Catharsis

I posted this months ago, but a critical piece of it was misunderstood, and so I took it down.  The misreading behind that should no longer be possible, so, here it is, to stay I hope.

catharsis [(kuh- thahr -suhs)]

An experience of emotional release and purification, often inspired by or through art. In psychoanalysis, catharsis is the release of tension and anxiety that results from bringing repressed feelings and memories into consciousness.

--The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition

Reading The World According to Garp, back in 1981, I reached the point where one of the children loses an eye in an accident. I put the book aside, and it was weeks before I picked it up again.  I thought for years, decades actually, that it was simply that I couldn't stand for bad things to happen to children, even in fiction.  Time has refined the things I understand about myself.  I've realized that what I'm really bothered by is the sacrifice of innocence or beauty to something that is neither innocent nor beautiful.

For about the last 24 hours, I've felt physically ill.  I can't say for certain whether it's something I ate that affected me so, or, more likely, something I read.

My longtime mentor in the world of books gave me one over the holidays.  A book, as he said today, not casually chosen.  Nor am I sorry to have read it.  The book was Laughing Boy, the 1930 Pulitzer Prize winner by Oliver La Farge.*  The climax of the book and the accompanying cathartic moment came barely 30 pages from the end.  The climax: sudden revelation of the truth by an accident of fate, action taken on that truth.  The cathartic moment: the necessity of a choice.  Cathartic because I recognize that having faced the same choice, I lacked the self-awareness of La Farge's protagonist.  I lacked the strength of character.

   Now I must choose between her and myself.  If I stay with her, I lose myself, really.  I am a man.  I am a warrior.  If I do not give her up, I become something else from what I have always been. . . .
   I must go away.  I cannot stay with her.  She is worth everything in the world, but there is something in me that I have no right to trade for her.  That is what I must do.

What we appreciate about great literature is its ability to put into words what we know but can't express, what we experienced but couldn't recognize for our immersion in the experience itself.  I'm grateful to La Farge and to my friend for both.

*Whatever you do, don't read the grossly inaccurate plot summary of the novel on Wikipedia.  Grossly inaccurate.

When did that happen?

I played golf last week.  First round I've played in Richmond, after living here almost two years.  Rotary Club tournament.  Captain's choice format.  We finished four under par.  Had a great time.

Why blog about it?  I'm not.  I'm blogging about a revelation that occurred on the course.  I had a decision to make about something.  I can't even remember what that something was.  I just remember suddenly being aware of the decision process.  Again, the decision is unimportant.  The process is everything.  The revelation came in suddenly recognizing the process.  In recognizing that it governs an awful lot of the decisions I make.  Too many perhaps.

The beauty is that from this point forward, having recognized the process, I can harness it.  The most interesting thing is that I didn't recognize it earlier.

The revelation came like this.  Facing a decision, two options seemed eligible.  I leaned toward one.  I wondered why.  In realizing why, I foregrounded an aspect of such choices that has long been there, but fairly automatic.  Awareness makes it conscious.  The aspect?  Which of the two choices would most people not make?

Not that I seek to shock. I don't really.  I simply seek to be anything but normal, average, run-of-the-mill, boring.  The difference on the course the other day?  Awareness.  I've been anything but boring for a long time.  It just happened.  I've been aware of it for a long time.  What I've not been aware of is how strong a role that need plays in most of my decision making.

All my life, I was the youngest this, the first that, the something some other thing.  On the backside of fifty now, whole new vistas of firsts open up in the opposite direction.  I expect I'll be the oldest this, the last that, and still something some other thing.  My point is that all of that just happened.  I didn't set out to be exceptional in those ways.  I just set out to do this or that thing that I wanted to do.  Then when barriers came in the form of, "Well you need to be this age to do this," or "You need this rank to fill this position," or "You need this experience for this post," I always managed to find the waiver authority for whatever rule was being invoked and to get the rule bent in my favor and then do a better job at whatever it was than anyone who fit the profile I was the exception to.

But choosing a path that makes you an exception and choosing a path because it will make you an exception are two different things.  It was the occasional entry of the latter into my decision making that I recognized on the golf course this week.  And recognizing it, I then wondered when it had become so strong a force.  When did the drive to be the exception become a motivating force in its own right?

For instance, I've been jumping out of planes for so long now, and love it so much, that I can no longer remember the exact motivation for taking that path.  But I'm sure now that part of that decision was that skydiving was something most people wouldn't do.  A HALO badge is something few soldiers and fewer airmen wear.  A liaison tour with the Marines or the Army is something most people are drafted into, reluctantly--I volunteered twice.  In 2007, I actively sought an assignment to Kabul as the Air Attache to Afghanistan, and would have won the assignment except that the embassy wouldn't re-open in time for me to complete the tour before my mandatory retirement.  (Don't think I didn't look for a way to bend that rule too.) 

In the end, I recognize that this decision process may not be the surest route to longevity.  But I can tell you this: my life is not, nor will it be, boring, or normal, or average.  For the most part, I detest those latter two words (unless they're being spoken by my doctor or, more specifically, my gastroenterologist, and occasionally, even then).

When I lived in Colorado, I used to gather with my classmates once a month for wine tasting.  Ostensibly.  Really, it was a monthly ritual in which we engaged simply to remind ourselves that, while aging was inevitable, maturity was largely optional.  Monday's revelation may mean that even the latter can't be escaped forever.

I'm not saying my decisions will necessarily change.  I may have a new awareness of the decision process that I lacked before, but faced with pancakes or crab cakes, I'd still choose crab cakes.

