Category: Journal

I  fly with the Flying Circus’s full of fabulous freaks like me, fellow captives, captivated by the “greatest job in the world.”    Welcome to the big show ladies and gentlemen. Step right up, don’t be shy.  All shapes and sizes are welcome to apply.  We have daredevils, acrobats, strongmen, high-fliers, and clowns of renown.  Join us and run away from reality, leave your life behind.  Jump on a plane, forget your name – we’ll give you a new one.  Quick grab the bar and hop on a car before we speed off to the big wing.  Don’t wait, time is tick-tocking away.  Live life like there’s no tomorrow, because it may all end tonight. The future is a fantasy, the past is an illusion, today is our reality.   In the flying circus we live like we’re dying, because we are.

I jumped on my first flying circus, the American Barnstormers Tour in 2006, and found my bunk in the back with the biplane clowns of renown.  I like to laugh.  Life can be difficult but laughing is easy, so I try to surround myself with people who like to laugh like me.  Barnstormers in particular have really wicked sense’s of humor.  Barnstormer have been the rule breakers and clowns since the 20s. We fly hard, joke hard, and play hard.  We make fun of ourselves as much as we make fun of everyone else. I have been punk’d, pranked, mooned, lampooned, flashed, and roasted as we got toasted, on every barnstormers tour.  Touring with the B-29 FiFi is no different than the American Barnstormers Tour.  Birds of a feather always find ways of flocking together, and even the most stoic flight suited types end up making their way to the bar in the clown car with us.   Once the gates are closed and the planes are put to bed – the silly show starts.  Omnivores of anything funny, the nightly clown comedy plays like an improv of onomatopoeia.  It begins most evenings with the CLICK on of the Comedy Channel, a THUMP on the wall, and the CLINK of a drink.

Thump, thump, thump. Giggle. THUMP, THUMP, THUMP. Alright!  Thud. Clip-clop, clip-clop. Tap, tap, tap. Pssst. Click. Slam. Dudes!  Giggle. Clunk. Bloop, bloop, bloop. Plop. Splash. Slurp. Clink. Glug, glug, glug.  Ahhhh.  Buuurp. Nice!  Smack. Snort. Hahaha. Blah,blah,blah.  Glug, glug, glug. Tosh.  Sweet!  BAM. SPLAT. No way. Way!  Ouch. Dude. Hahaha.  Clink. Glug, glug, glug.  Ahhhh.  Buuurp. Nice!   SouthPark. Sweet!  POW.  CRUNCH.  SPLAT. You killed Kenny, you Bastards!!  Smack. Snort. Hiccup. Hahaha. Blah,blah,blah. Clunk. Bloop, bloop, bloop. Plop. Splash. Slurp. Clink. Glug, glug, glug. Dude’s, let’s eat.  Thud. Clip-clop, clip-clop. Click. Slam. Buuurp. Nice!

The silly show performance plays in hotel rooms and restaurants on tour when the clowns wind down.  You see the clowns of the flying circus’s aren’t scary, they’re just scared.  Fearless fliers afraid of the day they will no longer travel the country, humming along to the song of a radial engine.  Knowing that people, like planes, need to be restored and replaced.  Wondering who will sit in our seats when we’re gone and continue the clown camaraderie.  So each night, as the ring leader’s count the days tickets and the barkers plan the next days strategy, the clowns gather together and recount the days possibilities of replacement’s.  A clown college come to order, looking for future fun graduates to join our ranks and continue the Flying Circus we love.  An initiation of inebriate’s.  We face our fear with a shot of courage, by flipping off fear with a foam finger, and throwing death a pie in the face.

