Sunday, January 24, 2010

The Loudest Scooter in the World

One of the main purposes of this blog, I feel, is to capture snipets of our life now that 5, 10 or 50 years down the road we may forget. One of those snipets is: the loudest motorscooter in the world.

Okay, so the loudest scooter in the world and I have quite a history. I feel as though I know the rider of this scooter intimately, like we are old friends or colleagues, though I have never met him, and, in fact, have no idea who he is.

When the weather turns cooler (which is infrequent) we are able to open our windows at night. The nights here are mostly quiet, barring a holiday that is celebrated by fireworks, which, evidently, in our neighborhood, is every holiday. Yes, I believe they even celebrate Valentine's Day and Columbus Day here by shooting off fireworks. I don't know what it is. Our neighbors love their fireworks. Anyway, every night around 2:00 a.m. we here the loudest scooter in the world drive by our house.

Because it is the loudest scooter in the world (I'm not kidding...this thing is louder than a Harley) the noise doesn't come and go in thirty seconds. The event last a full 5 minutes. He passes the house, then we hear him going through the round-about, fully a mile away. I guess he then heads west, because the squirty brrreeeeet of the scooter fades for a moment, only to reemerge miles away, like all the over by 95.

Since Peter's moved in with us and we are awake in the dark more often than not, we've grown closer to the pilot of the loudest scooter.

Elise and I have hypothesized that the scooter's rider buses tables (of course, he's not a waiter because then maybe he could afford a modest car payment). When we hear the scooter around 11 or 12, one of us will turn to the other and say into the night, "He must have gotten off work early tonight." The converse is also true. When he passes at 3 or later, usually a Friday or Saturday night (err, I mean Saturday or Sunday morning), the brief conversation begins and ends with, "Must've been a late night."

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