity, to smelly work, to perspiration, to unending effort. But this farm seems magical, a place devoted to curiosity, to learning, to exploration. Verne helped pioneer the craze for screen-printed art on T-shirts in the 1970s. He designed and printed thousands of T-shirt designs, including many for Harley. As a product of his success, he created this farm to pursue his passions: rebuilding old farm machinery, motorcycles, and cars. We sit down to lunch in the guesthouse where a number of Uglies and their wives are staying. We meet Ugly J. D., who toured with bands like the Eagles and Bruce Springsteen most of his life. Then there's Ugly Leroy Dwight who's traveling with his wife, Sharon.

Verne's wife, Terri, offers to show us her quilting space. I expect a small room, a few bolts of fabric, and a solitary sewing machine. She leads us, rather, to a barn that's been converted into a vast workshop, the walls stacked with shelves of quilting fabric arranged by color and pattern, a delight for the eyes. There's enough inventory here to stock a small factory. An antique bed is draped with quilts dating back to the Civil War. Not only has Terri made a number of state fair award–winning quilts, she also restores and collects museum-quality quilts dating back to the late 1700s. A lovely black-and-white border collie lies in the sun by the door to keep her company.

Verne then takes us to “his” barn, which is both workshop and museum space for restoration projects. Again, the space is massive. A refurbished antique jukebox sits to one side. There's a panel truck from the 1930s, a Duesenberg, an early '50s Studebaker, a '54 Mercury, a Ford Flatbed circa the early 1950s, a functioning mini Harley made for a child, along with combines and other refurbished farm equipment. When working on a project, he disassembles it completely, repairing or replacing worn parts, sandblasting each piece, then repainting it all before reassembling.

I marvel at how Verne and Terri have been able to craft lives aligned with their passions. Though I'm sure a tremendous amount of hard work has been involved, they've found a way to have fun and
indulge their joys along the way. They are an example for me. I want to construct a life like this farm, one that includes industrious work, but work that gives pleasure and satisfaction, and to feel a sense of curiosity and exploration in all parts of my life. We tour the rest of the property, highlighted by Terri's superb vegetable garden that's half the size of a football field with tomatoes so big I can see them from two hundred feet away.