Tow... tow... tow your bike....

.... gently down the road..... la la la la la la la.... life is but a dream. (I forget all the words inbetween there, but you get the idea.)

My husband rode his motorcycle to his office last night. Beautiful weather, not a raindrop in the sky, and it seemed like the perfect time for a ride. He's been so busy lately that the motorcycle has been parked in the garage and hadn't seen daylight for weeks now. So off he went.

After his office hours, back he came... walking through the front door, instead of riding the bike down the driveway and into the garage and coming through the back door. That the was first hint of a problem. Where's your motorcycle?

"At work. Parking lot. Got ride home." Second hint-- my husband doesn't usually speak in incomplete sentences.

What happened was that the motorcycle wouldn't start when he was ready to leave. The engine wouldn't turn over, no matter how hard he tried. One of his co-workers drove him home and dropped him off in front of our house.

As I was about to ask my husband how the motorcycle was going to get back here, he told me that as soon as he changed out of his good slacks and shirt and into a pair of shorts, we would drive his car back to the parking lot. Then he would tie a rope around the trailer hitch on the back of the car, and I would drive the car pulling the rope that he would hold as he straddled the motorcycle. What? What?

"Easy as pie," said my husband. "It's late, it's dark, there's no one on the road, it's less than half a mile. Not a problem." When my husband gets that "no problem" look in his eyes, there's no sense in arguing. So off we went, with me shaking my head all the way... I can't believe we're doing this.

When we got to the parking lot, the motorcycle was the only vehicle there. As we drove up to the spot where the motorcycle was, we saw an armadillo walking slowly right next to it. In all the years we've lived in Texas, that armadillo was only the second one I've seen alive. We've seen lots of armadillos over the years, but they've all been smashed dead in the middle of the road. For all their ugliness, when you see them up close, they're almost cute. Not kitten-cute, but cute in an E.T.-way (as in "E. T., phone home," the ugly-bordering-on-cute alien).

Anyway, back to the motorcycle. We did indeed attach the rope to the trailer hitch, then my husband got on the bike and sat there holding the rope in his left hand as he waited for me to drive. I asked him if it might be a better idea to tie the rope to the front of the bike, but he didn't want to take the chance of me driving too fast and then he wouldn't be able to disengage himself from the rope. Before I got behind the wheel of the car, my husband reminded me that he would be holding that rope, and he didn't expect to get rope-burns from trying to hold on. "Don't go too fast, don't go too slow... just keep a steady pace and we'll be fine." (No pressure here.)

I had to drive very slowly, less than five miles an hour, while my husband held on to that rope and steered the bike behind the car. He had to drop the rope a few times, then I had to stop the car, get the rope and give it back to him, get back into the car and get going at a steady pace again. It was nerve-wracking, especially since the lights on the motorcycle wouldn't work. Thankfully, because of the late hour, only one car passed us all the way from his office to our driveway, and we made it home safely. When we got here, I told my husband that this had been an "Amazing Race" stunt, except we couldn't go fast. I think he wanted to laugh out loud at that remark, but he was too ticked off at the motorcycle to appreciate my sense of humor.