Oh . . . Oh my . . .

This is not for the faint of heart.

Phoenix-Fly: The Need 4 Speed from Phoenix Fly on Vimeo.

Flying

Don't miss the open cockpit rear seat at about 2:35! Nice mix.

25 Random Things About My Father

I mentioned once before, just in passing, John Eldredge's claim, in Wild at Heart, that every man is wounded somehow by his father. I implied in that earlier post that such wasn't the case with me. Today, Father's Day, I want to state it outright.

I do not believe I suffered any psychic wounding at the hands of my father, ever.

Honestly, that's no small claim. I've watched other men and their dads. I've watched women and their father's too. I had acquaintances long ago that couldn't return home when they left the Air Force Academy they hated because their fathers told them not to come home if they quit. I had a so much more than friend, who will likely read this, who went there for a year, because her father told her if she would try it for that long, he would foot the bill for college elsewhere--she did; he did not. I've heard fathers say things to children in public that made my heart ache.

I had and have the best father I know. I know a couple more who are right up there with him (my new father-in-law among them), and I have friends who think or thought the same of their fathers. We are lucky people, those of us in this club, and today is a day we celebrate that luck.

Not all that long ago, I posted 25 Random Things About Me. Today, I'm going to take a shot at publishing another 25 about him. Wish me luck.

25 Random Things About My Father

1. He has taken up the drums. At least, he bought a drum set months ago, and for a while at least, he was playing them. This is especially interesting to me because a little less than four years ago, I took drum lessons for a short while. Neither I nor my father knew this about one another, which is a good segue to the next point:
   
2. My father's life has mirrored mine in so many ways that it's genuinely eerie, especially romantically. I could elaborate, but I'm going to leave it at that for now.
3. I suspect my father of being a closet adrenaline junkie. He owned a motorcycle from the time my parents split up until well into his second marriage. And he was, after all, a volunteer fire chief for over a decade.
4. When I left for the Air Force Academy, over three decades ago, the last thing I remember him saying to me as I walked out of Charlotte's Douglas Airport to climb the stairs to a waiting jet, other than, "I love you," is, "If you get there and you don't like it, son, you know you can always come home." It put staying there all on my shoulders. No expectation, no threats, no rebellion value in leaving (not that I ever felt any need to rebel). It made it possible to stay even during the months that I hated it most and seriously thought of leaving. Having options makes almost any task less onerous.
5. In all the years of my youth, he gave me only one spanking I hadn't genuinely earned. That one time, he was acting on misinformation from my Sunday school teacher. I didn't forget, but I didn't really hold it against him either. I just never liked that teacher much after that.
6. I've seen him pitch nearly perfect games of horseshoes. At Five Forks ball park in China Grove, NC, I watched him and Lee Smith, on their way to winning first place in a church league, throw ringer after ringer from one end to the other. It was awe inspiring.
7. He taught me gun safety at an early age, and how to shoot birds on the wing, to drain a rabbit's bladder before putting it in your hunting coat, how to build a rabbit trap, and how to enjoy the beauty of good bird dogs working a field.
8. He also taught me, by example, to think of all men as equals, at least equal in worth and rights, vehemently disdaining all the petty prejudices that so many fathers so sadly wean their children on. The stories in this regard are almost legend and fodder for longer posts at a later date. I'll simply say here that had Harper Lee known him, and if you knew him and her novel, you would think him her model for Atticus Finch.
9. He blames a long tour in Alaska, at Gambell Air Base, on St Lawrence Island, for the early loss of his hair. His seven brothers each kept theirs most of their lives.
10. His children have always come first in his life. Whatever other ambitions he may have had, I truly believe that being a good father was the ruling goal of his existence. God knows, he put up with more, and sacrificed more, for our sake than any other man I know would have.
11. Right behind Atticus Finch, the character from fiction that he is most like would be Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry. He was, for all practical purposes, the unspoken mayor of the small town in which I grew up. Smaller than Mayberry.
12. He can teach anyone to waterski and he was always good at it himself. For the most part, when anyone learned to waterski with us, they learned to slalom, right out of the gate.
13. He plays a wicked game of hopscotch. He always played with us on the shore during our annual vacations at Windy Hill Beach, SC, and I have since played more than a few times with my own daughters.
14. He loves tractors. He may think we haven't caught on to that, but he does. I'm not entirely certain there isn't a frustrated farmer trapped in him somewhere.
    