Fort Myers’ ramp was slow, “fished out,” with the lucky distinction of the only two other flying circus’s having visited their city the month before our tour. Without much competition for conversation, I got trapped by a “leather jacket” who was bending my ear with a long story of me, me, me.  Reminding everyone within earshot of his history, and touting his pilot prowess.  Clowns protect our own, and one of my fellow clowns saw I needed a wingman and came to my rescue.  Standing behind the “leather jacket” he began making funny faces and pantomiming the conversation with blah-blah-blah hands – opening and closing his fingers like a puppet’s mouth.  Then holding a fake finger pistol to his head pretending to shoot himself and pratfall on the ramp.  I was about to bust a laugh in the “leather jackets” face, when I spotted two cool kids across the ramp.   Unconventional young faces with their bold interest’s inked on their bodies like billboards, and hair spiked high.  Shining like beacons, illuminating the aging audience of leather jackets and seniors omnipresent at airshows everywhere.  I saw my way out and said to the man in the leather jacket, “It’s been nice listening to your stories but excuse me, I want to go show those kids the plane.  I like to encourage young people to become pilots.”   The “leather jacket” shot them a look of disgust and smirked, “With hair like that I’ll guarantee you he’ll never be a pilot.”  I puffed my chest out in protection, like a momma bird protecting its young, and said very slowly, “Sir, I don’t know what a pilot looks like.  See that guy over there in shorts with the handlebar mustache, clowning around in the tent?  He’s a pilot.  See that black guy next to him in jeans dancing?  He’s a pilot.  And did you see that blonde women in the boots, the one who own’s this plane?  She’s a pilot too.”  Then I did my best Betty Boop look with my hand on my cheek and added,  “A women pilot, imagine that!”  The leather jacket snapped, “I just came over here to talk to the Stearman pilot!”  I smiled my biggest smile and said, “You just did talk to her, for twenty minutes.  Guess I don’t look like a pilot.”  I turned towards the cool kids on the other side of the ramp and said over my shoulder, “Maybe I need to wear a leather jacket.”

I  don’t know what the next generation of pilots and crew members will look like, anymore than I know if Flying Circus’s and Barnstorming tours will even be around for them to join.  When you truly love something, all you can do is let it go and help it grow.  That day on the ramp there were a handful of young faces waiting for someone to not judge them by the way they looked, but instead listen to them.  So I spent my day happily clowning around in the back of the ramp with the cool kids, loading them in my front seat and taking pictures of them by my plane.  Their tattoos were every bit as interesting as their interest’s in aviation.  I wish everyone could hear what I heard.  The future of aviation was in their words, and it didn’t sound or look anything like the past.  That day my fear disappeared and all I heard was the laughter of young clowns on a Flying Circus, humming along to the song of a radial engine, long after I’m gone.

I am the great grand-daughter of a teacher, who’s mother was the daughter of a teacher, who’s daughter grew up to be a teacher, and now is the Aunt of yet another.  My Irish family tree buds teachers from every branch, and drops at least one of them to earth each generation. The grandfather I never met, taught the daughter he barely knew, to teach her children in his absence, “If you don’t respect yourself, how can you expect anyone else to respect you?”  I have inherited an inheritance of self respect, as I was taught by my teachers that we teach people how to treat us.

Shad and I left Sarasota early Monday morning on our commute to work in Naples.  The tour was due to be open for business by 2pm that afternoon and I couldn’t have asked for better company, or a better co-pilot.  Certainly he was a qualified round-engine flier that didn’t need any instruction from me, but more importantly he was hands-down the funniest person on tour.  I wanted to laugh all the way to Naples because flying is fun, or at least it should be.  I know no other part of the world as I do the Florida coast running from North Captiva Island to Naples.  It is where I did all my flight training from private pilot through my commercial certificate. Naples has a lovely airport, that’s in a lovely city full of lovely people, but I don’t have many fond memories of flying there.  When I walked through the doors of a flight school there twenty years ago, I was quite the naive pilot.  A puppy, wagging my tail enthusiastically.  Soon after, I was taught a number of costly and painful lessons by the flight school’s owner that took me years to unlearn.  I lost a lot of innocence in Naples, and I’ve worked hard to replace my serious memories with silly ones ever since.

