My granddaughter is now just a few months old. Growing and strong, she is just a gem. This is my first experience as a grandfather; and it's honestly pretty great.

What's great for me, now, is that she will sit on my lap and listen to any old bench racing story I want to tell. I relish these days. When all three of my sons were born, when they were only minutes into this world, I whispered to each the tale of the battle royal that was the 1983 500cc world championship. I did it in the delivery room, each time, when they were unwashed and swaddled, screaming ... if you were the doctor who just handed me one of my sons you'd have heard ...

'And then someone put the small gas tank on Kenny's bike and guess what, it ran out of gas! No! Really! And then in Sweden, Freddie and Kenny came together and Kenny crashed. He was really mad!"

They, like she did, listen, pretty much because, let's face it, infants are the ultimate in a captive audience.

Anyway, we took my son's new family out to dinner last night at a local Mexican place. What my wife and I brought into this world, mixed with fate and serendipity, filled the long, wooden bench seats of the booth we sat in. Three generations of our family out for Mexican; I was astounded to compile in my head the fact that my son, my granddaughter's father, has been eating at this restaurant for his entire life. We brought him here when he was less than a month old, in his infant car seat. Wow!

My granddaughter went around the table and everyone had their turn holding her and playing with her, trying to make her smile her innocent and wonderful grin that she will display when she finds something amusing.

Finally she got to me and I was ready. I propped my phone up against my tall glass of Diet Coke and started showing her pictures of motorcycles I own, race-people I know, recent races.

Snips from the swipes:

My SRX-6: "Yes, this is the very first motorbike that you sat on in your whole life. I have the picture. I'll give it to you some day. No, no it still doesn't start; it could start, ... my friend Tom Houseworth re-built the engine for me and it's in perfect shape but it refuses to start. Why? Well, because in a race I tossed it to the moon and well, I think it's still pretty mad at me about that. It will start, but just not for me.

1975 CB400F:
A very pretty motorcycle; it just looks right doesn't it? This is what a motorcycle should look like, don't you think? See, the very best thing about the 400F is how it looks. Because it's glacially slow and the brakes are horrible; it's almost dangerous to ride in modern traffic. If you don't have one, you will miss it. I know because I've owned, sworn off, and then owned about seven of them.

1985 Yamaha RZ500:
Don't you, baby girl, ever be sucked into the cult where people think the RZ500 is some kind of God-tier performance motorcycle because it's not in any way shape or form. In fact, in a lot of ways, it is, as Kenny Roberts says, 'a motorcycle with more bad ideas between two axles than any other ever made'.

A picture of Miguel DuHamel popped up. Oh! This guy! He won Daytona with a broken leg. I'll tell you all about this some day.

I could see her eyes dazzling in the reflection of the phone's screen. Okay, what's next, let's swipe.

Bam! It was a photo of Nicky Hayden I shot a long time ago. He was wearing a Honda shirt and that irrepressible smile. Nick. Our Nick.

"This is Nicky Hayden. Nicky is ... dead," I told my granddaughter.

I don't know that I have ever said that sentence out loud in my life. I have avoided it and planned conversations in advance so as to avoid it.

I have a pair of Nicky's Oakley sunglasses. He took them off his head once and gave them to me. I wear them occasionally. Oakley's are not my normal look, as you might imagine, and if someone asks where I got them I tell them. And then I wait, hand pulled in on the clutch lever, ready, for when they say, "Nicky Hayden? Didn't he get kil..."

YES. I say, cutting them off. Yes, he was, I affirm, and I make it clear this is not a matter open for discussion.

I often told friends that for years, Nicky's tragic death never felt real to me. It has only been in the last few years, two maybe, that it did. I don't know why. Maybe because his memory was so alive when he was with us that it sustained me. I have a photo of him hanging on a wall in my office. Every day when I see it I say, "Hey Nick .." in greeting just as I did when he was alive.

Saying that Nick is gone, out loud, while holding my beautiful granddaughter and surrounded by a big part of my own family unleashed a hyperspace of thoughts and emotions in my being, all of it rushing at me at great speed.
Nick is gone.
Nick was taken.
Nick was, for many people, the best person that they knew. He was the glue and the strength that held his family and his friends together.
Because of Nick's tragic fate, the scene in front of me, eating Mexican food with two generations of his own family, will never be realized by Nicky Hayden. I am here, Nick is gone. How can this possibly be real?

I sobbed into my paper napkin for a minute, the enormity of everything pounding at me so hard it overwhelmed me.

After a minute I gathered it all back together, "Lets go back to looking at grandpa's collection of old motorcycles he loves to complain about," I told her.

As I tried to shift the focus back to happier memories, my mind couldn't help but drift to the first time we all felt the weight of his absence. Laguna Seca World Superbike 2017 was a tough race for everyone who knew or admired Nick, held just a month and a half after his funeral.

I stood at that event with King Kenny Roberts, both of us lounging somewhere in the paddock. "Look at the people," he said of the spectators who walked past us, solemn, forced, grave-faced. "Look at them."

Yeah, it is hard, I told him. Hard for everyone.

No, he said. This is more than hard. These people have been wounded. They have suffered a wound in Nicky dying, he said.

Yeah, you're right, I said. Maybe in time?

"No. No, dude," he replied. "A wound like this don't ever go away. It will heal, but it's always gonna be there. This is going to be a wound that they will feel for the rest of their lives."

As I held my granddaughter, I realized again that life is a constant balancing act between holding onto the past and embracing the future. The memories of friends lost and moments shared may bring both tears and smiles, but they are the threads that weave us together. And as I pass these tales on to her, I find some solace in knowing that a part of me, and of those I’ve loved, maybe will live on in her, connecting generations in a way that transcends time.

"My grandpa?! He KNEW Nicky Hayden! They were friends!"