So Kate has this great teacher this year, who’s into all sorts of different and fun ways to learn that make extra work for me.

Just kidding. He’s actually very cool about that sort of thing. But this upcoming project is one where I’m going to have to do, or direct, a lot of the preparation. For two weeks in January, every kid in the class has to set up and run a “business” from their desk, which will be surrounded by a refrigerator box “storefront.” I have the box, thanks to a terrifyingly well-organized room mother, who went out to Livonia and picked up a couple dozen from an appliance store weeks ago, then drove around the Woods distributing them. And we have the business plan — Miss Kitty’s Homemade Dog and Cat Treats (which narrowly beat out the tattoo parlor). I even have a recipe for homemade dog biscuits.

(And needless to say, I have a camera-ready celebrity spokesdog to endorse them in billboards and advertising.)

What I don’t have is a cat-treat recipe. Which is where you, dear readers, come in. Of course I’ve found scores on the internet, but most require subsequent refrigeration or some other preservation, because they’re soft and moist the way cats like ‘em. I’m looking for something dry enough to keep in a coffee can or Tupperware, but not so hard that Pussy will turn up her pampered nose. Anybody have a recipe that fits the bill?

Here are two tentative finalists, which I’ll make this weekend and test on neighborhood cats:

Cat crackers
6 ounces of undrained tuna
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup flour
1/3 cup water

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Measure all of the ingredients into a bowl and mix thoroughly with your hands. Roll out to 1/4 inch thickness and cut into treat sized pieces. Place on a greased cookie sheet. Bake for about 20 minutes or until golden. Let cool. Give to your cat and watch them gobble it up.

Kitty cookies
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup soy flour
1 teaspoon catnip
1 egg
1/3 cup milk
2 tablespoons wheat germ
1/3 cup powdered milk
1 tablespoon unsulfured molasses
2 tablespoons butter or vegetable oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. 

Mix dry ingredients together. Add molasses, egg, oil and milk. Roll out flat onto oiled cookie sheet and cut into small, cat bite-sized pieces. Bake for 20 minutes. Let cool and store in tightly sealed container.

But if you have any to add, along with a personal testimonial, leave ‘em in the comments.

Last night one of the local news anchors described Gerald Ford’s death as “tragic.” I know, in TV, where it isn’t possible to report a mass murder of kindergarteners without a smarmy furrowed brow and lots of unnecessary modifiers, all deaths are tragic. It’s just a default adjective, like “controversial.” Still. The man got four score and 13 and died in comfort, surrounded by his family. Kind of devalues the word, wouldn’t you say?

I’m devoting this weekend to housecleaning, literal and figurative. Before I change “On the Nightstand,” though, I want to recommend the book that’s been over there for a couple weeks — “King Leopold’s Ghost,” by Adam Hochschild. Most of my reading-for-pleasure is fiction, but as they say, this book reads like a novel. It’s about the formation and shameless exploitation of the Congo, mainly by the late king of Belgium, Leopold II. Hochschild notes in his introduction that although this effort resulted in the death of as many as 8 million people, it’s still strangely unknown in our time. (I had to agree, as I knew precisely nothing about it.) The story of European exploitation of its colonies is familiar, of course, but what makes this one different is the scope, the utter shamelessness with which Leopold sucked the life out of this region of Africa. There’s also the interesting detail that Congo wasn’t a Belgian colony until close to Leopold’s death; before that it was his personal colony, owned outright by one man, who never even set foot in the place. (He didn’t even like Belgium much, preferring the more refined comforts of Paris.)

I’ve mentioned before that Detroit actually has a Belgian community. A friend of mine featherbowls at their main outpost, the Cadieux Cafe, where the walls are hung with pictures of Eddie Merckx and regulars can tell you all about the difference between Flemish Belgians and French ones (called walloons, if you’re interested). But I’d bet few know much about this sordid story.

At some point blogging becomes a form of procrastination, like, um, now. If I don’t clean my kitchen right this minute, it’ll never get done.

Have a great weekend. Happy new year. See you there.

With all the bodies piling up in the last couple of days, we haven’t had much time to talk about Christmas. How was yours? Mine was fine, with perhaps a bit too much driving. Down to Columbus on Saturday, back to Detroit on Sunday, to and from Defiance on Monday. But we had a nice time. My big present from Alan were several nice antique prints, including this one, which made me laugh. (I don’t think Alan paid that much, however, and if he did, he’s in trouble.)