Blue Skies.  Doc

Excuses

I know it's been as if I dropped from the face of the earth.

I'm sorry.

Life has been . . . a little hectic.

On the upside, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, just gets better every day.

Of Gamblers, Foxes, and the Wind in the Wheat

The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.

"Please, tame me!" he said.

What would it look like? That alternate universe where instead of fearing the happiness we were offered by Fate along the way, we reached out and took it, believed we deserved it, clung to it as if to the razor edge of life itself. What if, at any of those moments when the sheer beauty of love blinded us, caught us all unprepared and unawares, what if instead of running, what if we simply stood tall and let our arms fall to our sides with our palms forward and let it take us, fearless? What if we took a chance? What if we saw? What if we set it free? What if we let it shine? What if we embraced our taming?

Either/Or

I am not dead.

There is living life, and there is writing about it. Properly paced, there is time to do these things simultaneously, especially given that the latter is so often necessary in order to understand the former.

When there is time to write again, you'll understand. The last month would fill a book. A book. Sticking with the same title though: It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, Vol II.

Eventually. It'll be worth it.

Elation, disappointment, joy, grief, hilarity, heartbreak, loss, finding, finding again.

And, eventually, finding its way here.

Reruns: If It Works for the Networks

Then maybe I can make it work here.

If you remember Monday's post, and if you're keeping track, then you know I'm only on line 5 of a 13 line itinerary. And travel plans keep shifting. No rental cars available at Charleston Thursday (I failed to account for spring break), so I drove, yet again, from Atlanta in order to teach my classes Friday (in just a few hours actually)--after which, I'll drive back to Atlanta, so that I can fly to Colorado on Saturday. I'll need a break to recover from spring break.

A number of new readers have joined lately, so I thought I'd suggest a few older posts worth returning to, especially if you're still working on figuring out just what this "Doc" guy is really all about. One of these days, I'll put together a "Greatest Hits" list (read: my favorites, whether they were hits or not). Meanwhile, here are a few I'm not ashamed of.

• See Off This Mountain: Long enough that it's in three parts, but rumored to be worth it.
• In Memory of Randall Combs: Because I miss him every day.
• "The Friend of Your Youth" Revisited: A serious contemplation of whether Robert Penn Warren got it right or not, coming down, finally, on the side of "not quite."
• Perspective: Time and Space: A meditation on the uselessness of anticipated regret and an urging not to let it rob us of a present joy.
  
• Getting to Know Me: An earlier list, much like this one, in case you have a lot of time on your hands
  

If you're new to They Rode On and you're here because you like to read the more contemplative things I write, then any of those above you haven't seen yet should be worth your time. Enjoy.

How many more do I need for the book deal? ;-)

Snapshot: Two Falls

Eighty degrees in March is not a thing I'm accustomed to, nor the rattling of these leaves across pavement, a rattling that is like a second fall. Charleston's trees, like huskies it seems, shed twice a year or in shifts. And so, my mind and memory are lost this morning. The patio door stands open and the sounds themselves are conflated, conflicted, and confused. The birdsong wakens the sleeping neuron repositories of all the southern springs I've lived and all those I've missed in other lands and climes, but those leaves . . . those leaves, whatever they really are, my mind knows as the sound of water oaks' sheddings driven like horizontal cataracts down Stephens St as I sit in my Spitfire in my driveway in Goldsboro with the top down and sip dry sack sherry in the manner of that Falstaff whose discretion was no form of valor at all and listen to JT's Dad Loves His Work and have no inkling yet of the choices good and bad that will take my life from that more timely autumn to this second fall that is like, in so many ways, a second spring too, not outside that patio screen so much as within. And within, all time present in every moment, old ties renewed touch better selves only dormant. A squadron of phoenixes. And always, gratitude for and comfort in the harbor that exists, away from this harbor town, but within always. Days, and there again and whole.

Revisiting the Mountain

I've been dreadfully busy lately, and haven't posted much original in the past few days. Nor today. Instead, since readership has more or less doubled of late, I thought I'd take this opportunity to revisit a post, especially since, last night in the wee hours, I sat here in Charleston, SC, and read this particular piece to my youngest daughter from start to finish. It was late, even in Colorado, but she couldn't sleep. You see yesterday she got to see something that NASCAR drivers are accustomed to, but 16-yr-olds in their first year of driving are not: another vehicle crossing both lanes right in front of you before hitting the curb, going airborne, and landing upside down in a sidewalk planter. She couldn't sleep. She wanted a story. She knew the tale of Daddy's plane crash and some of the family history, but I'd never shared this account with her, since she wasn't yet ten when I wrote it.

So last night, I read it to her over the phone, hoping I was able to get away with playing a few long pauses off as being for dramatic effect, then sent her the doc file and the mp3. If you're new to the blog and you've not read "See Off This Mountain," give it a go. I'd like to believe it's more the sort of thing people visit for than breakdancing videos. It's certainly more the reason I have a blog.

Of Jalapeños and Ballons

Two interesting tidbits from today's news:

On the Salmonella front, now they're focusing on jalapeños. Just great. My idea of a great appetizer is one of these peppers cut in half lengthwise, seeds removed, then filled with peanut butter. I eat them in my scrambled eggs most mornings, my salads most evenings, my popcorn whenever I have it (though the eye-stinging aroma of peppers in hot oil did cause my in-laws to abandon their home once like radicals fleeing a tear-gas cannister).

And in the competition for this year's Darwin award, lawn chair balloon guy is at it again. At least he's wearing a parachute. ;-) Go here for my comments on last year's attempt.

