June 17, 2024 • 9 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Taylor Brown shares the eulogy he wrote in Garden and Gun for his biker dad.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, a
story from Taylor Brown that originally appeared in the Garden
and Gun magazine entitled two for the Road, A son's
eulogy for his father or, in this case, his biker father.
Here's Taylor Brown with his eulogy.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
My first big time riding his prized wide Glide. I
drop it in this parking lot. We were on these
back roads in North Florida, somewhere, just pine trees and
straight roads, tar snakes, and we had stopped for gas
and he said, do you want to ride it? And
so I said, oh, heck, yeah, you know, I want
to ride it. So I was pretty excited. I was
(00:56):
on a on a you know, a much smaller, lighter,
less powerful bike, so riding his UH was a big
treat so beautiful bike, you know, crow. He had modified
it to be much more powerful. It was really neat bike.
So we we ride, you know, for a while, and
we pull into this UH I think it was an
old gas station and it had a gravel lot, and
(01:18):
you know, I'm pretty excited and I stick my foot out,
you know, to prop the bike up as we stop,
and my heel just starts slipping on the gravel, and
it was one of those things. Sometimes these things happen
almost in slow motion, and you know, this is a big,
six hundred pound bike and it starts to just heal
over and I have not got the kick to stand
down in time, and I just feel it. You know,
(01:39):
there's nothing I can do past a certain point. I'm
not strong enough to hold it up, so I drop it.
Obviously there's going to be some scratches and dents and
all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
And I look at him.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
My biggest worry is, you know, the way, how he's
going to react. You know, I feel just ashamed. And
he looks at me and he says, it happens to
the best of us. What a difficult thing to remember
in the heat of the moment, and to say to
your son when he has just dropped your prize motorcycle.
(02:13):
I could tell that it wasn't necessarily even easy for
him to say that he was frustrated the bite being dropped,
but that's not how he reacted. And that was something
that you know, I think probably my biggest lesson from
him was something that I learned that day and has
stuck with me because it came back again and again.
It is that sometimes character requires you to place what is.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Difficult over what is easy.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
And I just really saw it that day that really,
you know, stood stuck with me. He was born on
the fourth of July, and that always kind of met
something to me. I'm not sure why, you know, when
we'd hear fireworks on fourth of July, he'd say it
was first birthday, and until I got a little bit older,
(03:05):
that's what I really thought. And he was the kind
of man to me that that was no surprise that
there would be fireworks for him.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
I was probably.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
About five when he got his first motorcycle he'd had
since I'd been around, and he got this Harley Davidson sportster,
and you know, so much of my childhood was wedged
on the back seat of it. I grew up on
this little place called Saint Simon's Island, and around dusk
a lot of nights, we would get on his bike
and I would sit on the back seat and we
would do what we call the loop around the island.
(03:37):
We would do the same route and hit the same
spots where we go over this causeway and we'd see
the marsh when the sun was going down and we
go through the tunneled oaks, and we would go through
what they call the village, which is down where the
fishing pier is, and he would always go in this
little alley between a couple of the bars and wrap
the throttle and so so much of my childhood grew
(03:58):
up attached to that motorcycle. It was really through the
motorcycle that I think that he found the bridge to
really connect. You know, he worked so much when I
was a younger kid up until around high school, and
around the time I was in late middle school high school,
he was really I could just tell. He made such
an effort to connect, and we did it through motorcycles.
(04:21):
In late twenty sixteen, we built kind of our first
motorcycle together, and we called it Blitzen because we built
it over Christmas, and it had these big chrome handlebars
that looked like antlers, and it was the tank was
kind of this dark red color that reminded me of
Santi Sleigh. And I started doing these long rides on
that bike solo and my dad had always done these
(04:43):
long rides sometimes on the weekend. When he was sixty seven,
he rode nine thousand miles all around the country.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
I hadn't done a lot of that on my own.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
And it was really when I started riding the bike
long distance solo, exploring those background roads, that I really
understood what he found in doing that. It made me
understand him so much better, understand I think, really the
workings of his soul and heart and what moved him
and what he found out there. It's like I found
(05:12):
the same thing that he had found out on the road.
It's hard to describe, right, of course, there's all these
words that we can put around it. Is it free,
the freedom of the road. Is it discovery? That's part
of it, But I think that it's it really is
something else. It's it just lets your soul loose a
little bit. All the anxieties and the fears and the doubts,
(05:32):
just when you're out there riding, they tend to just
blow away. I'm not sure exactly how it happens. Maybe
it's because you have to be so aware of your surroundings.
You are on a motorcycle, I think uniquely vulnerable.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
You are closer to death.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
I had started on a law motorcycle ride down to
New Orleans. I was actually going down to visit his sister,
my aunt Mary Anne, and I decided to come down
south and stay with my parents for one night. I
met my dad in Savannah and we had lunch and
we had to drink up on the one of the
hotel bars that looks over all the all the river
traffic in Savannah. It was just a really special day.
