Scootering at Night

I got a little sad tonight as I worked on the scooters in the garage. I was remembering the last time Cindy and I rode together. It was only a couple of days before her seizure.

We had always talked about having 2 scooters. For a long time, we only had the Vespa ET4. And I did have Cindy ride behind me on the ET4 a few times. But, we always felt that riding our own scooter would be more fun because we could go faster. We constantly talked about riding into D.C. together. That was kind of our big goal.

In early September, I bought a second scooter: a Vespa GT200. Since Cindy was always busy with work and school, we did not actually do our celebratory joint ride to the monuments until the last week in September.

I remember that night that her scooter did not start at first. Cindy had to connect it to the battery tender for about a half hour. I almost called it a night before Cindy said, "Wait, it's ready! Let's do this!" Even though it was past 11pm and I had to get up early the next morning, for some reason I knew we had to do this then.

At first, we drove into Shirlington together. She always talked about riding our scooters there on a Saturday night and dining outside so that we could "monitor" our parked scooters. Cindy always imagined that our scooters would get stolen (even though they were chained with Kryptonite locks).

From Shirlington, we scooted onto Clarendon. I remember it was real cold that night and windy too, but I didn't care. I was so happy to be finally riding scoots with Cindy and I remember smiling a lot because I felt that funny feeling when you are "in love" and are actually conscious of it (which, after 7+ years, is pretty cool and something you don't often experience during normal, everyday tasks).

Finally, we scooted over to the Iwo Jima Memorial. I remember that we parked our scoots and walked around the memorial. While on the walk, I joked how we were living out our dream scooting together. I remember telling Cindy that I loved her and that I loved our life together because we were so lucky to share these interests. I said that next year we would go to Spain and rent Vespas over there and have a scootering vacation.

Eventually, it must have gotten much colder because I told Cindy that we should head home and go to bed. Cindy actually wanted to continue on Route 50 into D.C. But I said, "No, we have plenty of time for more scooter rides. We don't have to squeeze it all into one night." So, we went home.

I would give anything to scooter with Cindy again.

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