As I’ve gotten older, my contributions to the what-I’d-do-if-I-won-the-lottery conversation are dwindling. I’m over cars, houses, and most grown-up toys. If I won the lottery, I’d do most of my big spending on two things — travel and art. A few years ago Alan and I started buying antique prints, nothing grand, the sort of things a couple of underpaid journalists can afford. (In all our time together, I think we’ve only owned two pieces that cost more to buy than they did to frame.) One of the household dramas of recent weeks that I’ve spared you was the Great Bedroom Painting Project, in which I learned (yet again!) that one does not argue with Alan’s color sense. Now we’re living in a taupe bedroom — and yes, all the screws on the light switches line up at 12 o’clock — and need some new stuff for the walls. Audubon’s butt-licking lynx will do nicely.

Among our experiences over the weekend was this oddity: My brother, Alan and I stopped in for a drink at the little workingman’s bar in Obetz, a little workingman’s suburb of Columbus. (My brother owns the joint.) It was quiet for a Saturday night, just two women and three men, all sitting at the bar. Only wait, that third man isn’t a man at all…

“There’s a dog at the bar,” Alan said. I looked closer. Looking back through the barroom gloom was, indeed, a dog. A big chocolate Lab, sitting on a stool as nice as you please. He had a bowl of water in front of him. (At least, I think it was water. It didn’t have an olive in it, so I assume it wasn’t a martini.) It looked like a beer commercial; I kept waiting for the dog’s lips to move CGI-style and for him to call someone dude.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Budweiser,” his owner said. But of course.

Budweiser was a very good dog, parking his considerable Lab frame on a rather tiny spot of barstool real estate with no obvious discomfort or complaint. Every so often someone would buy him a piece of beef jerky. At one point my brother talked some amicable trash to his owner, and the owner talked some trash back, and Budweiser barked in agreement. When one of the women called him over for some jerky and petting, he jumped down from his stool and jumped up onto the one next to her with no coaxing whatsoever.

“Doesn’t the health department have a problem with this?” I asked. (For the record, I think every bar should have a house dog.)

“This is Obetz,” he said. “You can do anything you want here. No one knows we exist.”

Good dog, Budweiser.

So, bloggage:

God bless the crazy men among us: Man spends $60,000 and half his life building a “Jetsons-style” vehicle. “Why drive when you can fly 500 m.p.h.?” he asks.

Excellent question.

Spike Lee’s directing the James Brown biopic? Finally, a movie where I care who plays the lead. (My bet’s on Eddie Murphy.)

Guess how much sleep I got last night? Not enough. I’m off to find more French Roast and take a shower.

For those of you who’d like to get some extra credit on yesterday’s assignment, two pieces, one short and one long:

Roy Edroso at Alicublog, on James Brown. (This is the short one.)

Philip Gourevitch in the New Yorker, on James Brown. (Long.) The latter contains a detailed description of his show that pretty much matches the one I saw, but is, of course, about a million times better than my description.

Gerald Ford is dead. People of my precise demographic slice will remember him as a vague collection of impressions, beginning with WIN buttons and ending with Chevy Chase’s pratfalls. Sentenced by fate to clean up after Richard Nixon, he did a good enough job that few people remember him with bitterness (even though he survived two — two! — assassination attempts), but not good enough that he could be reelected. Here’s another fleeting memory: Jimmy Carter calling for a round of applause, in his inauguration speech, for the man who did so much to “heal our land.” I recall Ford seemed uncomfortable with this Hollywood-like moment, even as he stood up and acknowledged the applause.

I was stunned to see he was 93. Didn’t he play football at Michigan? That would seem to place him in the leather-helmet era of the game, but maybe not.

This is probably a reflection of where my head was at the time, but I mainly remember Jerry Ford for his family. After the Nixon robo-daughters, the Fords were a family any American teenager could like. One son was a struggling actor. (Look for him as one of the president’s Secret Service agents in “Escape From New York” — he’s the blonde.) A daughter, Susan, was briefly touted as a Major Babe, a Republican Kennedy, then sort of resigned from the job. She made a commercial for Subaru in which she had to sing three words — Ford drives Subaru — and couldn’t stay on key, but was cute about it. It only now occurs to me how this must have stabbed the other Ford family, back home in the president’s native state, right in the heart; a Michigan politician’s daughter pimping an import! Heresy!