(06:15):
And then that night at home he helped me come
up with my route for the rest of the way
to New Orleans.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
And this was not using Google Maps, you know.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
He had all these old atlases that had dog eared
pages that he'd used again and again to plan his
trips from long before the days of you know, global
positioning systems and smartphones and all those things. And we
rode out the directions actually on not cards. I put
in a sandwich bag and kept in my pocket. So
that morning I took off, took off. It was a
(06:45):
misty morning, and I headed south on Highway seventeen. I
stopped for gas that afternoon, and my dad had ridden
to lunch down the same highway, down Highway seventeen to
a little diner called Stephen's right over the Georgia Florida line.
And he'd actually sent me a picture of a model
car they had on display at the diner.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
It was a nineteen forty Ford Coop.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And that's a very special car to us because it
kind of stars in my novel Gods of Howell Mountain.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
It's this bootleggers.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Car and one of the most popular cars for bootlegging
in the early stock car racing days, and my dad
and I had gone to car shows to actually go
see these cars as part of research for that book.
I don't think I had a chance to reply back,
and I just kept going along my way, and I
got a call from my mom and I could tell
immediately that something had happened. We didn't have a lot
(07:35):
of details, but she knew that he had been on
his way back from lunch on Highway seventeen, that same
stretch of highway that I'd ridden just a few hours earlier,
and a concrete truck had pulled out in front of him.
And I went to the airport to rent a car
to drive home. Certainly, I wasn't going to ride the
motorcycle back at this time. It would take too long,
and I didn't want my mom worried. And I was
(07:57):
at the airport renting a car in Tallahassee, and Mom
called and said that he was gone.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
He hadn't made it.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
And I was standing outside and it was about sunset,
and the sky was lit up, just fire colored, and
I thought of all these trips, motorcycle trips that my
dad had taken down to Florida. He used to love
to go to a place called cedar Key, another place
called uh Hudson, and he would go to the Gulf
Coast where you could see the sun go down over
(08:24):
the water, and he would send me photos of a
sky that looked just like that. And I had this
feeling that he was gone, but he would always be
with me.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
And I saw him in that sky.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
It always felt like there was some extra connection with us,
and that, you know, I'd ridden that same motorcycle down
that same road that day.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
I was on a long ride of my own.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
I was doing all the things that he taught me,
you know, and I couldn't help but feel that, you know,
he was always going to be not too distant. I
think that there are men who want to be like
their fathers and men who don't. And I've never had
any question of which one I am.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
And what a beautiful story by Taylor Brown. By the way,
you learned everything about his father when the boy, the
young man dropped dad's precious, precious white glide. My biggest
lesson he said that I learned from him was on
that day. Sometimes character requires you to put something difficult
over something easy, and it would have been really easy
(09:28):
to yell at his boy. A eulogy to my biker
father on our American Story
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, a
story from Taylor Brown that originally appeared in the Garden
and Gun magazine entitled two for the Road, A son's
eulogy for his father or, in this case, his biker father.
Here's Taylor Brown with his eulogy.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
My first big time riding his prized wide Glide. I
drop it in this parking lot. We were on these
back roads in North Florida, somewhere, just pine trees and
straight roads, tar snakes, and we had stopped for gas
and he said, do you want to ride it? And
so I said, oh, heck, yeah, you know, I want
to ride it. So I was pretty excited. I was
(00:56):
on a on a you know, a much smaller, lighter,
less powerful bike, so riding his UH was a big
treat so beautiful bike, you know, crow. He had modified
it to be much more powerful. It was really neat bike.
So we we ride, you know, for a while, and
we pull into this UH I think it was an
old gas station and it had a gravel lot, and
(01:18):
you know, I'm pretty excited and I stick my foot out,
you know, to prop the bike up as we stop,
and my heel just starts slipping on the gravel, and
it was one of those things. Sometimes these things happen
almost in slow motion, and you know, this is a big,
six hundred pound bike and it starts to just heal
over and I have not got the kick to stand
down in time, and I just feel it. You know,
(01:39):
there's nothing I can do past a certain point. I'm
not strong enough to hold it up, so I drop it.
Obviously there's going to be some scratches and dents and
all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
And I look at him.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
My biggest worry is, you know, the way, how he's
going to react. You know, I feel just ashamed. And
he looks at me and he says, it happens to
the best of us. What a difficult thing to remember
in the heat of the moment, and to say to
your son when he has just dropped your prize motorcycle.
(02:13):
I could tell that it wasn't necessarily even easy for
him to say that he was frustrated the bite being dropped,
but that's not how he reacted. And that was something
that you know, I think probably my biggest lesson from
him was something that I learned that day and has
stuck with me because it came back again and again.
It is that sometimes character requires you to place what is.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Difficult over what is easy.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
And I just really saw it that day that really,
you know, stood stuck with me. He was born on
the fourth of July, and that always kind of met
something to me. I'm not sure why, you know, when
we'd hear fireworks on fourth of July, he'd say it
was first birthday, and until I got a little bit older,
(03:05):
that's what I really thought. And he was the kind
of man to me that that was no surprise that
there would be fireworks for him.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
I was probably.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
About five when he got his first motorcycle he'd had
since I'd been around, and he got this Harley Davidson sportster,
and you know, so much of my childhood was wedged
on the back seat of it. I grew up on
this little place called Saint Simon's Island, and around dusk
a lot of nights, we would get on his bike
and I would sit on the back seat and we
would do what we call the loop around the island.
