[jdviole2]

Helena and I didn't do much in the way of outdoor activities at home. No softball, golf, tennis, etc. But one year she thought it might be fun to ride bicycles around town. So we bought some decent bikes and away we went. We tried to ride some every few days in the good months. We mostly rode on the streets but that was kind of hard because the streets with little traffic were in a very hilly part of town. Riding up and down seemed like too much fun. Then our town built a few bike paths and we started riding them. We had a lot of fun. One of the paths was about a 10 mile trail. We made our goal to ride the length of the trail and then return a 20 mile round trip. We were ready, so off we went. The day was warm, sunny, with a stiff breeze to keep us cool. We made the first ten miles in great shape. Made really good time. Then we started back. Thats when the trouble began. Remember that stiff breeze I mentioned. We had made good time on the way out because it was at our back. The ride home was into the wind the entire way. It took us three times as long to ride back as it did to ride out. About half way back I told Helena that she should stay where she was and I would ride the rest of the way back and get the car to come pick her and the bike up. She refused. She said we started together and would finish together (or be finished together). We got back and I do not remember being that tired ever before or since. We kept to short rides after that. She was a great sport though. Had our places been reversed I might have sat it out and waited until she brought the car. Oh as a funny side story related to this. One of the reasons we were biking was we were trying to lose weight. Helena had read somewhere that you should take pictures of yourself nude or at least in underwear and save them. Then while dieting if you began to weaken you looked at the pictures and supposedly got your willpower back. We took the pictures (in underwear, neither of us wanted to see ourselves that overweight, naked) and put them in a dresser drawer. And promptly forgot they were there. Flash forward 10 years. We were looking for something, don't remember what, and were searching the entire house. I dumped out a dresser drawer and found the envelope with the pictures. When I saw what they were I started laughing and Helena came to see what the heck was so funny. She started laughing just as much as me. The joke was the pictures looked so GOOD. Over the intervening years we had gained a bit more weight and our old selves looked pretty thin by comparison. I still have the pictures but I don't plan to post Helena's underwear shot. It just wouldn't be fair. We had some friends we used to visit in a town not far from ours. They had two young boys and one year their dad built a Go-Kart for them. That year when we visited he asked us if we wanted to go out and try out the cart. Hell yes! There was an abandoned mall nearby and we went to use their vacant parking lot. The kart was a custom built job and had a wider than normal wheel base. It was built low enough to the ground that you could corner very fast and not worry about rolling over. It was an open kart, no roll cage. It was also fast. It could go about 75 mile per hour (over 120 KPH). I had my ride and it was a lot of fun. Full gas then hit the brakes go into the turn and open her up again. Just great. Then it was Helena's turn. We didn't have any helmets (the owner didn't believe in them) and no other safety gear. Helena climbed into the kart and was ready to go. Our friend explained to her again about the gas, braking for the turn, all she needed to know. He could have saved his breath. He said go. Helena punched it and kept her foot on the floor the entire ride. As she approached the end of the parking lot I kept expecting her to brake for the turn. She had other ideas. When she got near the end she whipped the wheel into the turn. She drifted the turn and at just the right time straightened out for the back stretch run. Full Speed 70 plus mile per down the lot drifted the turn at the other end and again straightened out at exactly the right time. As she passed by where we were standing you could not hear the engine anymore because her shrieking yells drowned out the sound. Her long hair standing straight out behind her. She had a fierce look of manic glee on her face. I think, that day, I finally understood the Norse myth of the Valkyries. With the sounds she was making and the look on her face all she needed was shimmering armour and she would have been the personification of the warrior woman riding down to escort the dead heros to Valhalla. I had never seen that side of her before, and really I never saw it again. On the way home she was quiet a lot of the time (we were pretty tired) but she never lost the huge grin on her face. I wanted to get her a kart but knew that where we lived she would never have been able to ride at the speed or with the freedom that she had that first time, and I think that would have cheapened the whole experience for her. As it was that was one of her fondest memories. As her health got worse and she wasn't able to do what she used to do she would get a bit depressed. But if I started talking about the Go-Kart, her eyes would lose focus and she would start to smile and I knew she was behind the wheel again. It never failed to lift her up. Todays pictures are all from prints. The first one is Helena in the mid 70's at the entrance to the amusement pier at Santa Monica. The first building on the left is the famous carousel. The exterior is seen in The Sting. The second shot is from a very faded print. It shows Helena on the front porch of our first house (The House of Snakes) at around the time she shot her nudes. You can just see some gaps in the calking at the base of the siding. The next picture is from the late 70's and shows Helena in one of the many hotel rooms we've stayed at on our trips. It is funny but looking at all these pictures again I notice how nicely dressed she tried to be when we went out. (I always figure that, for me, if all the naughty bits are covered that's good enough). The next picture is from Easter time of 1975. We were still living at her parents house at the time and she and her mom had made a Lamb shaped cake for Easter dinner. Helena has almost finished decorating it. The next shot is from later in 1975 after we moved into our first house. This is another "clothed" picture from the nude shoots. The last picture is from the mid 80's and was taken at our friends house in Denver. Helena is involved in one of her favorite activities, playing with cats. She loved them and they loved her.