Taking Flight (7 page)

The airplane resided in our basement from 1994 to 1998. All my friends had finished basements with foosball tables and televisions. They had pull out couches for sleepovers and extra refrigerators with soda and Capri Suns. I didn’t know anyone else besides us that didn’t have a family room for entertaining in their basement.

In 1998, when the plane finally outgrew our basement, I was sure we would remodel to have the same fun basement my friends had in their homes. I spent a lot of time daydreaming about the sleepovers I would have now that there would finally be a place where we wouldn’t wake my parents up at 3:00 a.m. with our talking and laughter. Whether they didn’t have money or didn’t see the need, once that plane moved out, the basement remained a bare room with a cement floor and walls of pink insulation. It was as if the plane went off to college and we weren’t making changes right away so it would always have a place to come home to.

The plane wasn’t ready to go to a hanger at an airport, so logically, we moved the plane into the garage. For two years, throughout two Minnesota winters, my parents and I parked outside while the plane was comfortably shielded from the elements. Mom would curse Dad and Dad would curse his plane on the mornings that they spent twenty minutes chiseling their windshields out from three inches of ice in -25* weather.

Winter aside, I think Dad really enjoyed having the plane in the garage. For the most part it stayed assembled year round, and once set up in the garage it truly looked like an airplane. Instead of taking apart windows and setting it up piece by piece, when the summer rolled around we just slid everything forward a few feet on to the driveway. “Now you get to meet the neighbors that live on this side of the street,” Dad would say, lovingly patting the nose of the plane.

Having an airplane in your driveway is a sensational conversation piece. When the weather was nice Dad would work with the garage door open and neighbors on their evening walks would slow down and stare, eventually inching their way up the driveway to ask what exactly he was building. Some conversations would last a couple minutes while others would take hours, with Dad giving a technical breakdown of everything he had built.

My father was not one to brag, but having an airplane on display is just asking for friendly Midwestern interactions. The people he spoke to were in obvious awe of what he had accomplished, and I imagine those conversations, the unbiased appreciation of outsiders, gave him the encouragement he needed to see his work through to the end.

I would meander into the garage from time to time, because I needed to ask Dad a question on my math homework or because I wanted to take the car, and it was easy to forget what I had going on back inside the house. I would climb onto his stool with the overstuffed leather cushion and watch him work. It was like getting sucked into one of those “Come Paint With Me” televised classes on PBS. When the wings were completely attached I would step on them to climb into the plane. It was a very comfortable place to read a book, or to just sit and think for a while.

If I happened to be outside when a new passerby stopped at our house to talk to Dad about the plane, he always made a point of introducing me. “This is Sarah. She’s my co-pilot. Been flying with me her whole life.”

I know he was proud of his plane. But I also like to think that some of the pride in his voice came from the way I chose to spend time with him, in his world, even as a teenage girl with better places to be than in a dusty garage with her Dad.

Before we would take the plane apart and bring it back to the basement or garage for presumably another year of work, Dad would always have   a showdown between him and the plane. He would sit down in the grass or on the steps and just stare good and hard at his plane. I know that he was afraid he would never finish. He was afraid he was wasting all of our time and family money on something that would, in all likelihood, never make it into the air. Instead of seeing all that he accomplished he only saw how far he had left to go.

I can only imagine how overwhelming it was to build an airplane from scratch. There are hundreds of kits you can buy that would have produced an airplane in a fraction of the time it was taking Dad.

But Dad thought the kits were cheating. He was doing it the right way.

Sometimes I would sit beside him in the grass while he stared at pieces that he had worked so long and hard for.

“Hmmm,” he would murmur to himself, the noise carried past his lips on an exhausted sigh.

A daughter’s belief in her father can make anything possible. “It looks like a real plane, Dad.”

“You think so?”

“Mm-hmm.”

He would look at me. Or maybe he was looking to me. “I guess so.” His arm would wrap around me. “Do you think I’ll finish this thing some day?”

I would lean back into him in reply. Then we would stare a while longer, pilot and co-pilot, while the possibilities of the day settled all around us. 

As Mom and I stared blankly at the weepy faces of your family, faces that held traces of your reflection that I wasn’t ready to see, I felt like I was in a room of strangers. No one knew what to say to Mom or I. No one wanted to talk about how you’d died or what we’d been going through before coming to Missouri. Worst of all, no one wanted to admit that your death hadn’t been real until we had arrived to Missouri without you. Seeing us would always bring a new shockwave of pain for your relatives. We would never come home again, David, Jan and Sarah.

Jan and Sarah. Could we ever be enough?

Mom was a widow. But what did that make me?

I realized that the people who had curled my hair, watched my dance recitals, read me stories, tucked me in, kept clay imprints of my handprints on their dresser were pulling back when I approached them. When I needed them the most.

Mike broke the tension by asking me to go on a ride with him. When I asked where we were going, he said, “Young lady, you need to blow some shit up.”

Fireworks were sold year round in Missouri and I had grown up playing with these miniature explosives like some children grow up playing with dolls. On my summer visits to Grandma’s we always stopped at a firework stand where we loaded up with sparklers, bottle rockets, poppers and colorful packages that promised to spit and shoot brilliant sparks of light. We would take them out to Aunt Diana and Uncle Marty’s house and spend an entire night sitting on blankets in front of their burn pile, eating junk food and catching up while we took turns lighting off fireworks.

I was happy to go with Mike, to get away from awkwardness of my family. Mike didn’t talk around what was going on in the car ride but he didn’t talk about it, either. It was the first time I felt like I could breathe since seeing our family. I hadn’t expected for things to be worse in Missouri – naively, I had thought they would be better.

