Taking Flight (18 page)

There was a noticeable shift in Dad’s attitude once his airplane was painted. All the pieces had come together and he could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Some people dream of sports cars and beachfront condos when they retire; my dad wanted nothing more than a small farm where he could have his own runway. Seeing his plane painted brought him all the closer to his ideal life.

Dad had been working closely with a man named Jim who owned the very farm/airport that Dad dreamed of. Jim and Dad got along splendidly. You could often hear them laughing through our closed garage door. Jim worked on airplanes for a living and as far as I could tell he was Dad’s confidant in all things mechanical. There were a few bits of assembly that Dad wasn’t qualified to do and he spent many hours observing Jim at work on his plane. As soon as it was ready, the plane would be moved out to Jim’s hanger for the finishing touches.

Soon the only thing missing from the plane was the engine. Dad had spent a lot of money over the last six years of construction, but those expenses were carefully spread out over time to soften the financial blow. The engine couldn’t be bought in pieces, and as I later found out it came with a price tag of roughly $10,000.

During those six years my family never went on vacation. We barely ate out. Mom had to sneak me to the mall to buy new clothes. My parents drove used cars. Between my Dad’s frugal nature and their dedication to the plane, my parents had managed to afford everything he needed. Ordering the engine must have been difficult for Dad to justify. I have no clue where he got the money for it, as I was always under the impression that we had just enough and not a penny more.

Dad and Jim worked together to put the engine in the plane. They worked with the seriousness of actors in a bad suspense movie debating which wire to cut while the clocks tick behind them. With furrowed brows they checked their papers and measurements over and over again until they were certain the engine was secure and would, in fact, get the plane off the ground.

A wooden propeller completed the nose of the plane. With the engine and propeller in place there was no denying it: a plane had been born.

A trailer came to pick up the plane in the early spring of 2000. As I watched some men tie down the plane with straps and drive slowly away down the road I felt like I was watching a younger sibling go off to college. For most of my life I had lived with my parents and the plane. For most of my life I had listened to the sounds of a saw or a hammer, I had smelled chemicals and heard the cursing that brought the plane to life.  I always
knew my Dad would finish
the plane someday, but someday isn’t a date to be marked on any calendar. Like most adolescents I had no concept of time. But there we were with an empty basement. We were able to park our cars in the garage again. The plane was gone and our home felt emptier than I
had ever
thought possible. 

It’s (almost) funny to me how often people joke about plane crashes. Most of the time I can let their comments roll off of my shoulders because I’ve learned that my tragedy did not make the world stop turning. People aren’t being insensitive when they make these jokes in front of me, just like I’m not being intentionally cruel if I slip and call something “retarded”. I try to remember that we used to joke about plane crashes. We even joked about your plane crashing. We laughed about it once, so I really do try my best to see the black humor in the situation.

What I haven’t gotten used to are nervous fliers. I physically can’t force myself to reassure a nervous flier that everything will be okay. I’ve been on the receiving end of the one-time-in-a-million when it wasn’t okay. Sometimes people catch themselves fretting about their flight around me and apologize. Sometimes they ask me if they’re being crazy and because I am not always a nice person I will tell them that I am not the best person to ask. I sound like a bitch and I make everyone uncomfortable, but I can’t help myself.

There are more nervous fliers now than when you were alive. 9/11 did a real number to those who didn’t have a problem flying and grounded those who were already afraid.

I was seventeen when the planes hit the towers, a few weeks into my senior year of high school. Economics class had just started and suddenly the television on the wall playing the morning news was showing a smoking building. The announcements were repetitive at first: “An airplane has struck the World Trade Center.”

Some of the kids in my class turned and looked at me as the footage of the plane crashing into the building played on an endless loop. I heard a whisper. “How can she watch this?”

When the second plane hit I ran into the bathroom and vomited. Everyone, everywhere was in a haze that day. Without friends to commiserate with I walked the halls alone while countless television screens bombarded us with horrific images. For the first time in my life I was filled with irrational fear. I used the phone in one of the secretary offices to call Mom at work. She stayed on the line with me for half an hour until I was reassured that she was okay. I had no reason to fear for her safety but the energy of the day felt all too familiar. 9/11 was a day that our country collectively remembered, after decades of feeling safe, what it was like to be afraid.

Like millions of viewers I watched as New York witnessed the death of their loved ones. In a minute, whisper of a way, I knew what they were feeling. No one should ever have to see that kind of death unfold, or be replayed to snare higher ratings. Channel 9 had done a twenty-second blurb on your death, but in that brief window they managed to put their cameras inside of the mangled wreckage, the tattered fabric lifting in the soft summer breeze.

They delivered a copy of this tape to our house by courier a month or so after it aired.  You might think this is weird, but I watch this tape every so often. On the anniversaries of 9/11 we are and forever will be flooded with news clips and graphic images. I wonder if those left behind watch, desperately trying to look away but unable to avert their eyes?

When the papers came out in the days following 9/11 there were huge controversies over what was printed in newspapers. Just because we had, for the first time ever, the capabilities to record such events as they unfolded, did it mean we had the right to? I remember most the photo of a man free falling head first, already dead or moments away from death after he jumped from the burning building.

There were three other pilots who heard and saw your crash. They have a story to tell, a picture to paint of a man they didn’t know that they watched die. I have always wanted to talk to them. I want to hear them tell what it was like, how it sounded, how they felt. What they know has to be better than what I’ve imagined.