Abeam the Ritz Carleton, Shad was telling me some funny story when I smelled something horrible.  It was an impossible smell for me to smell along the beach that day, so it must be my imagination.  But that horrible smell was more real than the real smells of salt air and exhaust all around me.  Smells are impossible for me to forget.  It was the smell of my first flight with my first student, and I felt sick to my stomach.  When I moved to Florida in 1994, I had enough money from the sale of my car to pay for the two hundred hours of flight training I needed to get from private pilot to commercial pilot, and I took a year off to do it.  Getting my private pilot certificate was really fun, and I flew happily around northern Michigan in a seedy Cessna 150.   The sad exterior of that little trainer was well compensated by the good character of the shiny people at the flight school in Traverse City.  When I came to Florida the equipment got shinier, and the flight schools got seedier.  I remember feeling that most of my training was like navigating a shark’s tank, and I was chum in the water.  It isn’t very much fun being chum.  Eleven months and sixteen days after my private pilot check ride I was a new CFI, hired immediately and given my first students – without any training or mentorship.  They were two student pilots who had come to the US to get their private pilot’s certificate.  Although I was thirty-one years old at the time, I was a kid teaching kids.  A CFI with no experience, 250’something hours of flight time, being told I was qualified to teach those who deserved to be taught by someone with the most experience.  Student pilots are very impressionable and generally pretty emotionally charged. You can damage their progress and their spirit permanently, if you don’t know what you’re doing.  I questioned the Flight School owner and said, “I can’t do Private’s yet, I don’t have any experience, I’ll screw em’ up.  Can’t I have a couple BFR’s or a Commercial?”   His response was, “No, I always give new CFI’s Private’s.  They don’t know the difference, and I make money while both of you to learn together.”  I was back in the tank, but now I was one of the sharks. I can’t remember the face of which one of the student pilots I flew first, but I do remember the horrible smell in the Cessna 152 and apologizing for my mistakes all through the flight.  The horrible smell was the smell of chewing tobacco and spit.  A fellow Flight Instructor had tried to throw his full chew cup out the window on a ferry flight to the paint shop, and it blew back inside, soaking the interior.  He left it as a bit of a F’You to our employer for treating his Flight Instructors like crap, and paying them less than crap. The interior festered in the hot Florida sun and was never cleaned.  They just painted the exterior and put it back on the line.  Outward appearance were all that mattered.  I didn’t work there very long because the smell of that plane, and my lack of experience made me sick to my stomach every day.  I realized no matter where I worked, I would have to teach myself to be a good teacher while I taught, because no one else was going to help. When I was hired by FlightSafety a few months later, I had taught myself a lot, most importantly to make my cockpit a fun safe place to learn.  I eventually gained a reputation as the “fix-it instructor,” and given mostly students other instructors had screwed up.  Since then I’ve met a lot of really good, dedicated Flight Instructors that had to do the same thing – teach themselves how to teach, while teaching.

Twenty years later many Flight Schools are still ignoring the responsibility of teaching their teachers how to teach, showing little respect for the family tree they reap their harvest from.  When I see student pilots and their instructors putting their headsets on before engine start, pushing the engine immediately above 1000 rpm after starting, and then doing their run-up on the ramp with people all around – I get sick to my stomach.  These pilots did not invent these bad habits, they inherited them.  They were taught them by their Flight Instructor, who was taught them by another Flight Instructor before them.  Law firms have clerks, hospitals have residents, businesses have interns, universities have teachers assistants, even plumbers have apprentices.  Mentors are the gardeners of young teachers, and new flight instructors deserve a mentorship program shadowing experienced CFI’s before they begin instructing.  Is kids teaching kids still the best we can do?  We teach people how to treat us.

My ears ring tonight as they will more and more.  Flying passengers on tour with FiFi my world is always loud but no one sound seems to stand out.  Instead they all roar in my head at once, clinging to each other in their urgency and volume.  My intercomm competes with the wind and the rumble clicking of my engine and even when I am not flying, their remnants remain in my ears for hours after I’ve landed.  The peaceful space up there, in the air where I am accustomed to playing quietly, offers no escape for me in Class C airspace.  My Speedmail competes for my attention silently, reminding that his needs need to be considered first.  It is my responsibility to hear my plane’s voice above all the noise and chaos, and learn to speak for him.   He has taught me that he can only do for me, what I do for him.  It took a year but by this tour I finally hear what he’s thinking, and that gives me the space to listen to everything else.