And then there was Betty, who had her own problems, although we didn’t find out about them until after her husband left office. She was a good egg, though, pulling up her socks and becoming the public face of alcoholism. It needed a public face, right about the time we were turning from Foster Brooks and Crazy Guggenheim to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and an ex-president’s wife would do nicely.

Of the president, I simply wasn’t paying attention. There was the Nixon pardon, Whip Inflation Now and…well, what can i say? I was a teenager. I was paying attention to other things.

I’m struck by this passage in his obituary, noting he was “a man of the center. He was an internationalist in foreign affairs, a moderate on civil rights and social questions and a conservative on fiscal matters.”

And this was a Republican. (Amusingly, his position in football? Center.) They didn’t make ‘em like that for a long time, although the model seems to be making a comeback. Have you driven a Ford lately?

Here’s my James Brown story. It’s not much of a story.

I used to be a night person. It was a necessity of working 2-10 p.m., night shift at an afternoon paper. But I was young and had the sort of energy and lifestyle that made those hours pretty much ideal. Anyway, one night one of my colleagues, Dave Jones, stopped by my desk and said, “You want to see James Brown later on tonight? He’s playing at the Agora.” It was a crummy but busy rock club down in the campus area (now the Newport Music Hall, for you Buckeyes), seats about 1,000, maybe more.

“The show’ll be over by the time we get there,” I said. Nope, said Jones. He’s playing two shows.

This was 1982, around there, which would have made Brown 50-ish. He’d been in showbiz for decades already, had been its Hardest-Working Man for at least that long. But he was, shall we say, in a trough. The ’60s were long over, disco was dead, hip-hop was still a-borning, New Wave had peaked and radio was starting to split into armed camps of strict formats. “Living in America” was still a few years away, and the baby-boom nostalgia machine had yet to crank all the way up and give him a residual income from getting “I Feel Good” in all those Huggies commercials. And so he and his band were touring and playing two shows a night in 1,000-seat clubs.

We arrived in plenty of time to get tickets for the midnight show. The hall filled with a mixed-race crowd spanning a wide age range. We snared a table off to the side, a few steps above the standing-room main floor, ordered a pitcher and waited.

Brown’s shows always began the same way — with his large, brass-heavy Revue playing a few numbers by themselves, while an MC, Danny Ray, started the crowd chanting “James Brown! James Brown!” I was eager to see the show, but this seemed a little silly, even as we joined in. I looked closely at the Revue. The intimacy of the space and the artlessness of the lighting showed every pill on their powder-blue tuxedos. Their ruffled shirts looked tired. I thought I could see grime on their collars and cuffs, but that might have been my imagination. And it was the second show, after all.

After about 15 minutes of this, Brown made his entrance, lights shining on his trademark pompadour, his forehead already sweaty, his clothing the same tight polyester pants and wide-spread collars he’d been wearing for years. To this day, I can’t tell you a single song I heard or much at all about the music, except that it simply ran over me like a train. By the second song, Jones and I had left our table behind, moved onto the floor and were dancing like a couple of Ecstasy idiots. I felt like a Pentecostal taken with the spirit; the show was that powerful. The Revue played their guitars and horns and Brown danced and screamed and moaned into the microphone, sweat flying from him the way it would from a prizefighter. He stopped once in a while to mop his brow, but not for long. It was just a seamless, two-hour musical throwdown, and I hadn’t seen anyone, yes, work that hard on a stage ever. Still haven’t.

As time ran short, he went through the same wind-down he’d been doing for years: He starts to leave the stage, and MC Ray comes up with a cape and throws it over his shoulders. The first time I saw this was on a TV show in the mid-’60s, and the action was more of Ray trying to save his man from an onstage collapse: Boss, you gotta stop now or you’re gonna hurt yourself! The cape was thrown over him the way a groom throws a blanket on a racehorse that’s just stepped off the track — gotta keep those muscles warm so they don’t cramp up. But no! James Brown is too powerful to stop, and must keep gettin’ fun-kay! He throws the cape off and rushes back to the mic, sings a little more, and after a bit Ray approaches with another cape. This goes on for three or four capes.

