It’s up to you.
What does that mean anyway? I guess before I ask you to translate it for me, I should ask you which sex you are…believe me, it seems to make a difference.
Let me tell you the story of the first time I heard those four little words and how it shaped my life.
I had to have two serious hip operations, one a few weeks after the other. This was operation one and after a few days I was home on crutches to get stronger ready for the second operation.
Previously, two mates and I had started our first foray into motor sports by buying a Yamaha 750 and were doing it up for drag racing. We put high compression pistons in it, bigger valves and ….and I’m starting to bore you now aren’t I?
How about I just say we opened up the motor and poured many hundreds of dollars into it hoping to make it faster.
The last of the engine bits came as I was in hospital so my mates finished putting it together and made a date and time to meet out at our local drag strip for testing.
I turned up with my girlfriend as I couldn’t walk let alone drive. We looked the bike over and started it up, after a few adjustments the guys took a few runs down the strip, giving it a bit more each successive run.
Just before we left to go home one of my mates asked me if I wanted to have a run down the strip… I looked to my girlfriend who uttered these words.
“It’s up to you!”
Well, if it was up to me then I was going to run it down the strip…obviously!
They put the bike on its stand and helped me onto it; they even had to lift my leg onto the foot peg as I couldn’t do it myself. Then they stood the bike upright and held it that way as I got ready to go.
I gunned the engine and dropped the clutch, my two mates let go as the bike stormed away in a cloud of tyre smoke. It held the front wheel in the air for forty yards with me leaning right on the front to keep it down, it weaved across the track with the rear wheel spinning most of the way down the strip. Wow, what a rush!
By now I was out of track and had to brake hard before I ran off the end of the strip, I turned back and took it easy down the track to cool the motor before shutting it down as I was caught by my mates.
I did notice that my girl was kinda quiet as we packed up to go home, but I didn’t realize just how pissed she was until she had me captive in the car heading back down the road. That’s when I ran headlong into a shit storm of hurricane proportions.
Apparently, in this case ‘it’s up to you’ actually meant ‘Don’t you dare.’
The next couple of weeks were very uncomfortable, she did eventually start speaking to me again and I did eventually get my leg over again, but not for quite some time…
This is part one of this story….
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