By Sunday afternoon the sky was as crowed as the ground in Sarasota. Tampa Approach was doing their best to work with me, and Jon in the C45, as we flew our passengers back and forth along the beach below 1500’.  They were handling both Tampa International and Sarasota jet arrivals, and as a result of all the traffic I was having to keep Approach frequency at full volume.  Climb here, turn there, traffic at your twelve o’clock – all came blasting through my headset, competing with the voice in my front seat.  It was so busy the only thing I could do was respond with my N-number and comply to whatever Approach said.  Then translate their command to my flier nicely.  Rephrase it in familiar terms like, “Hey, how bout you climb us up a little bit higher,” so they would remain relaxed and enjoy the flight.   By the second flight the airspace had really heated up and the pitch of the approach controllers voice raised as he became more frustrated.  I was trying to teach my customer how to use the roll wires to do a turn, and I missed one of Tampa’s calls to me.  As a result I was sent to detention for not paying attention, and told curtly, “667K I need you to climb immediately to 2900.”  What Tampa approach wasn’t saying was that we were becoming a problem in the system, and they were running out of options to provide us with separation.  It was just too crowed up there in the air above Sarasota, but not nearly as crowded as I knew it would be on the ramp.  I am rarely afraid of flying, but I am often afraid of landing.  What I encounter in the sky is far less intimidating to me than what I encounter on the ground.

At three thousand feet on downwind Tampa Approach turned us back over to Sarasota and the gentle voice in the tower cleared us to land immediately.  Requesting I make a short approach, “Straight to the numbers Speedmail.”  Adding kindly the current wind direction, and anticipating our needs in knowing that it would be the only information I cared about.  After we turned off the runway the tower advised the military transport that they didn’t need to extend any further, the traffic he was following was clear of the runway.  What the tower didn’t say was that they had held up a large military transport for us to get in first.  That kindness felt like someone holding the door open for me as I rushed inside, just before a storm. Everyone in the tower knew we were working in a challenging environment, with shifting winds, and an old biplane and his pilot could use all the help we could get.  Buddy was thinking this would be his last flight today, and I thanked the tower for both of us as he wagged his tail happily, taxing back toward his adoring fan club waiting for him on the ramp.  My plane loves attention, it is part of his heritage and I believe it is important that non-aviation people see the antique airplanes they rarely get up close to, but I do not share his love of attention.   Large groups of people overwhelm me pretty quickly, in fact they scare the hell out of me, and I rubbed my temples in anticipation.

Buddy’s prop had barely stopped spinning as the crowds crowded in around us.  It was mid afternoon and the ramp was packed with people, all talking at once. Crowds have a personality.  A collective vibe to them that shifts hourly depending on environmental conditions and line length, and this one felt anxious.  I was trying to get my flier out of the front seat, to take souvenir pictures after our flight together, when a group of men threw questions up the wing at me impatiently.  My customer’s pay $600.00 to fly with us and they deserve every minute of my complete attention, even after we’ve landed.  I tried to explain, “I will be with you in a few minutes, when I am done with my customer.”  But they weren’t listening and kept talking to my back as I unloaded him and took pictures by Buddy.  My ears were full of wind noise and echoes of ATC and I couldn’t get them to clear as questions disolved into sound bites.  A series of disconnected words instead of sentences, that I had to piece together mentally before I could reply.  I felt like I was listening underwater.  I imagined their mouth’s moving open and closed over my shoulder, like fish breathing underwater with me.  I needed some air.  I climbed back in Buddy to lock his ailerons and hunched down in my seat and whispered, “I’m sorry man, I got to get out of here.”  I knew he was thinking that I don’t get to leave him alone when the ramp is really busy.  It is my job to watch out for him because they will climb on his wings.  Most people have no idea he’s covered in fabric and not metal, but I was desperate for silence, even for ten minutes.  I jumped out of the cockpit and headed straight through the crowd toward the FBO entrance.  Telling myself to just keep moving, “Walk with a purpose Sarah, don’t make eye contact.”  I only got halfway to the door before a hand touched my arm and said, “Excuse me Ma’am, you’re the Stearman pilot right?  Can I ask you a question?”  Then another and another and another.  I never made it to the FBO.  I stood against the wall, twenty feet from the FBO door trapped.  Listening to story after story while looking at my plane surrounded by people, looking back at me surround by people.  I was a deserter, caught abandoning my post.  A line from Top Gun bitch slapped my inner coward, “Don’t you leave me Maverick!”  I did the walk of shame back to my plane and crawled between his landing gear and wiped oil off his belly, as a silent gesture of apology and my ears started to clear along with the crowd.  A man with timid eyes was watching me through Buddy’s speedring.  I smiled at him and he got up the courage to speak to me and tell me his story, which started with a question. “Why does your engine have an odd number of cylinders?”

