Category: Flying Lessons

There is a Bird Walk off Taliesin East that floats in the sky over the Wisconsin River Valley like a cantilevered wing.  A concrete main spar makes its way above the trees of Spring Green.  Built for the third wife of Frank Lloyd Wright at her request.  She asked simply, “Please Frank, let me walk among the birds.”  Her words changed the architecture of their home and he built her a cedarwood and golden limestone balcony.  So she could walk among the birds with her feet planted safely on his ground.  Facing southeast the Bird Walk runs like a runway into the valley.  Favoring sunrises over sunsets, it banks slightly to the left to look into morning light. If you think of Frank Lloyd Wright, you have to think like the man and question the nature of the thing.  What is the nature of a Bird Walk? Is it a convertible castle keep, a contemplative catwalk, or a cantilevered wing? The nature of any thing is subjective, depending through who’s eyes you use to see.

Through my Wright eye I saw Wright’s life.  Surrounded by controversy and tragedy, yet he rose from the ashes again and again to rebuild himself and Taliesin III.  Never giving up on his life goal of designing an American Democratic Architecture.  His ‘shining brow’ Taliesin, namesake of the Celtic bard who sang at the court of King Arthur of Pendragon, was also thrice born. Restored and repaired on the brow of the hill at Spring Green, reuniting hill and house again in harmony. The Bird Walk soars out of Taliesin.  It is not of the hill or of the house, but of the sky. I saw Wright’s Bird Walk as a compromise from a man who had suffered so much loss.  At the very end of his life his architecture outstretched like an open arm, as a handshake between the pair. A marriage of freedom and safety. Walk among the birds as long as you please, then turn around and return home to me.

Leaving Taliesin an unanswered email waited for me.  It was from a man I knew residually, through some correspondence with his wife. He was contemplating flying and lost in the architecture of it.  Stuck in his mind, struggling to fit the building blocks of cost, safety, what to fly, and why to fly, together in his design. His questions were complex and philosophical.  He ended his email to me – “but then I think of my dream to fly.”  I cautioned him not to look at all the building blocks to becoming a pilot as monolithic stumbling blocks, but rather a series of small exploratory stepping stones.  Reminding him it’s not what you fly, it is that you fly. Looking through my Knight eye, I saw the nature of his Bird Walk as a mythical quest.  A young Knight of the Air, pacing fore and aft, on a catwalk staring into a precipice of fearlessness. Seeking the Holy Grail of flight, but unsure of how to begin.  Shuffling the courage around his feet and battling the air above the trees. The only enlightenment I could share was that every quest begins with the first step.  Walk on the Bird Walk for a while and plan.  You’ll know in your heart when it’s time to leap.

Through my pilot’s eyes combined, that shine bluer each flight, I saw with 20/20 vision the nature of the Bird Walk to me.  A bridge.  A Bird Walk is a cantilevered air bridge, with a wing as its suspended span. Uniting a community with an anchor arm of common history, supported by our shared desire to fly.  Projecting horizontally into infinity, the air bridge is traveled equally by Bird Walkers, Star Gazers, and Knights of the Air.  We are all architects of the sky when we design and build our own dreams of flight.

Once upon a time I flew with a snow goose.  When I was a little girl the snow goose would smooth the knots in my wild wings each night, and called me her Butterfly. I flitted and fluttered from thing to thing, switching crayons constantly, coloring outside the lines of life.  The snow goose didn’t mind.  She told me I could be anything I wanted to be.  The snow goose taught me how to fly.  She loved to flock. To migrate, to travel anywhere. Loved the cool air and calling out the colors of the sky with me honk, honk, honking alongside.  “The sky is cerulean blue today,” she would say.  I’d reply, “The sun shines like jaune brilliant.”  A common language of a painter’s palate was our common ground.  As different as two winged things could be, perched in the same family tree.  She was never so proud of me as she was the day I got my wings.  She said, “I’ll be the first to fly with you, I’m not afraid.”  Our first flight and our last flight together were in the winter, along the Gulf Coast to Venice. The snowbirds nest she knew the best  She loved low flying with me, hanging her head over the side, calling out everything she saw like a curious child.  Wondrous wonder still resided inside a snow goose born in 1929. Her smells of Joy perfume and apricot oil floated up from my floorboards as we flocked together.  Our last flight for the snow goose’s 80th Birthday was too short but too long.  Her wings were weak, her feathers grey.  It was cold and I gave her my jacket, gave her my lap blanket.  Searched for a temperature inversion, high and low. The snow goose was shivering and shrinking.  She was afraid of the cold.  The only thing I had left to give her was a song.  As we floated low in the currents, I gave the song back to her she had given to me for so long. You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are grey. You never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away.  She looked up at me in the mirror and said, “Thank you for such a beautiful flight Butterfly, I believe I’m a snow goose today.”