(03:37):
We would do the same route and hit the same
spots where we go over this causeway and we'd see
the marsh when the sun was going down and we
go through the tunneled oaks, and we would go through
what they call the village, which is down where the
fishing pier is, and he would always go in this
little alley between a couple of the bars and wrap
the throttle and so so much of my childhood grew
(03:58):
up attached to that motorcycle. It was really through the
motorcycle that I think that he found the bridge to
really connect. You know, he worked so much when I
was a younger kid up until around high school, and
around the time I was in late middle school high school,
he was really I could just tell. He made such
an effort to connect, and we did it through motorcycles.
(04:21):
In late twenty sixteen, we built kind of our first
motorcycle together, and we called it Blitzen because we built
it over Christmas, and it had these big chrome handlebars
that looked like antlers, and it was the tank was
kind of this dark red color that reminded me of
Santi Sleigh. And I started doing these long rides on
that bike solo and my dad had always done these
(04:43):
long rides sometimes on the weekend. When he was sixty seven,
he rode nine thousand miles all around the country.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
I hadn't done a lot of that on my own.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
And it was really when I started riding the bike
long distance solo, exploring those background roads, that I really
understood what he found in doing that. It made me
understand him so much better, understand I think, really the
workings of his soul and heart and what moved him
and what he found out there. It's like I found
(05:12):
the same thing that he had found out on the road.
It's hard to describe, right, of course, there's all these
words that we can put around it. Is it free,
the freedom of the road. Is it discovery? That's part
of it, But I think that it's it really is
something else. It's it just lets your soul loose a
little bit. All the anxieties and the fears and the doubts,
(05:32):
just when you're out there riding, they tend to just
blow away. I'm not sure exactly how it happens. Maybe
it's because you have to be so aware of your surroundings.
You are on a motorcycle, I think uniquely vulnerable.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
You are closer to death.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
I had started on a law motorcycle ride down to
New Orleans. I was actually going down to visit his sister,
my aunt Mary Anne, and I decided to come down
south and stay with my parents for one night. I
met my dad in Savannah and we had lunch and
we had to drink up on the one of the
hotel bars that looks over all the all the river
traffic in Savannah. It was just a really special day.
(06:15):
And then that night at home he helped me come
up with my route for the rest of the way
to New Orleans.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
And this was not using Google Maps, you know.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
He had all these old atlases that had dog eared
pages that he'd used again and again to plan his
trips from long before the days of you know, global
positioning systems and smartphones and all those things. And we
rode out the directions actually on not cards. I put
in a sandwich bag and kept in my pocket. So
that morning I took off, took off. It was a
(06:45):
misty morning, and I headed south on Highway seventeen. I
stopped for gas that afternoon, and my dad had ridden
to lunch down the same highway, down Highway seventeen to
a little diner called Stephen's right over the Georgia Florida line.
And he'd actually sent me a picture of a model
car they had on display at the diner.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
It was a nineteen forty Ford Coop.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And that's a very special car to us because it
kind of stars in my novel Gods of Howell Mountain.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
It's this bootleggers.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Car and one of the most popular cars for bootlegging
in the early stock car racing days, and my dad
and I had gone to car shows to actually go
see these cars as part of research for that book.
I don't think I had a chance to reply back,
and I just kept going along my way, and I
got a call from my mom and I could tell
immediately that something had happened. We didn't have a lot
(07:35):
of details, but she knew that he had been on
his way back from lunch on Highway seventeen, that same
stretch of highway that I'd ridden just a few hours earlier,
and a concrete truck had pulled out in front of him.
And I went to the airport to rent a car
to drive home. Certainly, I wasn't going to ride the
motorcycle back at this time. It would take too long,
and I didn't want my mom worried. And I was
(07:57):
at the airport renting a car in Tallahassee, and Mom
called and said that he was gone.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
He hadn't made it.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
And I was standing outside and it was about sunset,
and the sky was lit up, just fire colored, and
I thought of all these trips, motorcycle trips that my
dad had taken down to Florida. He used to love
to go to a place called cedar Key, another place
called uh Hudson, and he would go to the Gulf
Coast where you could see the sun go down over
(08:24):
the water, and he would send me photos of a
sky that looked just like that. And I had this
feeling that he was gone, but he would always be
with me.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
And I saw him in that sky.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
It always felt like there was some extra connection with us,
and that, you know, I'd ridden that same motorcycle down
that same road that day.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
I was on a long ride of my own.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
I was doing all the things that he taught me,
you know, and I couldn't help but feel that, you know,
he was always going to be not too distant. I
think that there are men who want to be like
their fathers and men who don't. And I've never had
any question of which one I am.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
And what a beautiful story by Taylor Brown. By the way,
you learned everything about his father when the boy, the
young man dropped dad's precious, precious white glide. My biggest
lesson he said that I learned from him was on
that day. Sometimes character requires you to put something difficult
over something easy, and it would have been really easy
(09:28):
to yell at his boy. A eulogy to my biker
father on our American Story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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