For hours they came and went as I sat under Buddy’s gear, each telling a story which had little to do with aviation but began with a question about my plane.  A women with swollen feet sat on Buddy’s tire and talked of grandchildren and being a widow after she asked me, “Why do your tires not have tread on them?”  An older man told me of his bone cancer and how he was going to die this year after he asked me, “Why is your rudder shaped differently than the other biplane’s?”  None of them could say what they really wanted to say.  Buddy knew what they wanted to say and reminded me gently I should not have tried to runaway to the FBO, but instead stayed with him.  “I know you don’t like crowds like I do, but I can’t protect you up there, if you don’t protect me down here.”  He said to me silently, “Sometimes what people don’t say, says more than what they do say.  They’re lonely Sarah, and for some reason talking about a plane like me, is the only way they can begin to talk about themselves.  On tour, it is our job to listen.”

When I travel on a cross-county I spend a lot of evenings in bookstores, used bookstores when I can find them. It’s a bit of a ritual. I try to find St Exupery’s section, see if they have anything beyond Wind, Sand, and Stars and buy a copy of The Little Prince.  I store them in my baggage and give them out as gifts to people I meet, people I care for in my plane.  I know it’s strange to give a children’s book to an adult, even more so to give it to a relative stranger, especially when I know they don’t understand it. I don’t expect them to.  I realize people rarely read the books I give them, but I hope my gift will somehow infuse the words into them, even subconsciously.  I was packing my plane for the FiFi tour last week and thought I saw a copy of The Little Prince in the far back corner of my baggage, but just couldn’t reach it. I gave up and started throwing everything out of my baggage compartment on my hangar floor.  Headsets, folders, towels, notebooks all went flying, until I finally grabbed the book.  As it hit the ground a handwritten note on Terrace Hotel stationary fell out of the cover.  I just stared at the note without picking it up. I knew exactly what it said and who it was from.  It was a letter from Florence Mascott,  WWII WASP 44-10, to my mother who was dying of cancer written in March of 2010.  She had written it after a beautiful dinner in the Terrace dining room with a group of Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, where we were all soaked in martini’s and flying stories, sharing smiles and hugs after our day together. Florence wanted to wish my mother a Happy Birthday and thank her for having me, so she asked the waitress for a piece of paper and wrote her a letter at the table.  I never got the chance to give it to her.  I went to my mother’s funeral a few weeks later.  One of the great messages in The Little Prince is the importance of ‘taking care.’

I am always responsible for everyone I fly.  I am their protector in all ways and even if I have to struggle, I try to find some thread to connect me to them, to care about them.  It is my duty to bring them back safely and most flights that is where our relationship ends.   But some days I have the greatest feeling of joy knowing I will care for someone truly special, someone who will always be with me, imprinted on my data plate.  I stood in my hangar and replayed that day in March four years ago, as if it was yesterday.  That afternoon I loaded Florence into my Stearman and watched her climb up the wing, barefoot and ponytailed.  It was as if I was watching an eighteen year old student pilot climbing into her Stearman at Sweetwater, Texas for her first training flight.  She beamed, shy but fearless and just happy for the chance to fly.

After all the photos were taken of the WASP’s together around my plane we taxied off the ramp into the grass and put our arms up, straight up to the sky, and cheered to us. Two gals flying together about to go on a great adventure.  “Yahoo!” Florence yelled.  At lunch she had told me she was worried she would be sick or worse, scared.  I took her hands in mine and I promised I would take the very best care of her.  I told her I had just flown my eighty year old mother all across Florida and she loved every minute of it, so with her “Yahoo,” I knew Florence had chosen to believe me.  Trust is usually more hard-won.