15. His two greatest shots in golf may have been his hole-in-one and his blind eagle. The hole-in-one was so dead on that it bent the base of the pin going into the hole. In basketball lingo, he "stripped the net." His blind eagle I was there for--a par-four on which he'd hooked the ball into the adjacent fairway, hiding the green from him behind a set of pines dividing the two holes. He hit the ball over the pines on his second shot and into the hole. I found it there. He was still looking everywhere else.
    
16. His dedication to golf during my youth was such that my youngest sister once recited the days of the week as, "Sunday, Monday, Golfday, Wednesday, Thursday . . . " He worked all day on Saturdays until he retired, but only half a day on Tuesdays. He is as good a golf coach as he is a ski coach. I should have tried out for the golf team at the Academy instead of wasting my time with track.
17. He would still like to learn to fly. He says he's let that ambition go, but I think I know better.
18. He can fix or build just about anything.
19. So far as I know, he has never cultivated any of the vices that other men, including myself are prey to. He doesn't swear, drink, or smoke, and yet he doesn't begrudge other men those "pleasures." I think he is simply cautious of the genes he carries, having had a father, grandfather, and more than one brother for whom these things were problems.
20. He is fiercely and poignantly patriotic. I remember him once calling me to the window over our kitchen sink, pointing to the flag flying at the fire station he helped found about a quarter mile away, and saying, "Isn't that beautiful?"
21. In our family business, he was all about Total Quality Management and focusing on the customer long before TQM became a watchword for the rest of the world. I remember trying to figure out what the fuss was about when the Air Force tried to institute TQM because I had always thought those principals were common knowledge. I've learned better since.
22. He is a true gentleman--gentle and yet fiercely strong. He is always polite. He opens my stepmother's car door, holds her chair, helps her with her coat.
    
23. He's more or less ambidextrous. He plays sports left-handed, yet he writes right-handed. It makes him very handy to have around when your ball is up against a tree and you really need a left-handed club to swing.
24. What he lacks in distance these days, he more than makes up in accuracy. I've been able to outdrive him since college, but I've never outscored him on the links.
25. I love him. I admire him. And I still want to be like him when I grow up.

Happy Father's Day, Dad.

The Blue Angels: Bring Your Airsickness Bag

One of my best friends in Colorado is a former USAF Thunderbird, Thunderbird-7 to be precise (you'll hear his voice here, as the airborne safety, saying "Knock it off! Thunderbirds knock it off!" and ending the demonstration following the crash of one of our birds at Mt Home a few years back), and fellow skydiver, so I have nothing but the utmost respect for any of the men who maneuver this much metal at this much speed within this sort of proximity. The challenge of working all those vectors in three dimensions is one of the things I like about Canopy Relative Work, but my hobby is far more forgiving.

The video below was sent me by another friend though, and it's not the Thunderbirds, but the Blue Angels, and the footage is not from the ground, but from the cockpit. It's a long video, but once you start watching it, it's rather hard to stop. Good luck.

25 Random Things

I was tagged for this exercise by Barry and by Becky, and blog-bud Buck's are up as well. So here goes. Here are the instructions (this will have a life both on the blog and on FaceBook, where both tags and the exercise originated):

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to “NOTES” under tabs on your "PROFILE" page (you may have to add the tab by clicking on the + sign), click on "Compose New Message" and paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

25 Random Things About Me. Here goes:

1. Like most military aviators, I have a call sign. It's "Doc." Most of my skydiving friends don't even know my first name. Most of my non-skydiving friends have never heard of Doc. It's still funny to me to watch either group say, "Who?" when someone refers to me by the name they're unfamiliar with.
2. When I sneeze, I'm pretty sure the neighbors' (upstairs and through the side wall) china rattles. I know that you can hear me from at least one car back--my family makes a point of reminding me.
3. I shave with a mug and a brush. Back in the late 70's, hot lather dispensers were the newest gadgets. I've had hot lather virtually every shave since the first time I ever pretended with a plastic razor and Dad handed me down his brush. Some things technology can't improve.
   
