The worthless, priceless hand-me-down motorcycle

What do you do with a motorcycle that’s worth nearly nothing, monetarily, but carries with it ties to days and people lost that are priceless? A motorcycle is a keepsake too large to slip into a drawer, with a promise to self to deal with it another day. And sometimes, circumstances force us to make decisions now.

Two years ago, motivated mostly by my father’s death and the ever more certain knowledge that my mother would never ride it again, I pulled her old motorcycle out of storage and returned it to running condition for my own use. Not because I needed a fourth motorcycle, especially one limited to smaller side roads by its (at best) 60 mph top speed. I did need to preserve the ties to my father and not let a thing of joy to my mother rust away alone in a shed. The little 1996 Suzuki GN125 was a leftover, an orphan on the showroom floor, when my father bought it in 1997 as a 59th birthday gift for my mother, and as ridiculous as it may be to feel sorry for a machine, I didn’t want it to be abandoned again.

When I learned about the birthday gift 24 years ago, I was skeptical. Or maybe I was just peeved he hadn’t asked my advice and had bought such a questionable, discontinued machine, an underpowered mechanical anachronism with 1970s technology and dated styling. But over the following years, I gradually came to believe my father had made exactly the right choice for the unique riding my mother did, puttering around the country lanes near their West Virginia home, enjoying some breeze and solo time, waving to the rural neighbors on their riding lawnmowers and the children on the Amish farm alike.

My previous story tells the whys and hows of getting the little bike back on the road. Since then, for the past two years, it’s been my main local transportation, just as 125s like this have done for decades for millions of riders around the world. It was so simple to hop on it and go, it became my first choice for anything from pizza or donut runs to trips to the hardware store. I put about 900 miles on the GN125 each of the last two years.

That’s how I ended up taking a 900-mile trip last week on a motorcycle that makes maybe nine horsepower and tops out at about 60 mph, if conditions are right. One last memory made with a bike that has been like a part of the family, and will stay in the family. You can read the full story at RevZilla.

Like adopting a shelter pet or returning someone’s lost billfold, I feel like I did a good thing. So long, little Suzi.