According to stories you will find finds in distant lands under warm suns in forgotten barns. We have often talked about the fact that there is also enough beautiful things to be found in our own country. And we came across proof of that again last week.
Not via the Internet
Internet is heavily overrated. It is of course the medium that has radically changed our world. But it is still so young that not everyone's world has changed. And then we also have the much-discussed aging. In short: a lot of seniors don't do anything or almost nothing with the Internet. They just have their own social life very old-fashioned. With real people. Family, neighbors, fellow villagers.
In the Dorpshuus
That social life does not stop with a chat over the hedge. All kinds of community centers run by social workers and things like that that are set up in the Randstad for young people who otherwise get too great a chance of beating others, you will not find much outside the Randstad. The community centers in the part of the Netherlands of which Grachtengordeldieren and the residents of 010 and 030 usually only suspect the existence have other community centers. Everything is organized there and the audience that comes to it is usually gray-haired and pleasantly involved and enterprising.
There are card and clover evenings and all kinds of lessons in languages and skills. The atmosphere is always great. And during the break there is a pleasant chat. If you, as a teacher, notice during such a break that you like old motorcycles… Then it turns out that two of those present have 'another one of those things' in the shed. One speaker is 83. The other a spring chicken of barely sixty. One motorcycle was simply put away because the owner no longer dared to drive. The other engine is broken up. For years.
Enter the garage
Because everything is very uninhibited on such a course evening, you just make a few appointments. And a few days later you are standing in the wooden garage next to a stately 350s house next to a beautiful Jawa 83, a machine with which you showed in its time that you were modern-minded and not unmediated. The conversation with the cute 15-year-old owner goes so well that the Jawa is adopted. After XNUMX years of dreaming, he can go outside again this spring.
The second contact, just like the first, says something about the state of motorcycling in the days when a lot was already dreamed about large, fast motorcycles. T500s and Honda CB750 OHCs were machines that impressed you back then. But more obvious was a 350 cc CZ.
The owner was also in his seventies, but he was busy restoring his steed. From the same evening a phone call came later from another senior who had not been there, but who did report that he wanted to distance himself from his 1959 Jawa 250 cc because of age and health.
One thing is clear
Now let that Internet sit and go on a course or club at your local community center, community cover or community center.