On this night, the action was a little stylized, an acknowledgement that this routine was now 20 years old and everyone knew how it played out, but it was still entertaining as hell. By now it was last call in the club, 2 a.m., and the management was ready for it to be over. They turned the houselights all the way up, but James Brown cannot be rushed by the Man. He played two encores, another blur of butt-shakin’ and splits and good-gods and microphone swinging, and then finally left the stage for good and we all filed out to let our sweat evaporate on the sidewalk.

(Two years ago, Jones e-mailed me and said he’d finally seen a show that was better — Prince’s “Musicology” tour. Prince wears tight pants, a pompadour and knows how to get fun-kay. Wonder where he learned that?)

It seemed I saw several shows that year that simultaneously underlined both the joy and the pain of the professional musician. There was also Albert King, blues genius, in a bar so small he had to leave the stage by walking through the crowd. Still buzzing from “Little Red Rooster,” I assaulted him with a bear hug, which he was nice enough to return. (My overwhelming impression: This man is sweaty.) He would have been around 60 at the time, playing tiny bars for college students. And yet, he put everything he had into that show, or at least seemed to. I think about James Brown, already annointed the Godfather of Soul, reduced to two-show nights in small venues, still giving so much that he demanded you give it all back to him. And we did.

A couple years ago, Terry Gross had one of Brown’s longtime band members on her show, and they talked about the rhythmic signature of his music: “Playing on the one,” which is how Brown often cued his band: “On the one!” ONE two three four ONE two three four. The beat was more insistent that way, the musician said. I don’t know enough about music to comment, except maybe this: Amen.

I originally started this post with a few paragraphs about unlucky Miss Nevada and her problems. It had a gratuitous swipe at Donald Trump and some other stuff, but Kate has started reading my website again, so I can’t do that anymore. Back to PG-13 material. And no, no links for you. You know how to use Google News.

Anyway, how crude of me, to bring up Miss Nevada on a day like today, the weekend before our Savior’s birth, when every other blogger in the world is putting up soft-focus shots of his family and offering joy to the world. Especially when there’s other, holiday-related bloggage, like this NYT story on inflatable holiday decorations:

“Appalling,� Catherine Bruckner, a traditionalist who decorates only in holly and evergreen, sneered as she stopped her car in front of an inflated Santa playing poker with two shrewd-eyed reindeer in a menagerie totaling two dozen figures. “It’s bad enough to see those things on Halloween. At Christmas, they rise to a level of tackiness that is horrible.�

Well, yeah. But when has that stopped Americans from expressing themselves at the holidays?

But the inflatables have brought the notion of Christmas self-expression to another plane. Now, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, that televised triumphal march that inaugurates the season, can live on in miniature for weeks at a time, swaying and bobble-heading across the front lawn of anyone willing to pay the electric bill — maybe a thousand dollars if you keep them inflated all the time, less if you leave the skins of your Christmas characters sprawled on the ground most of the day, their crumpled faces staring blankly at the sky or the sod, depending.

Why I love the New York Times: The story contains the fascinating detail that Gemmy, the company that makes the vast majority of these things, had its first success with? Anyone?

Yes, “the wall-mounted singing fish known as Big Mouth Billy Bass.” Perhaps my favorite Sopranos-episode prop.

And there’s also this fabulously dry sentence: The company also sells inflatable turkeys, pumpkins and the occasional dreidel.

“The occasional dreidel.” That cracked me up.

Oh, my, but I’m done here. I’m taking the holiday weekend off along with everyone else. Until the 26th, have a great time with you and yours. One last Festive Foto, although not the one the photographer was perhaps expecting to see. Colleen sent a link to a picture of the Fort Wayne Santa, but it was a tad out of focus and the bulbs were burned out in the sleigh’s runners. So I browsed her Photobucket and found this shot I like a lot more. Not Christmasy, but it is, to me, the essence of my drive to work when I was on the 5 a.m. shift. The city is never more deserted than it is between 4 and 5, which gives its lighted displays even more impact. I knew I was almost there when I saw this:

It doesn’t exactly say “sleep in heavenly peace,” but it works for me.

Happy holidays! Merry Christmas!