On the Opinion of our Peers

Two observations and a story.

Observation 1:

First, it occurs to me that a healthy disregard for the opinions of our peers is something that some people never develop. Oh, they matter. But only sometimes and in regard to some things. I think I'm known for speaking the truth. That matters to me. It doesn't matter to me that I'm known for doing so somewhat indelicately--what one unfortunate supervisor whom I revere to this day as the finest officer under whom I ever had the honor to serve referred to as "poking sticks at snakes." "But they're snakes," never seemed to answer the mail on that. I've gotten better though, more choosy about my battles. Still . . . >-)

So, in some respects, I do care what people think. Should they ever think me dishonest, cruel, ill-spoken, etc, then I suppose I would admit the need to seriously examine my behavior. But, if the labels they're tossing my way tend more toward "nuts," "flippin' crazy," "completely out of his gourd," well, those are just reminders that I'm probably still a hell of a lot happier and better adjusted than they are. >-) (There are psychiatric labels for this sort of conceit, I'm sure, but I am more resistant to cure in this respect than MRSA.)

In my case, it took a long time for me to reach this place. In some respects, I often think my current disregard for the head-shaking of my peers (my best friends just cheer--it's one reason they are my best friends) is a sort of balancing of the scales. I cared, like most teenagers and young adults, way too much, for way too long about the illusive twins of approval and acceptance. Way too long.

Observation 2:

Which brings me to my second observation. It also occurs to me that, at least early in our lives, we tend to possess that healthy scorn for the approval of our peers in uncannily inverse proportion to our need for it. The person who is part of the "in" clique has more peer approval than he or she knows what to do with, so whether they care or not doesn't really matter.

The person who marches to the beat of Thoreau's different drummer though, that poor person has a real need for a numbness to criticism or even attention. You may be thinking, I'm sure, that such a person's eccentricities are themselves a sign of possessing that precious disregard, and rarely, you would be right. More often though, the gene of utter uniqueness isn't paired with either the gene of self-confidence or heedlessness. Doubly cursed, such a one is equally incapable of running with the crowd and of not caring where the crowd is going or that it notices her solo journey.

A Story:

Way back in . . . well, a while ago--the year I graduated from college actually--I gave Britney (unborn at the time) a run for her money in the field of short marriages. (Hang with me. It relates.) Right after graduation, I'd looked up a girl I'd been thinking of for no less than two years, but had never dated because when we'd met, she'd been the girlfriend of a fellow student and friend. He'd moved on and I moved in. We dated through my summer leave, kept the flames burning through the fall, and then I flew her to Sacramento for her fall break in October. After 10 blissful days, she wanted nothing so much as a proposal. I held out for a couple of weeks (well, maybe a week at least) after her return to Western Carolina before admitting to myself that there was really nothing about bachelorhood nearly so appealing as beginning and ending each day in the glow of her raven-haired, blue-eyed, Cherokee-cheek-boned smile. Had her continuation at school been certain, I'd not have considered it, but she was thinking that finances were going to force her to take at least a semester off. So I asked if she had plans the day after Christmas, offered a suggestion in case she didn't, and she said, "Yes, yes, oh yes." Yeah. Exactly like that. Like it was yesterday.

And so all was excitement. For a few weeks, maybe a month. Then, the opinions of peers began to kick in. Back on campus, in the dorm, on the court (she was "most athletic" in her high school class) she began to hear, "Why do you want to get married? You can have any guy you want. What are you thinking?" Had they known me, they'd have known what she was thinking. That 6'1" tanned blond guy in the flight suit driving the British convertible when he wasn't flying wasn't exactly hard up for options either. But, by the time Christmas rolled around, "Yes, yes, oh yes," had become, "How would you feel about waiting until June?" This, two whole days before a wedding to rival Princess Diana's. Hmmm. BOLDFACE: BAIL OUT! BAIL OUT! BAIL OUT!

But, I was, back then, among the most susceptible of humans to that despicable craving for approval and acceptance that this post is all about. I knew what I needed to do. It was, as they like to say in physics texts, intuitively obvious to even the casual observer. But the thought of attempting an explanation to all our friends and family who expected a blissful event in two days time was petrifying. And so, knowing it wasn't the right thing to do, I stood there as she came down the aisle, and I betrayed us both.

A week in NC visiting relatives. A flight back to California one week after the wedding. Last, "I love you," I ever heard from her in the airport in Louisville, KY, changing flights. Two weeks in Sacramento, growing distance, faraway looks, "What are you pondering there?" "Just thinking about what I'd be doing if I weren't married." "I'm afraid it was just that the, you know, was so good." October, inseparable. January, low-level, moved to the couch, unable to sleep with someone not wanting to be touched, and needing to sleep before days zipping along at 250 kts and 500 ft. Three weeks to the day after the wedding, a trip to the airport, and in the worst winter storm Sacramento had seen in decades, I sent her back home to NC.

It's still open for debate whether the dumbest thing I've ever done was on the day after Christmas or on that day three weeks later. But looking back, one thing about the whole affair that is clearer to me now than ever is the role played by an inability to ignore, disregard, brush off, rise above, and otherwise overcome the opinions of our peers, hers and mine. Her lack of immunity to those opinions had basically killed a thing of such intense passion that I long ago gave up the hope of seeing its like again. My own hypersensitivity to those opinions had allowed me to ignore her one brief plea for help, "How would you feel about waiting until June?"

