Most of us grow out of our motor cycling days and graduate to cars. Some of us manage to retain a motor cycle or two and sneak in a ride once in a while. They are the lucky ones for sure, but they have no significant advantage when it comes to exchanging notes about their respective two wheeler times.

Memories you see, don’t just favor the brave. They make themselves available to all and sundry. From the scooterist who grew up to be a bank teller and just changed his steed from a Lambretta to a Kinetic Honda, and finally switched to an Activa. To the motor cyclist who went from 100cc toys to 1000cc monsters and is now lusting for the superbike while he takes a break from his penthouse office suite.

I was a biker from my early teens till my late twenties. Almost fifteen glorious years. And I have ridden everything from a 125cc Bobby minibike to a 250cc Jawa, from a 125cc Suzuki to a 350cc Bullet. From a 500cc BSA to a 650cc Triumph. The ultimate machine I rode was a 1200 cc Honda Cruiser.

But are my memories of those bikes alone? No, my memories extend to the many rides I’ve been on. The fun, the excitement, the breakdowns, the rescues, the pillionairesses, the cross country runs, the falls, the skids and so on. But much more important my memories remind me of my ears.

I guess it has been pointed out so often that I now know that I have funny ears. They function well enough I must admit, but have a strange tail ending i.e. their lobes are different from the other ears’ I have seen. They curl up and look like lobes that were unlucky enough in childhood, not to be weighed down by earrings.

While that may be considered as a visual deficiency, I must admit also that a lot of people have found it ‘cute’. But that, as they say, is another story altogether.

The connection between my ears and my motor cycling days is more tenuous and infinitely more painful. You see, fashion dictated in those days that our shirt collars were much longer than those you see nowadays. And the collars were big. It wasn’t that I was dressing any differently from my friends when I sported shirts with those huge collars…though in retrospect, I must admit they looked like a combination of a neck brace and a dog’s tongue.

Now, most of you who know me, know that I am an insanely early morning person, just as I am a crazy nocturnal bird. In my motor cycling days I was no different. Early morning rides and late night spins were par for the course. The temperature was cooler, and the wind was chillier. And that added to the trill of biking.

Except that after a certain speed had been achieved, my collar ends would start flapping. And a I went faster the frequency of flapping would increase. And the tips of the collar would attack my ear lobes.

At a medium pace the flapping of the collar, gently onto my ear lobes, was fun. But as the pace increased, the flapping became more violent and added substantial elements of torture to my freezing ears. Sometimes I’d come home with bleeding ear lobes. And have a hard time convincing my parents that the company I kept in those days, was not carnivorous.

But strangely, as I look back at my biking days it is the flapping of the collar, the bite of the ear lobe and the freezing cold of early morning wind chills that come to mind. And the warmth of the engine and the occasional scald of the exhaust.

Wonder years. Truly. And whoever had heard of Doogie Howser?