Once upon a time I flew with a snow goose. The snow goose was my Mother.  A snow goose taught me how to fly.

The four corners of the meadow stretched for 50 acres connecting four houses, like four pillars on “the road.”  The four fathers of those four houses were the Titans of my meadow.  Larger-than-life men, as seen through my child’s eyes, with single-sided personalities. The funny one, the generous one, the strong one, and the mean one.  My four fathers were in constant competition. They’d taunt, jest, and best each other at cocktail parties, and over the phones on their desks, relentlessly.  But on summer Sundays, dressed in white, the Titans came together as a foursome to play doubles in the meadow.

My parents didn’t much believe in traditional Sunday activities like going to church, or the country club – we didn’t belong to either.  In fact we didn’t belong to anything organized.  My mother was raised Catholic, and went to Catholic schools, but after my first communion I don’t remember ever going to church again. I asked Mom why we never went back, and she pointed to my heart and said, “God is right there, in you always. You don’t need to go to church to have a conversation.”  My parents believed in a trinity of family, freedom, and tennis.  So at our house, Sunday service was served up on the tennis court.

I would hear the four fathers in the meadow laughing over the popping of tennis cans, and the slapping of rackets on the asphalt.  A call to my brother and I to come running with our labrador retriever, Rover, to be spectators at their spectacle.  They were funny and cruel and quick on the court.  Each one an athlete and a good tennis player, but my Dad was the best – the “strong one.”  Born a shy second son of a factory worker and milliner, he earned his way through college driving a beer truck. Then started his business in a garage, making thermocouples with me in a basket by his feet.  He wore button-down shirts from JC Penney and leather shoes that had been resoled for ten years.  But on his tennis court, the poor boy became a King.

My father could hit a tennis ball farther than anyone.  When a ball was flat, he’d toss it up and send it flying into the meadow and Rover would dive into the grass to retrieve it.  She’d always come back with one of the hundreds of tennis balls hidden in the meadow in her mouth, wiggling with pride.  Everything was retrieved by our retrievers from the meadow. Baby bunnies, baby chipmunks, and baby birds were brought to the house unhurt, and laid gently on the cement step in front of the screen door as presents for my parents. Rover was just doing what retrievers do, run and retrieve. We’d build nests for the wild babies in shoeboxes, trying to feed them back to health with eyedropper’s of food.  When we didn’t succeed we’d hold funerals, and bury each one in the pet cemetery behind the tennis court. The same dogs that ran freely back-and-forth underneath the fences between the four houses, breed freely back-and-forth.  Each spring there would be a new litter of puppies to play with.  When the puppies were old enough to follow their parents into the meadow on morning visits, they’d get lost in the tall grass.  My mother would hear them crying and go rescue them.  Then she would bring them warm and wet to my bedroom, and put them in bed with me before breakfast. Everything good came from the meadow, and everything good went back to it.

I remember my father whispering to my mother one Sunday night, with a shovel in his hand, and then disappearing out the screen door in the dark.  He came back though the same door smelling like dirt and sweat. It was the first time I saw my father cry. The “strong one” cried as he told my brother and I that he had just buried our dog, Rover, behind the tennis court.  The “mean one,” said the retrievers were running his sheep and he fired a warning shot over their head, but Rover jumped into the shot.  Even as a child I knew nothing in nature jumps into a loud noise exploding overhead, they duck down. The dog who had never left my side though chickenpox and pneumonia, who had licked every skinned knee and tear from my face as long as I could remember, had been killed by a rich man for running with his decorative sheep.

I went to visit my parents on a different road party after college, and the “mean one” was there.  Even in my twenties, I was afraid to talk to him. He saw me and came straight over and gave me a giant hug.  He had a new wife, and was much softer than the lean athlete I remembered. He was funny, and generous with his words, and when I saw him through adult’s eyes I saw him differently.  He wasn’t the “mean one” who shot our dog anymore.  He was just a man, who wasn’t a very good shot.  In his honest Sunday night confession that he had shot Rover by mistake, instead of hiding his mistake in the meadow, the “mean one” had been kind.  Then I no longer saw the four fathers of the meadow as one-sided, but as men with both sides of light and dark.  Funny and serious, generous and selfish, strong and weak, mean and kind.  It was the first time I saw my meadow through wider eyes.