The opinion of our peers. What do they know of our hearts? Of our choices? Of our fate? The objective value of those opinions is constant over time. What changes is our understanding of it. Our susceptibility to it. Our immunity to its influence. Until we can achieve that, we are ever likely to purchase acceptance and approval with self-betrayal. None of this, mind you, is meant to be chiding. These are observations only; not lessons. For those born susceptible to it--and God knows most of us are; I know I was--no amount of reading or schooling can impart the needed disdain. Only time and life do that, and even then, not always, not for everyone.

As I said, I'm busy balancing my own scales in that regard. That I'm also feeling a little déjà vu these days is sad, but I would be the last to condemn anyone I otherwise admire so much for a susceptibility I once sported myself in spades. At any given time in this journey, we each have just so much disdain to distribute. If we march to a different drummer in one corner of our lives, sometimes we need to keep step with our peers in another. We all choose battles. And for those of us able to take all comers if we so chose, sometimes there is more honor in ceding the field.

The Regret I Can LIve With and the Regret I Can't

There are two forms of regret hovering in my future these days. Of course, if I didn't think these translate to others' lives as well, I wouldn't think about them out loud here. Basically, we can call them the regret I can live with, and the one I don't think I can.

The one I can live with involves the long shot. Because it is the long shot, the likelihood of feeling that regret is pretty high. But the regret one feels for taking a chance and things not working out, however unlikely success may have been, is qualitatively different from the regret one is always in danger of feeling through playing it safe.

Maybe the difference boils down to whether our personality leans more to the pragmatist or more to the romantic. If to the pragmatist, then maybe you go with the odds and never look back, never wonder what if. But, if you're a romantic, and God knows it seems to be a trait that no amount of real life has been able to strip me of, then the almost certitude of failure does little to nothing in terms of negating the regret of not trying, of not giving even the thinnest chance an opportunity to defy the odds.

I can live with taking a chance and not succeeding. Even more so when success was never a thing anyone but I thought possible. But I can't, I don't think, live with always wondering what might have been if I had been willing to risk it all.

My life has never been normal, has defied one set of odds after another. I've at least one friend who never fails to point out my six- or seven-time membership in "the extra days club."* Given the choice though, I would rather die in joyfully attempting the "impossible," than live to a ripe old age in the safety of cloying normalcy. So, for those few friends who know the real topic here and think I need my head examined I can only say--"Yeah. So what else is new?"

*As he explains it, after some events--the ones of which we can honestly say, "I should've died that day,"--every day we live on is an extra day. Let me see: plane crash, car crash, coma, two unplanned canopy rides of less than 7 seconds, snake bite, rock helmet split open on a mountainside--I should stop counting, just in case nine lives is some sort of magical limit.

Convergence: John Holiday

For those of you new to the blog, who may need an explanation of what I call "convergence," go here.

Only my closest friends (and a few new acquaintances on the way to becoming real friends) know that from late August until Thanksgiving I spent a little time looking for someone I'd completely lost track of. Those same friends also know that, like several other instances of deflating memories, I'd have been better off to leave that one undisturbed--and how.

But those are other stories. This story is about John Holiday. "Doc." Go figure.

I dine during happy hour at least once a week, sometimes several evenings a week, at Plate World Cuisine, about a mile from the house. Bar none, the best food on the north end of Colorado Springs. On an evening about six weeks ago, I stopped in there after a short errand I'd run on the way home from work. That errand was the first effort I'd made in weeks to discover what had become of that old acquaintance. The "search" was a good two and a half months old at that time, and I was, frankly, running out of ideas on how to find this person. So, I stop in at Plate, and Michael, the General Manager, escorts me to a seat at the bar and introduces me to a nice lady named Judy. Judy and I, both pretty naturally gregarious, are getting to know one another when in walks another guy Judy knows. She waves him over and he introduces himself to me as John Holiday, "But friends call me 'Doc.'"

"No kidding. Well, you're not going to believe this, but a lot of my friends call me 'Doc' too." And thinking that the coincidence might stretch credulity just a little, I fished out one of my skydiving cards, complete with callsign, and passed it to him. He returned the favor.

Now keep in mind that I had just come from the first real effort at tracking someone down that I'd made in a couple of weeks, and that I was running out of ideas, that I was, in fact, about ready to concede defeat. Enter convergence. On John's business card, just below his name, was printed, "California Licensed Private Investigator." I wish now that someone had taken a photo of my face. I can't even imagine what my expression may have been. I swear to you, the things that happen in my life, if you put them in a book, an editor would say, "No one is going to believe this." I'm going to put them in the book anyway.

One thing led to another. John gave me a few brief pointers. Persistence and time eventually led to success. I almost wish it hadn't, but again, that's another story.

This story is John's. During our conversation that first night, he mentioned that there had been a story about him in The Gazette a few years back. It was when he mentioned that he was also a collector of rare books and had owned a book store that I remembered having read the article, and thinking even then, "Now this would be an interesting person to meet."

Nor was I wrong. I look forward to conversation with this other "Doc" as much as anything about the whole Plate experience. Last night, for instance, I expected to make a quick run to Plate for dinner, and ended up spending over three hours at the bar in conversation with John. I've been an English professor. I still hang with English professors. But it took an evening with John to make me look forward to picking up James Joyce again. I was not a fan of Ulysses my first time through it, but I think I may have a new appreciation for it this next time around. Go read that article. Like most of the instances of convergence in my life, if you were to write John Holiday into a book as a character, an editor would most likely say, "No one's going to believe this." Believe it.

Indescribable

I know that this blog has few readers who don't know me personally and who don't know where my life has been lately. So, let me share, just a little. I said on New Years this year, that I thought 2007 would be the most profound year of change I'd seen in as long as I could remember. It's shaping up that way.

