Yanked back

I had lunch with a longtime friend yesterday - a guy named Skip who started his career at "our" newspaper in 1967, the same year I did. He's a fellow Cancerian, also divorced from a Scorpio, who will mark his 67th birthday within days of my 60th this July.
Skip died about a year ago. Really.
He had a bizarre heart episode in which his heart suddenly jumped from 72 beats/minute to 270 bpm. Minutes after his wife got him to the ER, his heart spazzed out, went into flutter mode and then flatlined.
The ER doc hit him with 100 volts across the chest to no effect. Then she recalled reading about the effectiveness of putting one paddle on the right side of the chest and the other on the left hip.
She cranked the machine up to 200 volts, yelled, "Clear!" and let him have it. His wife said he leapt about six inches straight up and, when he came down, his heart started beating again.
His next recollection was waking up much later with tubes down his throat.
But, as you might expect, he had an interesting experience during that period he was without a heartbeat - a point where a lesser doc would have called it and declared him dead.
His recollection is of a white featureless background out of which his long-dead father emerged.
Skip's dad died an old, enfeebled man, ravaged by diabetes that cost him a leg. But the father Skip saw was as he looked in his 40s - muscular and fit and in the prime of life. He stood there at a distance of what seemed like 20 yards, staring at Skip with his arms crossed over his chest. Neither spoke a word.
Then Skip's dad turned to his left and stepped into the white nothingness.
Presently, he reappeared with Skip's maternal grandparents, looking as they did late in life. The three of them stared across the void at Skip and he stared back, no one speaking. Then they turned and walked into the whiteness.
"Those were the three closest people to me when I was growing up," Skip said, adding he spent every summer on his grandparents' farm in southern Illinois.
The next impression he can retrieve was of a gray iron bar about 2 inches thick and 18 inches shooting through his chest and another piercing his left hip.
The point of our lunch meeting - I hadn't seen him since our paper was chloroformed by the parent corporation in the late 1990s - was to talk about motorcycles. Skip had bikes when he was in his 30s and is getting back into motorcycling. He wanted my thoughts on what bikes might be right for him.
He's signed up to take the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's novice rider course next month and I'll bet he's the oldest student they'll have this year.
But my friend Ted Simon rode a BMW R80 G/S around the world - yes, around the entire planet - in the two years following his 70th birthday.
I think Skip will be just fine on a bike and I hope to ride with him this summer when he decides on a machine.