True Story

Let's call this episode, "Motorcycle Jacket Bible"

When dad was a teen-ager, that was well before the word 'teen-ager' existed, he and a school chum determined to escape the small coal mining town of West Virginia they had grown up in. They pooled their money and bought a motorcycle. They drew out a map of adventuring all the way to the West coast. They also had the ingenuity to place ads in several nationally distributed magazines saying they were two guys looking for adventure, and places to stay along the way. A couple of weeks later, there was a whole box of letters waiting for them at the post office. Letters from girls, mostly. Offering them a place to spend the night. So, they got to work fine tuning their motorcycle, and they bought some black leather motorcycle jackets. A week later their dream was gone. The motorcycle had caught fire and quickly became a lost cause. It was but a few weeks after that, that dad enlisted in the Coast Guard, and was assigned to New York harbor. So, he escaped Shrewsbury, after all. And lucky for me, I guess, since New York is where he met my mother.

A few weeks after he began doing his duty patrolling the harbor, he got a package from his mother. It was a large and bulky Bible. Old and worn. And it had been re-covered with a plain black leather backing she had made herself. She had made the cover for the Bible out of the back of the motorcycle jacket he had left behind. Somehow, I became the recipient of this book. It is on a shelf nearby. Sometimes, I take it down. Not to read, really, but just to ponder the history of people and things.