I've been busy finding my way back to myself. I've been getting to know my daughters better than I ever have. More importantly, they've been getting to know me--not me filtered through anyone else's eyes, but through their own, seeing me, perhaps, in some ways, for the first time.

Anyone who knows me, knows I pretty much don't get nervous. I've crashed cars, experimental planes, come out of a coma that was supposed to be final, twice opened a reserve chute less than two seconds from impact (the last time, only a month ago). People asked if I was scared. The answer's always been honest--"Not really. I was busy."

Only twice in the last two years could I really confess to being no kidding nervous to the point of knowing it. The most fascinating thing about it is how much it's surprised me.

Once was orbiting a stadium packed with 50,000 people, waiting to jump in with my class flag. I'd planned that jump for more than five years. That the reality of it set my heart to pounding nearly out of my chest, with nearly 800 jumps behind me already then, was itself almost surprising enough to calm me down. I rarely even got excited about jumps any more, let alone nervous. Don't get me wrong, I love every jump. But mostly, they're calming now, centering more than exciting. I never did figure out what made that one so different. But I haven't forgotten the feeling.

Today, I've figured it out. That feeling's back. What it is, is the waiting. Having set events in motion that you've imagined again and again, the time almost here finally, yet nothing to do for the moment but orbit, door open, knowing you're about to step out into thin air again, but this time, into the irreconcilable flesh and blood of a reality you've imagined a thousand times. A thousand times a thousand. It's the waiting. Nothing to hear but the pounding of your heart in your own chest. A thing you've grown personally and professionally unaccustomed to. Ground rush is less frightening.

Today, I'm like the little boy, who having behaved badly in church, is being carried out by his dad, and passing the last pew, throws one last glance and plea to the parishioners, "Ya'll pray for me." I may not land on target this time. I may not land standing up. I might not, I'm afraid, even make the stadium. By I am, by God, going out the door the second that green light comes on.

"You know who you are."

Just Call Me Bob

Oh, there is so nothing in the world to put things in perspective like a good friend. I was bummed last night. I was still bummed this morning. It was in a rather somber mood that I wrote to a friend this morning explaining why. This is what I got back:

Oh, my God. I re-read the Kelly saga. I cannot stop laughing out loud. It is sooooooo funny. Please tell me you could hardly keep from laughing all night long. Your voice today with those words re-telling your thoughts [I'm guessing she meant the Paris remark, but that was so out loud]---oh it was so funny. I'll read that anytime I want to get happy. You have got to write a book. Got to.

"Wrong wrong, wrong," Just too funny, every word of that tale.

Ohhh-kay then. So I tried re-reading it myself. I had tears in my eyes, I was laughing so hard. It is funny now. Hilarious. Last night and this morning I was just too busy licking my wounded ego to see it. So, I'll share. I would change the names, but no one in this town reads this blog anyway, and if Kelly does, hopefully she'll get a laugh too, because God knows I'm not taking a run at those shields again soon.

Last September, John came out and I took him skydiving. That evening, we stopped by a local bar/restaurant. Behind the bar was Kelly. Kelly was friendly. Kelly was a single mom. Kelly seemed like someone who had it all together. She seemed bright. She was in awesome shape. She was energetic, burning more calories per hour behind the bar than I do on a five-mile run. She was a delight to talk to. Right after we all traded names, she went back to the register to do something, and in profile, I saw her say my name. The look on her face, the way she said it, hadn't been matched since my first wife, whose particular way of saying it likely had something to do with my marrying her. That that marriage lasted all of three weeks should have been a warning, but no. I'm apparently a very slow learner. That moment, seeing Kelly say it, took me back to those earlier moments. And the way she said it, not knowing that I was watching, led me to believe that meeting me was as much a delight to her as meeting her was to me. It probably won't spoil the rest of this story to tell you that I was, um, how shall I put this . . . mistaken.

At any rate, I wasn't in a place to do anything about my impressions then. I was busy trying, and actually harboring some hope of success, to finally get it right with the woman I had been very much in love with for over 20 years. I didn't forget that moment though, and at some point, actually months later, I wrote a thank you note, anonymously, that I considered leaving at the bar for her. I never did though.

Then, this summer, I learned that I was really the only person interested in putting any more effort into getting right what 20+ years had amply demonstrated wasn't working. So, I did, finally, drop off that thank you note for Kelly about a week ago, along with my number, and a brief note that some things in my life had changed, and that if she might ever be interested in grabbing a cup of coffee sometime, I hoped she would call. Seemed unassuming enough to me. That she didn't call wasn't so much of a surprise, but it also occurred to me that maybe the person with whom I'd left the card never delivered it.

So yesterday, I called. She was actually quite fun to talk to, and seemed comfortable enough. No she hadn't gotten the card. I told her with whom I'd left it. I invited her, on the phone, to have coffee after work. She couldn't. She had to work until nine. Had to pick up the kids. "Okay. I understand. But you should find that card."

Between the phone conversation and the prospect, late yesterday at work, of a rather challenging adventure with which to fill the next year, I was feeling pretty bulletproof when I left the office, came home, got out of my flight suit, showered, dressed and left to say hello to Kelly in person.

I suppose what I failed to take into account is that Kelly, working behind a bar, must get hit on about a dozen times a night, and not by guys who are actually interested in getting to know her. I had thought I was someone special. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. She asked if I wanted to stay and have a drink. Okay. I did. But then, she made no particular effort to talk to me. Shortly thereafter, I noticed, sadly, that whenever she took any customer's name, she said it aloud--to aid her memory, perhaps, or merely to make a point that her saying mine (remember the Thank You card) was nothing special. Gradually, I became aware that she had more layers of shielding up than the starship Enterprise in full battle dress. I was sitting right under an AC vent blowing cold air, but the more I think about it, the chill was more than that.

