When I was seven years old, my babysitter was the coolest person I knew. She met all of my seven-year-old qualifications for cool: she was a teenager, she had crimped hair, she resembled Kelly from Saved by the Bell and, coolest of all, she tore around our neighborhood on a Honda Spree.

When I was sixteen, we lived in an old neighborhood in Longmont with a tiny alley in between each house, barely wide enough for a driveway. One day, my neighbor's yard erupted in the sound of a two-stroke engine as she fired up her 1980 Vespa P200E just outside my bedroom window. As I saw her streak away, I thought, that is so cool.

And much later, as a journalist for The Longmont Daily Times-Call, I did a story on scooter clubs in Denver and actually, joy of joys, got to ride on the back of a scooter. But when I got home, the only thing on my mind was just how I could work my way up to the front.

I got my first bike, a secondhand Bajaj, from a guy in Boulder who hadn't ridden it much and had let it sit in his garage as he did wonderfully Boulder things like leave the country to teach English and work at a summer camp in Northern Maine. So the poor neglected thing became my responsibility and my pride and joy.

The summer after I purchased this fine piece of Hindi engineering, it began to have some problems. And so did I. After a messy breakup, a layoff, a series of temp jobs, and sending my sister to Africa for the Peace Corps, I was in just about as bad of shape as the hunk of steel that kept stranding me in unsavory neighborhoods throughout the city. So I took it into the shop, one day after finding out that yet another temp job had failed to become that coveted "long term engagement" I was so dearly hoping for.

In making small talk with the parts manager, I found out that the shop needed office help. And days later, I was the newest (and only full-time female) employee of Sportique Scooters, Denver. And there are several good stories I've collected since then.

But here's my current favorite. The old Bajaj, whom I eventually dubbed "Bad Karma" for all the difficult times we shared, was totalled two months ago after we hit a bad patch of road construction near my home in Capitol Hill (Mayor Hickenlooper, have you gotten my sternly-worded letter yet about proper posting of warning signs?). And the replacement in the picture above? That bike is the very same I got to ride when researching my scooter club story those many years ago.

I finally got to sit in the front. And it's lovely up here.