Doctors innately hate motorcycles. Or fear them. Motorcyclists hemorrhage and code in hospital trauma bays each weekend, losing limbs and brains and wrecking spinal cords. From the time I was born, my father — a physician — would tell me horror stories. We’d ride past the Spigot Café in Hartford with all the motorcycles parked outside, and my father would talk about barfights, broken bottles jammed into someone’s eye and late-night operations he had to do. (These days, I’m told The Spigot has more of a hip vibe.)

So when my son, Greg, bought himself a motorcycle, I lost my cool. Anyone who knows Greg knows he can talk himself out of any losing argument. To my irate rant, he just smiled, listened, and then said quietly: “Dad, just sit on it. Rev the throttle. Take it for a ride.” And, before long, I was throwing my leg over my own sexy Italian motorcycle, a 1200cc Ducati Multistrada.

My colleagues gave me a hard time, of course. A midlife crisis? A psychotic break? One eminent neurosurgeon just said, “A motorcycle? So you wanna feel the wind rushing through your brains?”

But no, I’m not going to grow a ponytail and leave my wife for a pair of vapid, sexy trophy twins who just had breast augmentation and aspire to star on a reality television show.

In fact, my wife soon caught the same addiction, got her own bike and we go a-ridin’ on the weekend, hitting cool biker destinations like the Vanilla Bean in Pomfret.

Much like the biker bars of old, bikers themselves have grown older and mellowed a bit. At the Vanilla Bean, not long ago, there must have been hundreds of bikers one Saturday afternoon. I was probably younger than most of them, and indeed noted that as many got off their big old hogs, shut off their cruise control and their fancy stereo systems, they creaked and cracked and held their stiff old backs and massaged their aching knees or their frozen shoulders. There was a line in the men’s room, partly from the diuretics these old dudes were taking, partly from prostate problems.

At the bar we put in our orders. Instead of a shot and a beer, orders were for double lattes with a double shot of espresso or a spiced chai and a pistaccio oatmeal cookie. At a table nearby, an older biker with gray hair and a bandana was bragging about his urologist who blasted open his big prostate with a laser, while another talked about his recent angioplasty and how his cardiologist was an OK guy but a bit dorky. I didn’t look at him directly just in case I was the cardiologist he was talking about.

I really do love riding my bike and feeling the fresh air, as the Italian engineered motor purrs, the wind rushes by and these great roads through Voluntown and North Stonington and Charlestown and Newport and Westerly jump by. Bikes are more dangerous than cars, of course. One of my patients summed up how he feels toward his motorcycle.

“It’s always best to treat her with respect and even a little fear. It’s when you think you’ve mastered her that you crash and run into all kinds of trouble,” he said.

I started to think of how I felt toward that beautiful Italian motorcycle of mine and realized in a sort of epiphany that what he said also could be applied to the other Italian beauty in my life — my wife.