There’s something about the freedom of a motorcycle ride … the wind blowing through your hair, passing mere cars at light speed, mosquitoes splattered against your grin. I guess that was why.

But why would ol’ Dingle let Dewey Decker take his motorcycle out for a spin?

“Hey, I was right there,” Dingle said later. “I told him not to go past the neighbor’s mailbox, and I’d shown him how to run the thing. It’s not like he wasn’t supervised.”

But Dewey?

The problem is, Dewey has … occurrences.  A Dewey Occurrence (and the capital letters are on purpose here) normally consists of something so out of the ordinary happening to him that it would be virtually impossible to happen to someone else. Like the time he got his father’s pickup truck stuck in the mud. During a drought. In the only mud puddle in the county.  If Dewey drove a car in the Indianapolis 500, it would be hit … by a meteor. If Dewey took the podium to conduct the high school band on the football field at half time, the podium would disappear into quicksand. If Dewey had been a soldier in World War II, we’d all be speaking German.

So allowing Dewey to ride a motorcycle … even as far as the neighbor’s mailbox … comes perilously close to being a crime against humanity.

You don’t really think of accidents happening at less than five miles an hour. Not usually. But I understand Dingle’s motorcycle can be fixed, Dewey only has to wear the cast for six weeks, and the neighbor was tired of that mailbox, anyway. The nurse down at the emergency room said she calls them “donorcycles.”