We took off to the south and flew over the orange groves at 800 feet, low so Florence could smell the orange blossoms and I turned us to the north and told her I was going to take her to a secret place, my favorite place.  I told her to look down and she would see elephants magically appear for her. The Ringling elephant preserve is hidden north of Fantasy of Flight and there were at least twenty to be seen that afternoon.  Florence clapped her hands and giggled as we circled the elephant ranch five times.  With each turn she pleaded, “Just one more time, please, just one more.”  I started to sing to her the song my mother sang to me, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.”  I watched as her smile grew wider across her face, and her hands slowly emerged over the edge of the cowling as her shoulders relaxed.  Then Florence held perfectly still and I knew it was time for me to stop singing.  I looked in the mirror at her face, a face I held so dear, I thought of how Florence’s trust had been granted to me so easily.  Wondering why it couldn’t be that easy for everyone to believe I would take care of them in my planes always.  We flew silently across the lakes on our return to the airport as I watched tears run out from behind her glasses.  I don’t believe she was sad, she simply had remembered why flying had been so important to her sixty-five years ago.  It was as if Florence had run into an old beau.  A Stearman who had imprinted on her data plate, decades before, and she had forgotten how much she missed his company.  At that moment, I was just happy to be ‘taking care.’

Art from nothing, beauty from waste, discarded pieces collected, polished, refitted, and reassembled to be brought to flight again.  Restorations are never exactly as they were but better, more beautiful, and stronger than before. Watching Buddy’s parts be put together for seven years at Kimball’s, to most people they looked like a pile of junk in a shed.  An old frame, a rusted motor mount, chemical eaten duster wings, boxes and boxes of metal bits and pieces that would eventually come together to form my beautiful Speedmail.  I made monthly trips to visit my parts for years.  I would stand in the storage shed and look at them, not sure how Kimball’s were going to do it, but I could see clearly what he was going to be.  With all the wondrous metal machining and engineering they put into building Buddy, the most transformational part of the restoration for me, was when they started the fabric work.  When my plane was covered, stitched in fabric and painted, he came to life, and taught me a very important life lesson.

When I returned to Lake Geneva this winter after barnstorming, I looked around to see what was missing. I needed to shift my focus and discover a source, a different building block to start my Invisible Empire.  I call it “invisible” because no one else sees it but me.  My Invisible Empire is shaped like a Richardson Romanesque arch, arcing over my head. Constructed of conceptual wedge shaped “idea stones” or voussoir’s, representing projects I have in progress, even if only in my mind. It’s a big arch, supporting  a Jimmie Allen Flying Club comic, a festival of UP to cultivate curiosity, creativity, and rethink what flying means to everyone, a foundation to get at-risk teens life coaching in my airplane, a children’s book, promotional air tours, and many more aspirations.  In order to be the architect of such a massive structure, I needed to find the first idea stone, the right virtual voussoir to lay in place to start building upon.  Then see if my Invisible Empire arch holds, or it crumbles to the ground, and if so try another one.  I am a bit of a pattern watcher and sometimes I like to work backwards.  I begin by noticing the absence of something, before I notice the presence of something else.  In November I started noticing the absence of trash around me.  Lake Geneva is very clean for a city with a lot of tourism. In the alley behind my apartment there are as many recycling bins, as their are trash containers.  So I started watching trash. What filled up bags the most?  What filled up the bins the most?  Cardboard, hmmmm, interesting.  I started thinking about cardboard. Where it came from, where it went to, and what I could make out of it?  I discovered that paper was Wisconsin’s number one resource, and that it could be 100% recycled.  How can I make cardboard inspire everyone to fly, and who are the people who need to believe they can fly the most?  I looked at cardboard for a while, until I saw what was missing.

Late one night I emailed my friend Mirco in Italy to ask a question, “Wasn’t the best present you ever got, the giant cardboard box it came in?”  I attached  a picture of a little boy in a cardboard airplane and my idea for  designing a “Cardboard Buddy.”  He shot back a picture of a race car he and his wife Monica built out of an appliance box for their son.  Seems we were going to make toys.  We started to design a buildable, wearable, customizable, “Cardboard Buddy.”  I sent the concept to my friend Ben Redman and he helped out with measurements of his little boy, so we could scale it.  Then I found a local manufacturer to build them right up the road at Wisconsin Packaging, who would outsource the assembly and packaging to another local company, who employ’s handicapped workers.  Even though we’re still finishing the concept design, strengthening the wings and adding N-struts, this “idea stone” seems to be holding up pretty well. When the design is finished we are going use the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, to raise enough money to build a limited edition.  So we can give the template away for free on my website, and donate the majority of “Cardboard Buddy’s” to children’s organizations and shelters.