4. But whipped cream out of a can is just fine. That I've been known to mainline.
5. The last time I wore my uniform was the day I gave my last final, last semester at the Citadel. If it stays the last time except for some future official ceremony, I will not be sorry. Thirty-one years is long enough.
6. I make kick-a** guacamole. It's the one real debt I owe my former mother-in-law. "People mess it up by complicating it." I complicated it tonight with cilantro, jalapeno, and powdered red savina peppers--but those are merely tonight's enhancements to the basic recipe Peggy taught me and that I've treasured for 25 years.
7. I haven't read anyone else's 25 things because I wanted mine to be pure. I'm looking forward to that later tonight.
8. I've performed onstage as "Curly" for two production runs of Oklahoma: Goldsboro, NC, in 1985, and Merced, CA, in 1987.
9. The funniest opening to an essay I think I've ever read was, "The subject of my S. A. is . . ." I don't remember anything from it after that. I was sitting in the auditorium watching others audition for Oklahoma when I graded it, and watching my future wife lose her role as Laurie by merely reading Ado Annie's part. She was freakin' awesome. The producer looked back at me from one row ahead, and I just said, "I know, I know. Now I'll have to kiss some other girl onstage." :-D
   
10. And in 1985, after moving to Merced and taking a role as a member of the chorus in a three-weekend run of Camelot (because I'd had the musical memorized since age seven and by the time I arrived in town, auditions were over and the principal roles filled), I filled in the second weekend as Lancelot because the principal had laryngitis. I had six hours to rehearse. I never missed a line.
11. I am not gay. Mom liked musicals.
12. I serenaded Tammy Bost with "If Ever I Would Leave You" at the ripe old age of seven, while her older brother and sister held her captive. I was a sucker for a pretty face from a very young age. Someone should have warned me.
13. I was 27 years old before I learned that my grandmother took her own life and older still before I really understood why Mom liked Camelot in particular.
14. My father is the closest thing to King Arthur I will ever know, and a better man than I expect to ever be.
15. The best grade I ever earned on an academic assignment was for my final paper in a technical writing class at the Academy. It was on hunting with a bird dog. The instructor put an A in the middle of the last page and plusses out to the margin. I think he liked it.
16. I believe in destiny,
    
17. because I've rolled a Spitfire with the top down,
18. thirteen days after cartwheeling an aircraft through the treetops.
19. And I've been struck by a water mocassin (leaving only two perfect holes, a slight scar and bragging rights, but no venom),
20. while I was trudging through a swamp to find the main canopy I'd cut away below a thousand feet less than an hour earlier. But I'm still here.
    
21. I had the highest IQ among those tested in my high school class. I was tested for admission to the Cullowhee Experience in 1974 because Ms. Strawser said, "I knew you had to be a genius because you have no common sense at all." At the time, that was accurate.
22. I met most of my best male friends in high school because we were pursuing the same girls.
23. I'm afraid of heights. But only when I'm below about 500 feet and not wearing a parachute.
24. I don't often drink alone, but tonight, I had a Vesper and a bowl of guac and chips to keep me company during this post. A textbook Vesper, right down to the champagne goblet. Vesper and guac alike are gone, and I'm done, save one final not-so-random thing:
    
25. I've felt like just about the luckiest guy in the world for almost a year now. She knows why I think that. I wish the same for all my friends.
    

And I'm not tagging anyone with this. My inbox is the equivalent of the dead letter office for chain mails and memes, but if you feel like sharing, you know I'd love to hear it.

Peace y'all.

London at Night

Back in the day, when I was still actually flying for a living, (okay, may as well admit before Buzzard reminds me, it was more, sort of, back in the last century) I used to love flying at night. There is a beauty to the populated and artificially lighted world, seen from above, that people who live and work on the ground every day rarely get to behold. Really, night or day, one can do worse than earning a living five or six miles above the earth. That part of the Air Force, I miss.

And just so you know what caused this moment of nostalgia, you'll find some stunningly beautiful photographs of London at night, here.

Enjoy.

Fake Video

The temptation to simply cause this post, from yesterday, to disappear is strong, but instead, I'll chalk it up to a lesson learned. Generally, I double check everything I get via the web to insure its authenticity. But I didn't do so with the one-winged landing video. That won't happen again.

"So He Has Some Skills"

Over at Enrevanche, Barry says of the pilot of that US Air flight, "I'd happily ride in anything that guy flew."

True enough, but I think in terms of skill, this one tops even that ditching.