I started to fear myself then, the unfamiliarity of my mind inside my own skin. When your parent dies you have to remember to grab on to what you knew. What once was. I hadn’t held on tightly enough, and with every unexpected feeling I was forgetting how things had been before. Before was as place in time that I wanted to return to. I would spend many years trying to fit myself into ‘before’.  

The fireworks tent was packed with families buying last minute toys for their Fourth of July celebrations. Even with all that was going on I still got a kick out the little kids running around in their overalls, most without shoes, reaching into cardboard boxes to pick out their favorites. Children as young as four were holding onto lighters and matches, excited to help their older brothers and sisters ignite the tiny fuse at the end of the flammable plaything that was the social norm in Wentzville. 

Mike grabbed two crates, set up at the front flap of the tent for the serious pyros, and handed me one. “Fill it up,” he said. I didn’t have any money but I was sure Mike knew that. I watched as he reached for the big explosives on the top shelves, some costing $20 a piece. He’d grabbed several handfuls when he noticed that my crate was still empty. “We aren’t leaving here, Sarah, until we’ve got enough to blow up everything that sucks right now. Fill it up.”

I was the envy of every child in that tent. They watched as we loaded up our crates with a sampling from every table, never once checking price tags. Those barefoot kids probably wished they could trade places with me. It’s funny, isn’t it, how we don’t see beyond the surface of peoples’ lives. How we never even try.

We stopped only when we couldn’t carry anymore. A toothless man and his very fat wife finished ringing us up and handed Mike a receipt. “That’ll be $192.48.”

I was certain that we would put some of the fireworks back. Without hesitating Mike pulled out his wallet handed the cashier a stack of twenties. “Keep the change, sir,” he said. Together we carried our crates back to his truck.

Angela was not pleased when she saw that receipt, and under normal circumstances she would have probably chewed his ass out for spending so much money on fireworks. But nothing was ordinary since your plane crash. I think she knew how much the gesture meant to me.

We had our bonfire that evening. I ran back and forth from fuse to fuse, blowing up as much of my fear and anger as I could. For the briefest of moments there was color in the darkness. All I had to do to get the colors back was light another fuse.  I threw bottle rockets carelessly into the flames, sending them shooting out in every direction in unpredictable angles. Our family sat silently around the fire, doing their best not to get burned in the wake of my destruction.

Several years later, Stephanie called me as I was on my way home from work with some big family news. “You won’t believe this. Mike has been having an affair!” Apparently, Angela’s neighbors had busted him bringing a woman back to their house. Angela did some snooping and found receipts proving one of Mike’s business trips was actually a romantic weekend with his girlfriend to Mexico. “He is such an asshole. No one ever liked him,” Stephanie said. I opened my mouth to argue, but I stopped myself.

“I mean, I know he was nice to you or whatever after David died. But he was a jerk to everyone else.”

I stopped at Target that afternoon and bought Angela a bag of chocolate candies and a card. But even as I filled out that card, even though what Mike did was wrong, even though I supported Angela completely, I have never forgotten how Mike, the asshole, was the first person to make me feel better.

In eighth grade homeroom I sat behind a boy named Cole. We had been friendly throughout elementary school, so I was surprised when I felt my face heat up when he asked me how my summer had been. His eyes, the way he turned his head when he smiled – how hadn’t I noticed these things before? I was startled by my crush but didn’t think much of it because there was, in my mind, no way Cole would see me as anything but a friend. I am the girl that guys are quick to be friends with while they chase after the pretty girls who can walk in heels without tripping.

Cole and I were talking one morning, joking around before the bell rang. When I went to open my mouth to speak a spit bubble of epic proportions formed between my lips. It was as big as if I had intentionally blown a bubble with gum, and when it popped a little fleck of spit landed on his hand.

Just as I was contemplating crawling under my desk to die from embarrassment, Cole burst out laughing. “That was awesome!”

Soon afterward, Cole started to pass me notes. He would try to color on my hands with his pens. He would catch my shoe under the desk and try to slip it off of my foot. There was always a reason to playfully bump into me. Every bit of contact was exciting, sending tingles down my neck. To my knowledge I had never been flirted with before, not until that spit bubble explosion.

The way my parents met is my kind of fairy tale. My Mom was walking down the hallway at work when she tripped. (Likely over her own two feet, knowing her.) She spilled coffee all over and sent a stack of papers flying. “I looked up after making a complete idiot of myself and there was the most handsome man I had ever seen, laughing at me. He helped me pick up the mess. Of course he was nice and handsome!” Mom would recall, shaking her head. “That was all it took, really. You know the rest.”

Their story has convinced me that a woman who can be herself under any circumstance
– spit bubbles and all –
is sexier than a woman pretending she is a polished, perfect human being.

There are many debates on the necessity of feeling “a spark” when meeting someone for the first time. Personally, I don’t think a spark has to happen instantly. You can find yourself warming up to love the way an ember can be nurtured into a flame. If we can just exist in our ordinary days and lives we become vulnerable and unassuming with no walls of insecurities or doubts to push away the potential of each moment. I believe that from those honest moments come the best love stories.

There are few things I am as certain of in my life as my parents’ love for one another. Then I came along, because they loved each other enough to share their hearts with a child. I have never doubted that they were meant for each other, and I have never questioned their love for me. It sounds so obvious, but so many children never experience a home with love and affection and kisses before bedtime. I was one of the lucky ones.

That being said… I don’t think my Mom had any clue what she was getting into when she married David Norton, aviation enthusiast. I think Dad waited until he had the ring on her finger before showing her the full extent of his obsession with airplanes.