Eventually, I asked if she might be interested in having coffee sometime.

Her response and change in demeanor was as sudden and only slightly less frightening than Bilbo's reaching for the ring in Rivendell. "You need to get to know me better before you start asking me out." "Sorry. Thought that's what I was trying to do. I wasn't suggesting that we fly to Paris for the weekend. I just thought it might be nice to have a conversation." From there, it just went downhill.

In hindsight, I suppose I was hoping for something like the little twirl that my first wife did 26 years ago when I looked her up two years after first meeting. Kelly twirled alright, but she was swinging a mace when she did. :-{ I could have carried that memory of last September forever, and enjoyed it.

I had left the office feeling like the world was full of promise and ready to take it on. I left the restaurant feeling like I needed to find a hole and crawl into it. I pride myself on having a pretty thick skin, a fairly unassailable ego. Maybe not so much. I can't remember ever, in my life, having been shot down so thoroughly, or having felt so bad afterward. Maybe it was because of the magnitude of the difference between the reception I expected/hoped for and the one I got. Maybe it was the pure shock of having misread something so, so badly. One thing I certainly took away: I'll think long and hard before lifting the dome on a dream or a memory in the future.

And the next time a cute girl behind the bar asks my name, I think it's gonna be Bob . . . just to be on the safe side.

See Off This Mountain, Part 3

Recap:
The following is the third and final part of a serialized work of creative nonfiction. As it was once a single whole, the pieces are meant to be read in order. You can find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

It was inspired, somewhat, by a piece of music by South Carolina-born singer-songwriter Edwin McCain. Again, if you're interested in hearing the music, you'll find it here.

“Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.”
-- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

See Off This Mountain (pt 3)

(a memory evoked by the music and lyrics of Edwin McCain)

Continued from Part 2.

The next day I don’t mention this new knowledge to my parents. Instead, I drive first to the cemetery behind Bethpage Methodist Church and find my grandparents graves. A single headstone. February 24th 1960. February 24th 1983. Twenty-three years to the day. Then I recall that my father’s mother also passed away on that day and I make a mental note to take special care on that day in the future. From the gravesite I drive to the offices of the Kannapolis Daily Independent. I explain that I’m doing research on my family and ask if it’s possible to see the newspaper’s archives for February 1960. A kind clerk leads me to a microfilm machine, opens a drawer in a nearby cabinet, pulls out a yellow box and hands it to me. “Do you know how to work this thing?” I assure him that I do and he leaves me with, “Just leave the film in the box beside the machine when you finish.”

I begin two weeks prior to the 24th, stopping to peruse the headlines of the front page of each day. “Cannon Farm Road to Get New Bridge.” “Mill to Open Second Monroe Plant.” “Union Bid Fails Again.” When I come to the 25th, I am more thorough. I want to know what it would have been like to read that paper. I remember that I was a mere five months and five days old. Not until I see the story’s headline, top left corner of page A4, do I allow the truth of what Marty revealed to solidify. “Wife of Enochville Grocer Shoots Self.” The article is short, to the point. The Independent has no machine from which to print a photocopy of the microfilm. No, they are sorry, but they can’t let me take the reel to the university library in Charlotte. I copy it, by hand, to a sheet of notebook paper. I thank them for their courtesy and depart. That night, I stand in my old bedroom at my parents home. I look out the window, across Enochville Avenue to my grandfather’s house now rented to someone by my mother, up at the stars, and for the first time, I sob uncontrollably over the grandmother who knew my infant self, but deprived me of the chance to know her. My mother had been 24 years old for just one month and one day when it happened, two years younger than I am now. I try to imagine what it must have been like for her.

If I could see off this mountain
Through the clouds in my eyes
I would see off this mountain
On the night the stars fell

In 1979, during the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, a friend from Colorado Springs flew home with me for the summer. As a double date, we made a day trip to the mountains with an old girlfriend of mine, home for the summer from Wake Forest, and a friend of hers. We picnicked in the front yard of Deer Haven on a blanket at the base of the stone steps. We hiked to the head of Linville Gorge and looked out over the falls. In my one photo album, assembled before I began piling photographs in shoeboxes, themselves piled on a shelf in my closet, there is a picture of Lisa, Jon, and Samantha perched on the edge of the wall overlooking the gorge. We ran back down the trail through a sudden summer downpour, Jon and I laughing, Sam and Lisa squealing because one—I can’t remember which—was sure we were about to be struck by lightning. Going home, we took the road that runs through the valley at the base of Grandfather Mountain, pulling over at one point, to park and recline on the hood of Lisa’s car to watch the hangliders soaring over the valley.

Before Scott started flying, building, and selling Pterodactyl ultralights, he used to hanglide from Grandfather Mountain. He was, therefore, a member of The Order of the Raven.