Today’s Holiday Foto Fest submissions come from our stalwart reader Mary Beth Poole, out Los Angeles way, where, if it’s December, it must be time for Las Posadas:

The festival — posada means “inn” — commemorates the failure of Mary and Joseph to find so much as a Motel 6 open in Bethlehem during tax-collection season. Presumably, the festiveness of the occasion suggests that today’s Mexican-Americans wouldn’t turn the couple away, and would even fete them with tamales. (Note to self: Go down to Mexicantown today and buy some tamales.)

As for Casa NN.C, the other night we celebrated our long-standing tradition of I Can Never Remember: Do We Have Latkes for Hanukkah, or One of Those Other Jewish Holidays? Why, when we’re not even close to being Jewish? Because potato pancakes are damn tasty, that’s why. I’d sit down at the table of brotherhood with Osama bin Laden if the food was good enough. (Note, though, that Osama is thin as a rail. Figures. Probably lives on tea, fasting and self-flagellation.) Our other holiday traditions are pretty flexible — nothing like a major relocation to throw a bomb into those things. But we have them. They include decorating the tree, Kate rearranging the NOEL stocking holders to read LEON and eggnog French toast on Christmas morning. We are a small family; it works for me. Oh, and by the way, that is Mary’s backyard Christmas cactus, blooming naturally on schedule.

I have some linkage this morning, yes I do. A new blog, found via James Wolcott: Ken Levine, “the world as seen by a TV comedy writer.” Great Hollywood stories, told by someone who can really write. Whenever I find a new blog I like to go back to the first month of the archives, just out of curiosity. In Levine’s November 2005 archive: Porn Star Karaoke. Worth the visit.

I always thought the dividing line between a true big city and a wannabe was how the hometown folks handled the successful locals. Do they make a big honkin’ deal out of them, or play it cool? (For years I thought “Fort Wayne’s” was a permanent attachment to Shelley Long’s name, and she just dropped it so it would fit easier on a marquee.) You’d think, with Detroit’s rich and ever-evolving musical tradition, we’d be able to handle a Bob Seger concert without making our pop music writers break a sweat, but I was wrong:

The Freep, today: They waited a decade. Sometimes impatiently, sometimes forgiving. Always with passion intact. Wednesday night, at last, they got Bob Seger. In the most prominent concert of Detroit music since Eminem played Ford Field in summer 2003, more than 17,000 fans watched — and sang, and screamed — as the local icon lit up the Palace of Auburn Hills for his first hometown show in more than 10 years.

The News, today: When the crowd sings all of “Turn the Page,” word for word, loudly enough to almost drown Seger out, there’s obviously a lot more than a concert going on. There are innumerable layers of communal and personal memory kicking in, with Seger acting as the much-loved host and emotional touchstone.

Well, it is Bob Seger. I forget not everyone spend the ’80s listening to the Ramones and B-52s and snapping the radio off in irritation when “Roll Me Away” came on for the 11 millionth time. I really need to get out more. And to think, after two years in Michigan the only place I’m really interested in seeing Bob Seger is out on the water. (And he didn’t do “Heavy Music”?! Or “Feel Like a Number”?!? Those folks wuz robbed.)

Most people think genetic engineering of plants to make them resistant to disease and other stresses begins and ends with soybeans, corn and wheat. Nope.

Finally, the video that made Kate giggle all morning:

Me, too.

Not much time today — the biggest part of the Big Edit still stretches before me, and I got five hours of sleep last night, which means an afternoon nap is a necessity. I sent the first part of the job to the client last night, and discovered we differ on whether the phrase “unpaid volunteer” is redundant.

I said yes, but then considered the volunteer military, which is paid, so OK, he wins on that one. And so it will go for about 50 more pages. Which I volunteered for.

Whenever I do a project like this, I can feel myself slipping into editor mode, ready to go 15 rounds over unnecessary adverbs and “unpaid volunteer.” Every so often I have to smack my cheeks, screech “big picture!” to the empty room and reset the ol’ brain. Good writing, and good editing, is all about details, but obsessing over details is the original slippery slope leading to madness. I didn’t know my journalism fellowship was really over until I was back at work on the copy desk, beefing with a colleague over…(harp glissando, swimmy-screen effects)

When I was away on my leave, the newspaper was redesigned yet again, with the usual results: More big type, less little type. Stories now carried a main headline, a sub headline, something called a “lead-in” and my personal favorite, the overline. The relationship between all of these elements was complex and changed from section to section, but it went basically like this: The main head could be Tarzan-speak: Fire kills 3. The subhed was longer, still Tarzan: Space heater blamed for early-morning blaze. The lead-in, if there was one, had to be more of a complete sentence: The home had smoke alarms, but they lacked batteries. (By this point the poor reporter could file a story saying, “Blah blah blah blah blah” and not worry about being found out. By readers, anyway.)

