"Why the hell not" turned into a series of brief interviews, during which we talked about everything that happened during these last two years. the good folks from Harley asked mom about the experience with cancer, and right away I think they knew that we weren't going to be average.
Mom talked about the diagnosis very quickly, and the treatment even quicker. She talked about not wanting to join a support group, because in general, it was a bunch of sick people, talking about being sick.
Instead, she wanted to get through it, and fast, and be surrounded by healthy people that reminded her of the future, not the present. The Harley folks were smiling. We talked about how far we were willing to go, even thinking about running to Mexico for coffee enemas and juice therapy. They laughed, they loved that we were laughing together.
They asked me why I started riding, and I wasn't lying when I pointed at mom and said, "because of this, because of the cancer." I know that was the answer they expected, but as I explained, I hope they knew it was genuine. I had been enamored, but highly fearful, of motorcycles. Involving myself in the car industry meant I got plenty of adrenaline, but bikes---nope. It wasn't until mom's diagnosis that I looked at my list in an old journal titled "things I want to do, but probably won't, because they're scary." So many of them had been checked off, surprising things I can't believe I was actually afraid of, but there were a few that remained. "Ride a motorcycle, " and a few odd ones here and there about love and my intense fear of commitment. I decided to tackle the motorcycles.
They asked my mom what bikes she likes, and she smirked and remembered the bikes I'd been showing her, rattling off "Fatboy, Softtail." Wow. No wonder we were cast.
On Wednesday, we went to Leo Carillo Beach and met the crew of the print ads. They fed us an amazing breakfast, they put us through hair and make up, they put us on a Sportster and shot pictures for about an hour, fed us lunch, and called "that's a wrap." Before we left, the rep from Harley hugged my mother and I, and gave us Pink Label riding jackets.
Harley Davidson treated my mother like a superstar.
I have always admired the brand, always loved the rumble of a Harley V-Twin, always secretly wished I was a little bigger so I could ride the bigger bikes, and now...I fully respect them more than I could ever put to words appropriately. The people in their ads were real riders, not just pretty (although Holy Christ, they were pretty too!!). The causes they support aren't just on paper. Their brand ethos isn't just marketing.
As for word 'cancer' in our house---it's not a death sentence, it's not something we talk about often, and its not something we dwell on anymore. As Breast Cancer Awareness month rolls out and everyone is selling something pink, we haven't really ever participated. It's been very under the radar. Now though---now we're about to be on posters and online and wherever else, the faces of people affected directly by cancer, the faces of a brand all about "pink". And both of us will now make the exception to wear the color, so long as it's on our Harley Davidson jackets.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
I wore pink. Part 1.
Pink---it's become the color chosen to represent a fight with or surviving from breast cancer. It's also been a color that I always found dreadful both for the girliness attached to it and simply because I hated it. As a symbol, I hated it also, because it reminded me of the very, very vicious disease that has, for decades, been picking my family off one by one. Not just breast cancer of course, I have a virtual medical degree just keeping up with the diseases from which my relatives have died. But breast cancer, surely, was among them.
It's a fact of life, partially from having a very big family.
Also, because it hit home when my mother called me on my way home from work over a year ago now, and told me, with weakness shaking a voice otherwise very strong and opinionated, that she was diagnosed with breast cancer herself. In the months that followed, I jumped a plane countless times on the trek from LAX to CVG Cincinnati, read countless books about cancer on the journeys to and from, and spent days and nights with my mom as she was operated on, bits of her removed, stuck with needles, chemotherapied, and on and on all countlessly. Medical---very medical. Very clinical. The smell of antiseptic sends me back sometimes to swabbing her sutures, to watching bags of blackness slowly drip into a port in my mother's chest, to waiting awkwardly in a room with other cancer patients who didn't speak to each other for the fear of not seeing them again next week, and knowing why.
If I were an only child, it probably would have broken me. But I am not an only child, and my brother and I switching on and off with my mom meant we both got to spend time with her, we both got a break from the medications and hospitals and heartache.
My mom, of course, never got a break. She lost her hair, her eyebrows, eyelashes. One never fully appreciates those things until the sweat beads from a torturous Ohio summer stream into your unprotected eyes, or until the snowy winter months leave your home encased in a snowdrift, the heater barely warming your sensitive, bald head. All of this, I observed as a spectator. My mother...well, she had to survive it.
And she did, and she's here, and we don't talk about it a lot because we all agreed to get on with life and leave the past to the immense universal shredder. And we don't wear pink.
Just this once though, I decided to go backwards for a minute and I asked my mother's permission. Harley Davidson, which has grown on me through the years as a favored brand and company and a helluva motorcycle, needed real riders and real cancer survivors to be poster girls for their Pink Line. They donate to cancer research through the proceeds of this line, and their donations may well have touched my mom's life and my life without us even knowing it at the time. In any case, I thought "why the hell not??"
It's a fact of life, partially from having a very big family.
Also, because it hit home when my mother called me on my way home from work over a year ago now, and told me, with weakness shaking a voice otherwise very strong and opinionated, that she was diagnosed with breast cancer herself. In the months that followed, I jumped a plane countless times on the trek from LAX to CVG Cincinnati, read countless books about cancer on the journeys to and from, and spent days and nights with my mom as she was operated on, bits of her removed, stuck with needles, chemotherapied, and on and on all countlessly. Medical---very medical. Very clinical. The smell of antiseptic sends me back sometimes to swabbing her sutures, to watching bags of blackness slowly drip into a port in my mother's chest, to waiting awkwardly in a room with other cancer patients who didn't speak to each other for the fear of not seeing them again next week, and knowing why.
If I were an only child, it probably would have broken me. But I am not an only child, and my brother and I switching on and off with my mom meant we both got to spend time with her, we both got a break from the medications and hospitals and heartache.
My mom, of course, never got a break. She lost her hair, her eyebrows, eyelashes. One never fully appreciates those things until the sweat beads from a torturous Ohio summer stream into your unprotected eyes, or until the snowy winter months leave your home encased in a snowdrift, the heater barely warming your sensitive, bald head. All of this, I observed as a spectator. My mother...well, she had to survive it.
And she did, and she's here, and we don't talk about it a lot because we all agreed to get on with life and leave the past to the immense universal shredder. And we don't wear pink.
Just this once though, I decided to go backwards for a minute and I asked my mother's permission. Harley Davidson, which has grown on me through the years as a favored brand and company and a helluva motorcycle, needed real riders and real cancer survivors to be poster girls for their Pink Line. They donate to cancer research through the proceeds of this line, and their donations may well have touched my mom's life and my life without us even knowing it at the time. In any case, I thought "why the hell not??"
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