And see off this mountain
Through the tears in my eyes
I would see off this mountain
And the stars fell from the skies

I got to fly one of Scott’s Pterodactyl’s once. It was the day after I used a set of pliers and wire-cutters to remove what was left of my Tomcat from a stand of woods separating a farmer's two fields. I’d piled it in the back of my father's Chevrolet pickup at the wood’s edge and thanked the farmer once more for not calling the FAA nor the newspapers. Just the day before, I had been the lone Tomcat flying with seven Pterodactyls from Scott’s airfield, destined for the parking lot at Carolina Mall in Concord. On the way, we'd set down in that fateful field to survey it. One of the other pilots was going to lease it from the farmer to use as an airfield closer to home. The seven Pterodactyl's, built with large diameter tricycle tires, had no problem navigating the almost knee-high barley that was only thinly planted in the corner Dave planned to use as an airstrip. The Tomcat, sitting much closer to the ground on bouncy lawnmower tires, was another story. I came to a quick stop as both the guy wires for the leading canard and the main gear struts brushed through the green stalks. I began to wonder right away if I would get airborne again.

After the seven of us had looked around, seen the spot where Dave planned to erect a hanger of sorts and admired the evenness of the terrain, we decided to get back into the air while there was still enough daylight to get to the mall and back. The best course, I decided, was to let the other seven take off first and wear the barley down a little more. As the last Pterodactyl lifted off, I said just a short prayer, and pushed the throttle to the wall. I gained speed quickly enough at first, where the barley was thinnest, but it grew thicker as I went, and the barbed wire fence at the far end wasn’t all that far away anymore. I was just about to pull the throttle back and resign myself to another try when the nose lifted out of the barley and I was airborne. Airborne, but instantly in a slight left turn. The left gear had drug in the barley just long enough to create a slight yaw, enough to induce about a ten-degree left bank. Now, in an aircraft with three-axis controls (a rudder, ailerons, and an elevator), that wouldn’t have been a problem. But the Tomcat was controlled entirely by the canard mounted some six feet ahead of me at the end of a four-inch diameter main fuselage. My fiberglass bucket seat was mounted directly to that fuselage. The main wing structure and engine tower were all behind me. There were no wires or frame around me. My feet rested on an eighteen-inch-long, one-inch diameter tube riveted to the bottom of the main fuselage in front of me. Flying the Tomcat resembled nothing so much as riding a broom. Nothing but a seatbelt between the pilot and the wild blue yonder. I loved it. But, because the canard was the only moveable control surface, there was about a one-second delay between any control input and an actual turn. Tilting the canard left or right pulled the nose around and created yaw. The forward wing developed more lift and induced bank, resulting in a turn. All of this happened within a second or so, but that short delay caused new Tomcat pilots to over-control somewhat at first. I was a new Tomcat pilot, and I’d made that mistake a couple of times already, but well above the ground, where there was plenty of time to sort things out. You would be surprised just how fast your mind can work when an aircraft does something unexpected on takeoff. I weighed the risks of over-controlling near the ground, and mentally calculated the distance to the fifty or sixty-foot-tall trees along the left side of the runway, factored in the shallowness of the turn I was in, and decided that I had the climb gradient to get over them. I only lacked about three feet being right.

Golf, bowling, and flying have at least one thing in common: men tend to talk to an aircraft the same way they talk to a golf ball or bowling ball. “Climb baby, climb baby, climb!” Actually, these sports may have a second thing in common: golf balls, bowling balls, and aircraft are similarly unaffected by these pleas. The low wing clipped the treetops. I cartwheeled once across the roof of the forest before the propeller bit into the tops of the trees and the sound of the engine was replaced by the sound of tearing sailcloth, splintering wood, and bending aluminum. The thought that I might be about to die, if it came, was so fleeting that I don’t remember it. What I do remember was mentally replaying the scene from First Blood in which Sylvester Stallone’s character jumps off a cliff into the top of a pine forest, spreading his arms, and depending on the branches to break his fall. They broke that and a few ribs. Hollywood though that may have been, I remember thinking, "maybe the wings will hang in these branches enough to slow my fall or maybe stop it altogether." And I remember thinking, as I came down, hanging upside down and watching the trunk of a tree go by and by and by, that they were slowing it enough. The chest mounted parachute I was wearing, on loan from Scott, protected my chest from what broken branches might have been a threat. At the end, the engine tower, it turns out, was about two inches taller than my head. I came to rest with a jolt, hanging in the seat, upside down, with my helmet just two inches off the ground. I had a tiny scratch across one cheek. There is something to be said even for short prayers.

None of the Pterodactyl pilots even missed me until after they landed at the mall. A stranger, one of several who lived nearby and had seen the eight of us circling into the field and driven over to see the aircraft, gave me a ride back to Huntersville. That trip, I don’t remember. Physically, I had a single scratch. Emotionally, I was grappling with the fact that my venture into homebuilt aviation hadn’t fared much better than my venture into matrimony.

When the kind gentleman dropped me off, Scott was at the field, tying things down for the night. He listened while I explained what had happened, then surprised me as much as anyone ever has with what he said next. “What you need to do is come back here tomorrow afternoon, after you get the pieces out of the trees, and fly my Pterodactyl.”

"That's pretty brave," I said, "considering what I just did to my Tomcat."

He just smiled. Scott was the only person, other than me, who had ever flown my ultralight. I’d invited him do so on the very first day I’d brought it to the field on a trailer. "Anyone who could fly that thing,” he smiled, "can fly one of these with his eyes closed."

I did. It was fun, but I still preferred the openness of mine to the web of aluminum tubing that surrounded the cockpit of the Pterodactyl.

In the air I hear a fiddle
Down along Hickory Way
And the mandolin guitar
Like we used to play

About a month later, Scott was flying from our Huntersville field down to the Carowinds amusement park. His flight path took him well east of Charlotte's Douglas International Airport. But we always flew fairly high, so that the huge parachute we carried would have time to deploy in the unlikely event of a catastrophic airframe failure (they were designed to bring down both craft and pilot). At 9:00 a.m., according to FAA tapes, an Eastern Airlines 727 called Douglas tower and asked if they could see "one of those powered gliders out here on final? We just had a pretty near miss with one. I expect it shook him up a bit."