And then there was the overline, which hovered over everything else like a vengeful god. It was a short little all-caps thing that was at the very top of this explosion of verbiage, and no one really knew what to do with it. In sports stories, it was always whatever sport or league the story below concerned: NFL, COLLEGE BASKETBALL. Elsewhere, it was sort of a Greek chorus commenting on the story below. Think of an old-fashioned painting where a cherub flies above the action, trailing a banner like a little airplane, helpfully spelling out the scene’s moral lesson. For our fire story, it might be HOLIDAY TRAGEDY.

So on this one day in the summer of 2004, I was handling the Page One story about an insurgent attack in Iraq. The main hed was something like 4 Marines die in bombing and the subhed Truck explodes in crowded marketplace; 12 civilians killed, many more wounded. And there was probably a lead-in, too, but today’s story involves the overline. The one I wrote read BAD DAY IN BAGHDAD.

Can you guess what was wrong with this, and why it had to be corrected between editions? Was “bad” considered undue editorializing? No. Did it happen at the cusp of sunrise or sunset, making “day” not precisely accurate? No. Grizzled copy editors with the AP stylebook tattooed on their frontal lobes know the real problem:

Baghdad is not a stand-alone city in AP datelines; hence it must always have the country appended to it on first reference. And since this was part of the headline array, it might be the very first word a reader’s eye falls on. On the one-in-a-billion chance that this might be the first story read by a recently awakened coma victim who didn’t know the United States was fighting a war in Baghdad, Iraq and not Baghdad, Iowa, and might spend a nanosecond or two in terrible confusion, the overline was changed to read BAD DAY IN BAGHDAD, IRAQ.

No, I’m not kidding.

This is why I’m really not cut out to be a copy editor. However, I do it because I care.

Today’s holiday foto feature is submitted by Alex Jokay, who notes it’s from Aboite Township (the Fort’s hoit-to-the-toity suburb), “but not the tonier side of the tracks.” Ah, suburbia:

Now go out there and pick some nits of your own.

We have a guest blogger today. I found this essay while doing some tidying up on the computer. Alan wrote it a couple years ago, as part of the application for a job editing a motorcycle magazine. They were still making up their minds when the Detroit News called, so it never saw print. Most people don’t know that before Alan became a bald guy who loves fly-fishing and sailing, he was a long-haired guy who loved motorcycles (and bore a strong resemblance to the young Bob Seger). He doesn’t know why I like this essay, and I’m not sure either; it could use a new lead and is a little gearhead-y for a general audience. But it has a few nice moments. It’s a window into a part of his life I wasn’t there for, and objectively, I think it will strike a chord in anyone who ever loved a beautiful machine that didn’t love them back.

By Alan Derringer

I once owned a Sportster XLCH that I bump-started all the way from Indianapolis to Glacier National Park after the kick-starter took a bite at my leg and tore a chunk out of the engine case instead.

It was a complicated relationship from the beginning. I knew better than to buy the Harley-Davidson. I read all the bike magazines and I knew: Even in 1974, the year my Sportster was built, the motorcycle was an anachronism.

For starters, the brake pedal was on the left and the shift lever was on the right. That orientation was the opposite of the Japanese motocrossers and street bikes imprinted in my muscle memory. In panic situations on the Sportster, I learned to curl down the toes of both feet, hoping one would find a brake pedal. Federal safety regulators forced AMF Harley-Davidson to reposition the brake for the 1975 model year, but that didn’t prevent me from trying to upshift my 1974 brake pedal. Even the shift pattern – one-up, three-down – was out of step with the world.

The 1000 cc iron-head V-twin vibrated like a paint shaker. The vibration numbed hands, feet and any other body part that touched the machine. The blur in the rearview mirror was useful only for getting a sense that something big was closing in. The lone rubber isolation mounts were beneath the handlebar risers, and they didn’t do much but add to the vagueness of the motorcycle’s cornering. It would be 30 years – model year 2004 – before Harley-Davidson isolated the Sportster’s engine from the frame with rubber mounts.