After the last of the books from my office were moved into the hangar in Lakeland, I sat on Buddy’s wing and petted him.  I told him I had a present for him, “We’re going to spend the season on grass Buddy, I found us a meadow in Poplar Grove.  It’s beautiful, you’ll be safe there.”  The IT band in my leg was a mess from moving things down my steps, and I had to have friends help me finish the move because I couldn’t bend my right knee.  I wasn’t fit to fly.  I kissed Buddy’s cowling and promised to retrieve him and take him to the meadow soon.  Everything good comes from the meadow, and everything good goes back to it.

On Saturday nights the parents on “the road” would have parties. Sometimes my brother and I would get to be the greeters, or the coat bearers, but most Saturdays were spent with our grandmother.  We would be dropped off at her house freshly scrubbed clean, and already in our pajamas, before 5pm.  Grandma would greet us at the door with a hug that folded me into the folds of her flesh, and I would get lost in her housecoat and the smell of her orange blossom perfume. She was so wide I couldn’t get my arms around her, and she was so soft I didn’t ever want to let go.

My grandmother’s house was a tiny condo of curiosities. Each closet or cabinet was stuffed full of boxes, that were stuffed full of stuff.  Curious, mysterious stuff like rubber band balls, foil piles, knots of twisty-ties, and paperclip chains that stretched forever.  She had shoe boxes, hat boxes, picture boxes, dress boxes, and sweater boxes – each one waiting to be opened by grandchildren to discover what surprises were hidden inside. My grandma was a product of the Depression. She knew what “not enough” felt like all too well, so she kept everything to make sure she would always have enough all around. Her freezer was the most mysterious room in the house. It was packed with small foil wrapped balls of mystery foods.  Each one no bigger than your hand.  She said she kept them in case she had “a taste” for something.  A half a piece of cake, one chicken wing, or a couple spoonfuls of stuffing.  I’d sit at her tiny kitchen table and watch as she opened the freezer door and dug through the piles of foil “tastes.” Unwrapping  and smelling each one, before she finally found the one she wanted with her dinner.

Saturday night was Lawrence Welk night at Grandma’s – a chiffon covered celebration of everything light and graceful.   She would pour herself a tall glass of Diet Rite cola and red wine on ice, then nag us to get our trays ready before the show started.  My brother and I would lay on our stomachs at the foot of her chair. Our TV trays mounded full of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a food that was taboo in my parents’ house, and watch Lawrence Welk with her. When the show was over, Grandma would unfold the card table and tell us to get the Yahtzee game.  I knew it was always kept in the bottom right-hand draw of her mahogany writing desk, and that our names would be waiting for us on the top of the pile of score cards.  Then the three of us would play Yahtzee, laughing together, until it was way past our bedtime.

My grandmother’s writing desk sits in my condo in Lakeland, with a Yahtzee game in the bottom right-hand drawer still.  It has been with me ever since she was not. Behind it is a bookshelf full of books that were her husbands – the Grandfather I never met.  He was a reader, and letter lover, that died inside when he went into his family’s funeral home business during the depression. His body died shortly thereafter but in his books he lives on in my imagination.  I have stacks of beautiful hardback books by authors like Whitman, Shakespeare, Plato, Twain and Thoreau.  Each one with my Grandfather’s signature, or a handwritten note, on the first page. Except for Shakespeare and Twain, most of his books I’ve never read but I love the way they smell.  I imagine he smelled like hardback books, orange blossom perfume, and tobacco. I have moved that desk and those books from Indiana, to Michigan, to Florida, to Colorado, and back to Florida again. Thirty years of moving possessions and I don’t know how to move them anymore.

My condo in Lakeland had sold, and I had less than three weeks to decide what to do with all my stuff.  What to take and what to leave behind?  I kept telling myself, “Take just what you need, nothing more.”  But what did I need?  I was freezing up at the thought of moving, so I stopped thinking and just got in my car and headed to Florida.  After driving for two days in a fog of show tunes, I walked in my office, and saw my Grandmother’s desk. The sight of it knocked the wind out of me.  I curled up on the floor at the foot of her desk, holding my Yahtzee game, and I started to leak.  Then I cried, and then I sobbed. I felt so guilty because I had been given so much, and I didn’t want it. I was a spoiled little brat. I was stupid, self-absorbed, and selfish.  The more I told myself how horrible I was, the harder I cried.  I was tired and dirty and overwhelmed.  Melting down in a puddle of self-pity, clutching a stupid Yahtzee box to me like it was the Holy Grail.  I needed help.  iTunes!  Song ladies, help! I call them song ladies instead of song angels, because I see them as being dressed in pastel suits like the ladies that used to lunch with my Mom. I held my phone and whispered to iTunes shuffle, “Please tell me what to do?”  The song ladies answered with Carole King and James Taylor tucking me into bed with, “So close your eyes, you can close your eyes, it’s all right.”

