LINCOLN – Kathy Dakin leaned over to sign the photograph and suddenly stood back up, looking stricken.

“What do you say?” she asked, tears forming in her eyes.

“‘I love you,'” her friend Tammy Tracy advised. Dakin frowned.

“He knew that,” she said.

Pausing for a moment, with tears flowing, Dakin seemed lost in thought, then bent over again to scribble on the photograph in her small, tight handwriting.

“Son, I’m so proud to be our mom,” she wrote. “Love you 2 infinity. Will be so glad to be with you again one day.”

Dakin, 53, of Swanville was among about 50 motorcyclists who participated in the second annual Chris Dube Memorial Motorcycle Run, which honored her son, a Houlton resident and ironworker who was killed in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in an accident on Nov. 23, 2006, said his father, Paul Williams of Woodstock.

Dube was 33.

The ride took the motorcyclists – mostly riding Harley-Davidsons with some Japanese bikes thrown in – from Bangor to Jackman to Greenville and back to Bangor, Williams said. The group stopped at Shooters pool hall and restaurant on West Broadway shortly before noon Saturday.

Though commemorating someone who died so young might seem somber, the ride was a fun, sometimes raucous chance for those who knew Chris to remember him, said his sister, 26-year-old Kristi Williams of Bangor.

Dube worked hard, played harder, and had a kind of ebullient charisma and antic humor that made him lots of friends, his sister said. One of her favorite stories about her brother, she said, had him visiting a restaurant with her sister’s boyfriend and bringing his guitar. Dube approached some lovelies at the bar and announced, “Ladies, I’d like to play a song for you.”

Except Dube had only just started taking guitar lessons and knew only five chords, which he played over and over again.

“And I bet he went away with some telephone numbers that night,” Williams said.

“That was Chris,” she said. “His presence is just as huge now as it was then. We miss him.”

nsambides@bangordailynews.net

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