The real anachronism, however, was the kick-starter. The XLCH had no electric starter motor, only a vicious and schizophrenic manual kick-starter: Sometimes the engine would kick back the steel lever and try to pitch me over the handlebars. Other times, the pitiful teeth of the starter-clutch gear would slip against the kick-starter’s ratchet plate and allow my full weight to come crashing down.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned. I bought the Sportster used in 1979 for $1,250, a bargain price for a Harley-Davidson even then. “Most people don’t want a kicker,� the seller shrugged. In hindsight, I believe he had a limp.

But I was seduced by the grunt of the staggered dual-exhaust when the Sportster was short-shifted. I was drawn to the polished aluminum eyebrow over the headlight, to the simplicity of the exposed push-rod tubes, the ribbed 19-inch Avon Speedmaster and the muscular 2 1/4-gallon peanut tank. I saw my future in the reflection of the canned-ham air-cleaner cover.

I had taken a year off college to work as a carpenter in Ohio, save money to buy a Harley-Davidson and ride around the American West for a couple of months. My best friend at the time, a college roommate, was going to do the same. When he announced he had squandered his money on beer and was returning home to work in his father’s tool-and-die shop, I reentered college and finished my senior year.

I rode my Sportster to classes. And I learned, mostly, how to tame that beast of a kick-starter: I’d straddle the bike and push the start-lever slowly with my right boot until I felt the pressure build at the top of the compression stroke. I’d allow the lever to ratchet up until it was almost perpendicular to the pavement. I’d grab on hard to the handgrips and let the engine compression give my boot a bounce like a diver off a springboard. Then I’d come down on the start-pedal with all my weight, fully committed.

One kick out of three, the motor would catch and I’d coax the throttle as the Sportster coughed to life. One kick out of 25, the motor would kick the start-lever back up. I broke the shanks of three pairs of boots. I tried starting the Sportster while wearing Topsiders exactly once.

A few years passed. I graduated from college and went to work. One of my friends from back home traded his decrepit Bultaco on a 750 Yamaha. We both strung together 10 days of vacation time and made plans to ride from Ohio to Glacier National Park, and then down to Yellowstone.

We were 135 miles into the 4,400-mile journey when we stopped in Indianapolis to refill that 2 1/4-gallon peanut tank. When I tried restarting the bike, it kicked back savagely. I looked down to see a wide crack in the outer engine case that supported the kick-start shaft. Without the case’s outboard support, the internal gears of the start mechanism gnashed uselessly against each other.

It was Labor Day and no Harley shops were open. So we pressed ahead: To start the bike, I would run alongside and push as fast as I could. I would mount the Sportster as if it were a pommel horse, spreading my knees wide at the last moment to clear the overstuffed saddlebags and the tent and sleeping bag bungied to the rear fender. I would bounce myself hard onto the seat and dump the clutch.

It wasn’t that much of a hardship bump-starting the Sportster for the first 1,900 miles. At one campground with deep-sand roads, I only had to push the bike a hundred yards until I found a patch of concrete. Whenever we stopped to gas up or eat or have a smoke, I tried making sure we parked at the top of a rise, no matter how small.

One morning, up high in the Rockies in Glacier National Park, I unzipped the tent door to discover three inches of snow. We broke camp and loaded the bikes. I tried bump-starting the Sportster on the snow-covered road. The back tire locked and skidded; the Sportster refused to start. We cleared a patch of road with our boots and threw down some sharp stone. The motor turned over and caught.

We headed out of the park, aiming for lower altitudes and warmer temperatures. We hit Missoula for the night, staying at an aunt’s house and thawing out our gear. In the morning, my uncle drove me to the Harley-Davidson dealership to buy a new engine case. I installed the new case and kicked the bike to ignition. We said goodbye and headed for Yellowstone National Park.

We followed the Madison River to the town of West Yellowstone, where we stopped for gas before entering the park. I hunted for the compression stroke with my boot, then came down hard. The motor kicked back and broke my brand-new engine case.

I bump-started the Sportster all the way through the snow of Yellowstone National Park, and then home to Ohio. The relationship had become a lot more complicated.

The guy who bought the bike from me saw nothing but the hard muscularity of the machine, heard nothing but the easy lope of the idle. “Most people don’t want a kicker,� I told him when the deal was done.