I got up the next day and saw my problem clearly.  I had too much.  Too much is different for everyone, but 1700 square feet of stuff is too much for me.  I needed to unload all of it, that was the only solution.  In one week, with hundreds of trips up and down my steps, it all went to people who didn’t have enough.  As they carried out my Grandmother’s desk I told her. “Don’t worry Grandma. I’ll always have enough. And if I don’t have enough, our family taught me how to take care of myself and I’ll make enough. Please tell everyone not to worry anymore.”

My people are from Ireland and Scotland.  They came to the US as poor farmers and indentured servants.  All their DNA knew for centuries was “not enough.” Their children and grandchildren lived and died in the wars, and the Depression, from “not enough.”  My parents were raised with “not enough” and knew what it felt like in their bellies.  They worked every day so my brother and I would have enough.  We are the first generation in our family to never be hungry.  In my lifetime I’ve always had enough, and for most of it I’ve had too much – until we built Buddy.  Then my family tree started screaming at me that I should be keeping every dollar I have, tucked away safe, for my retirement.  Telling me I would be an old women alone, with “not enough.” Reminding me how stupid I was to spend my money on a plane.  Building Buddy taught me to listen to myself, and not to them. That only I knew what was important, and what was important to me was freedom and a few good things.  A good car, a good plane, and a collection of art from every place I’ve ever visited. I’ll leave Lakeland with what I can carry with me in my car, and some boxes stored in a rented hangar. I did give myself one present.  I kept all the books, every single one.  Three totes full of hardbound books that smell like my family, and are covered in their handwriting, to remember where I came from.  For the first time in my life, I have just enough.

I grew up in a Fairyland of no stranger danger, in a place defined as “the road.” Nurtured by a neighborhood of families, tied to each other by an umbilical cord of one long gravel road that strung all of our properties together. There were very few fences between us.  The one’s that divided our properties were decades old, rusted wire, and covered with vines of wild raspberries. The parents on “the road” built wooden turn-styles over the top of the fences so we could climb them easily, and roam as we pleased.  They even cut holes in the bottom of the wire, so our dogs could dig under them. There were no boundaries on “the road,” just a wide open world of one extended family.  As children we were allowed to travel freely in the company of our horses, and our dogs, with only one rule.  Be home for dinner.

In the summer we ran “the road” barefoot.  Soles of our feet like leather, wild children with a secret call, “Woo WOO. Woo WOO.”  We’d cup our mouths and howl to each other like wolves, waiting for the echo of our friends – Johnny, Joby, Pete, Robbie, Joey, Danny, and me.  I ran with the boys, and we ran in packs with our dogs.  Paco, Rover, Tawny, Magic, Bo, and Boots.  Every family had a dog on the road and they were never on leashes.  The dogs were free to run from yard to yard, just like us.

In this wild childhood of freedom, we were called home at night by the sound of our mother’s voices yelling, “DINNER!”  We’d return to our houses each evening around 6PM, with slurry stuck in our scabby knees from falling off our bikes, and wild raspberry stains on our lips.  Exhausted and hungry my brother and I would bide our time, pretending to listen to stories about our parent’s day.  Shoveling down dinner as quickly as possible, and finishing it with a calculated polite, “Thank you, may I please be excused?”  Then planning our escape, by rushing through dishes so we might be given our freedom again. “Can we go out and play now…Pleeease?” Like dessert after dark, we’d be served up barefoot by our parents graces unto the grass again, and call to our pack. “Woo WOO. Woo WOO.”  Then Johnny, Joby, Pete, Robbie, Joey, Danny, Paco, Tawny, Magic, Bo, and Boots would come running through the night.  Kids and dogs, playing ghost in the graveyard together for hours in the dark.   We’d say goodnight and collect our jars of stars; lightning bugs as night lights to place by our twin beds. Then be tucked into our fresh sheets by the parents on “the road,” after nightly tick checks and tender brushings, removing the meadow’s burrs from our hair.

I carry home with me still, in me that wild barefoot place, with no fences you couldn’t climb easily over.  My idea of home is never a house, it is a wide open space surrounded by magic meadows you run unleashed through; free to explore.  I learned to fly as a child, before I knew I had wings.  My soul of adventure was born in my own backyard.