And down on Dunn's rock
Brothers boasting a dare
We tell them they're crazy
And pretend we don't care

During the Cold War, I spent eight years flying in Boeing KC-135 “Stratotankers,” four-engine jet refueling platforms from which the civilian 707 was developed. We used to practice “minimum interval takeoffs,” launching four or eight heavy aircraft from a single runway a mere twelve seconds apart, practicing for the occasionally all too real possibility that the Cold War might turn hot. We flew preset headings designed to minimize the likelihood of one heavy jet flying through the wake turbulence of those before it. Wake turbulence is the deceptively benign term for the small horizontal tornados that flow off the wingtips of a large, heavy aircraft. They tend to spread down and away from the wingtips, somewhat like the waves that follow a boat on the water. They dissipate with distance, growing in diameter and lessening in velocity until they simply exist no more. But, like young venomous snakes whose bite is reputed to be more deadly than the adults’, they are a dangerous, invisible, and deadly force in their infancy, and the heavier the aircraft and greater the loading of the wings, the stronger they are. I’ve seen a 200,000 pound aircraft roll suddenly into thirty degrees of bank or more in their grip. An ultralight, by definition, weighs less than 350 pounds, engine, frame, sails, and all. If the Eastern flight took any evasive action, pulling up, or turning, thus loading the wings even more, the vortices would have been stronger still, only ten, maybe twenty feet in diameter and rotating at over 200 miles per hour. This, they knew, when they said they had probably shaken Scott up a bit. Imagine a paper crane in a blender.

An ultralight, in 1983, was still a rare enough site that there was hardly a moment someone on the ground wasn’t watching as you flew by. The police report said that witnesses saw the big jet go right over the little glider, and then Scott's wings just "folded up like paper." They saw him deploy the parachute that he wore on his chest, but the broken, twisted wings caused the craft to spin, "like a maple seed," and the chute became tangled in what was already wreckage before it ever returned to earth. Scott, and his crippled Pterodactyl, impacted the ground at 9:01 a.m.

If I could see off this mountain
Through the clouds in my eyes
I would see off this mountain
On the night the stars fell
And see off this mountain
Through the tears in my eyes
I would see off this mountain
And the stars fell from the skies

The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that there was no connection between what the Eastern flight reported and Scott's crash. As for what the witnesses saw, they attributed it to "an illusion of parallax." As a result, I haven't put much stock in anything the NTSB reported since.

I don't think Scott felt any pain at the end, but he had way too long to think about what was coming on the way down. I was on Alert (seven consecutive days living at the end of a runway, ready to fly away in less than the time from launch warning to impact of a Soviet warhead) at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base when I got the call just before dinner. Sharon called. I don’t know how, but she did. She could barely speak. Nor could I. Nor could I leave and make the drive to Huntersville to comfort her. “Not family. Not authorized. Sorry.”

The following weekend, on "C-square" (Combat Crew Rest and Recuperation) I did go home though. And that Saturday, I coached our group of flyers on how to create a missing man formation. Standing at Sharon’s side, at the end of the field where Scott and I had both flown one another’s aircraft, I watched a set of five Pterodactyls pass over the field at 200 feet, saw the left slot pull up and out, and per Sharon's wishes, scatter Scott's ashes over the field that had utterly revolved around him.

And the mist tastes like moonshine
In the wind a carnival tune
It soars with our laughter
But we'll all leave too soon

Raven Lambert was born two months later. I last saw Sharon and her daughter in their apartment in Charlotte, some time in 1984. I took them to dinner. It will seem presumptuous to say this, but it was one of those rare times when I wished to God that I could clone myself. I've since lost track of them. That is a source of sadness now so profound that no words can describe it. I understand though, how it happened. And I know that Sharon, because she could look through me, understands as well. It was all that I could do to walk away that night. I couldn’t have done it more than once, and I had, I thought, another life yet to live, a different destiny to fulfill. What are we to make of those choices, those moments in time when two roads lie before us, equally vivid, equally appealing? One marriage of remarkable brevity, one ultralight, and one Spitfire (totaled just 13 days after the crash of the Tomcat) behind me, I chose, for once in my life, what seemed the prudent course.

So I raise a toast to family
Put thanks in my glass
In the arms of your loved ones
It's the only home that lasts

If I could see off this mountain
Through the clouds in my eyes
I would see off this mountain
On the night the stars fell
And see off this mountain
Through the years in my life
I would see off this mountain
When the stars fell from the skies

The song "See Off This Mountain" by Edwin McCain (c) 1999, is in blue throughout.

Yeah baby . . .

We all know this sounds just like something I would do . . .

BEND, Ore. — Last weekend, Bend gas station owner Kent Couch settled down in his lawn chair with some drinks and snacks — and a parachute.

Attached to the lawn chair were 105 balloons of various colors, each 4 feet around. Bundled together, the balloons rise three stories high.

Couch carried a global positioning system device, a two-way radio, a digital camcorder and a cell phone. He also had instruments to measure his altitude and speed and about four plastic bags holding five gallons of water each to act as a ballast — he could turn a spigot, release water and rise.

Destination: Idaho.

My favorite line:

Even at two miles high, Couch said, he could hear cattle lowing and children talking. He heard gunshots, which worried him.

Who knew you needed to prep the route with a SEAD mission? :-)

Source: Yesterday's Seattle Times.