The skies were silent in the aftermath of 9/11. I listened from my bedroom window to the birds and the wind, waiting in vain to hear the buzz of a propeller. You raised me to watch for planes, you trained me to always wave them home.

My sky may be forever silenced, but I will always look up and I will always wave, just in case the plane overhead is you, trying to find your way home.

My high school choir went to Italy for a week in March of 2001. There was a shadow trip offered for parents so they could attend all the concerts and take a tour of Italy while staying in different hotels and giving us our freedom. Since Mom couldn’t bring you for what would have been the first trip overseas for the both of you, she brought Grandma.

Italy was a turning point for me. It took leaving home far behind me to fit in again. I didn’t have to force myself to have an appetite, the platters of penne pasta that were set in front of me were devoured in minutes. I threw a hundred coins into a hundred ancient fountains, not foolish enough to try and wish my grief away completely. Instead I thanked the stone edifices for easing the pain, showing me that reprieve was possible, if only temporarily. There was music again, and when I sang in darkened churches lit only by dripping candles I felt a connection to a God I had stopped talking to with the Latin words that passed from my lips and rose and reverberated inside the domed ceilings.

While walking down a street in Florence I passed a wooden cart with bundles of flowers. Dozens of red and white roses called to me, bringing me back to your funeral and the blossoms I had laid upon your casket. I paid an old woman with crumpled lire for one red and one white rose. I carried them with me for the rest of the night, and at our evening performance I held them in my hand, wishing you could see me sing in such a lovely city.

I separated myself from the crowd after we had finished and I walked to the hotel on my own. The hotel was set on the top of an incredibly steep hill and by the time I got to the top I could hardly breathe. The valley stretched out for miles below me, Rows of trees, villas and grapes decorated the hillsides. I leaned against the jagged stone wall, still warm from the daylight, and slowly I began to tear the petals from the stems. When my hands were full I threw them over the wall, and watched with delight as the breath of God carried them far and away, my burdened eased ever so slightly.

I’m not sure if traveling is my way of running away from reality or my way of reconnecting with myself. I hope it’s the later, because I have done much travelling and hope to do a great deal more. Instead of walking in my high school graduation Mom sent me on a month long trip with Stephanie, touring Italy, France, Spain and Switzerland. I’ve worked a second job for the better part of my twenties that has allowed me to stand inside a giant redwood tree in California. I’ve sat on Oahu’s North Shore and felt the force a seventy foot wave crash into the rocky surf. I’ve touched the Berlin Wall and walked through the crumbling remains of the Coliseum.  

Seeing the world is something you never got around
t
o doing.  

I think your plane was your biggest dream, but it certainly wasn’t your only one. Forty-eight is a young age to die and there was much you never got to do. I am terrified that if I wait until I have more money or a stable career that twenty years will have passed with me just talking about the things I’d like to do someday. Your death has awakened me to each moment I am breathing. In and out, I am here.

Though I did inherit your values when it comes to money, I did not inherit your paranoid need for caution. I want to experience life with my husband and friends now, not someday in the future when we may or may not make it to old age.

When I travel and I find myself sitting in a teeny cafe, the cadence of a language I don’t understand filling my ears, bumpy cobblestone beneath my feet, I end up thinking that maybe traveling is to me what flying was to you. Maybe we both need wings to take us where we feel like we belong.

I know that I’ve said it was better that Dad died doing something he loved, but to be honest I have struggled with this concept for years.

On one hand, Dad lived to see one of his biggest dreams come true. He built, from scratch, from nothing, an airplane that was signed off by the Federal Aviation Administration. How many people are smart enough, patient enough and dedicated enough to do that? How many even try? In addition to his airplane, he died with a good job, a nice house, and a happy, healthy family.

Maybe it was just his time. It was meant to be. He was young but his life had been so full. Of course my family wishes he could have been with us longer, but there is no denying that he went out on top.

But then again...he’s still dead! Doesn’t that trump the way in which he died? Flying used to be something I loved – not with the same obsession that my Dad felt, but I was raised a pilot’s daughter. I was his co-pilot. His enthusiasm was infectious. He not only left me without a father but robbed me of something that once brought our family such joy.

I think about hobbies and passions and wonder what the better legacy is to leave your children: I loved you enough to play it safe so I could be around as long as possible, or, I loved you enough that I showed you how to make your dream a reality. An avid chess player might have a heart attack and die while playing chess, but it wasn’t chess that killed him. In that scenario his children can talk about the hours their father spent playing chess, his love of the game, and perhaps they could even find satisfaction that the last thing he did in life was play chess. As I consider the risks involved with flying I can’t help but feel like Dad was selfish. I know no one believes the unthinkable will happen to them. I understand that we were the exception to the rule. But if Dad hadn’t been a pilot, if he had been a chess player, then he wouldn’t have died in some field, taken down by something he loved and believed in.

For all the work and energy he devoted to his plane, he only had one season to fly. Was it worth it? Would it have been worse if he had died and the plane had been unfinished? Would it have been harder for Mom and I to try to decide what to do with his plane, when to take it apart and let it go? Is it better he died doing something he loved in the thing that he loved, leaving us nothing but scraps to dispose of?

In the newspaper article about the crash, Mom is quoted saying, “If you think golfers are nuts you should talk to pilots!” I didn’t understand the joke then, but now that I’ve worked in an office where almost every one talks golf, I understand and couldn’t agree more. Pilots share a bond in their love of flight. Their decisions to defy what the rest of us take for an indisputable law bonds them together forever.