There is a beautiful strength in the gentle nature of fabric airplanes and even cardboard ones, that mimics our lives and connects us to them in remarkable ways.  Many aircraft owners have a symbiotic relationship with their planes. I seem to be inexplicably tied to mine always.  A friend once said to me that our planes are our children, but I see my planes as my mentors.  Wiser than me, teaching me lessons, as I try to keep up with the homework they give.  What my Speedmail taught me during his restoration was that I was in need of a restoration myself.  I had too many pieces of metal built up on my exterior and not enough fabric, and that was compromising my structural integrity.

I’ve spent most of my life in the company of men. Tagging along with the boys since childhood, and traveling the country on boats and planes with them.  I love their company.  I guess I prefer the directness of a verbal punch over a passive aggressive pinch any day, but men can be pretty tough.  Flying alongside the boys for twenty years, I had been trying to be as tough as them.  It wasn’t until a series of stresses, a number of sadnesses came along in sequence.  One after another during the final years of Buddy’s restoration, that my tough exterior started to crack from mental metal fatigue, and all that toughness started to fall away.  Which is a good thing, but when I got one really hard life punch, I didn’t have the exterior metal I was accustomed to wearing to protect me and that blow caused some serious structural failure.  When I was there, in despair, leaking from every pore in my body, without any armor left, my plane reminded me I only had two choices.  To put all that metal back on, reapply all those tough exterior parts I had used as a brace, or leave them off and lighten up.  I listened to him and started enlightening myself with the strength of knowledge, and empowering myself with the power of love and kindness.  I learned the only armor I would ever need would be found in the friendship of people who were looking to lighten up, and enlighten themselves as well.  Change is hard for people, it makes them uncomfortable, and when you change inevitably the skeptics question, “Who does she think she is?”  I won’t answer them except to say.  I am not exactly who I was, or yet exactly who I will be.  I am a project in progress.

I’ve been collecting sunsets, storing them on my shelves, pasting them to the walls and floors of me. Piling them up next to piles of thunderstorms, racks of rainbows, baskets full of full moons, and stacks of sunrises.  In love with the colors of sky and how the light reflects all around.  Scooping up handfuls of colors like Skittles all my life, coloring and painting, wondering why I see what I see there?  Pilots are often in love with the sky, daydreamers always looking up, hiding wonder behind their sunglasses.  I recognize pilot’s eyes even in non-pilots, they hold a luminescent quality.  The tapetum lucidum I’ve written of.  I see them as an internal pilot light of sorts, glowing Sumerian sized eyes wide with awe, reflecting what we’ve seen up close in the sky.   My eyes have been craving snow, and I wanted to know why?

I have always been curiously curious about everything, making me appear more curious than ever, and not caring to hide my curiosity any longer.  Openly looking for answers, teaching myself to write by writing my blog, and sharing the things I learn on my website.  I have been hiding for most of my life, wandering around in my beautiful exile’s on boats and in planes.  Quietly wondering what fog taste like, and what clouds smelled like, why I see purple in the marsh, and what blue feels like in my hands.  I don’t know why I ask the questions I do, but I have accepted that I have a great curiosity that I choose not to hide any longer.  What I’ve learned is as we grow older, we worry more about what people think and how we are perceived, than what we think.  In the subtractive process of aging, we mask over our natural luminescence, hiding the childlike exuberance that let us wear our superhero cape to the grocery, ask a thousand daily questions of why, and tell people we love them, just because we felt like it.  As we grow up we cover up our natural transparency, becoming more opaque.  Dimming wonder down through narrowing eyes of black or white.

With my love of the sky and of color, why was I loving looking at white snow for hours?  I found my answer.  Snow is a group of individual ice crystals arranged together.  When a light photon enters a layer of snow, it goes through an individual ice crystal on the top, which changes its direction and sends it out to another ice crystal, which does the same thing until all the crystals are bouncing light between them, reflecting each other and passing it on.  Ice crystals are very generous it seems.  They reflect all the different light frequencies, all colors of light are shared and bounced back out, not absorbed.  The “color” of all the frequencies in the visible spectrum combined in equal measure is – white.  In understanding this I no longer saw snow as white, but as a frozen light rainbow of infinite color, and it glowed more brilliantly than any rainbow I have ever seen in the sky. The wonder of it all is not the science behind it, or that you agree with me, or even like snow.  It is that I chose to question what I saw, and when I did that, I changed the way I saw.