For Thanksgiving - "Strays"

Chapter 43 - Strays    

Walking through my neighborhood with our rescue dog yesterday, I saw a cat, arrested within the eyes of that dog, pulled up high in the apostrophe of fear as he held poised for fight or flight.  I pulled her gently away, as she has been around cats since being rescued and we weren't in for a rumble. But I didn't want her to get a clawed nose for her curiosity.  The cat's coat was in good condition as far as I could tell, but it was very thin, likely a stray. I was going to see where it went, where it might have a home, but it was gone in a flash before I could check on its well-being. I'd seen it before, always hanging around the same spot in the fence, where she likely had found a safe place to sleep.

I’m glad we adopted our rescue dog after our last dog died suddenly from cancer. She had been dumped heartworm positive at a high-kill shelter. A stray. We’d see them on the streets, in shelters, the fortunate ones collected by rescue groups, the unfortunate—the look in their eyes, heartrending.

But animals aren't the only “strays” we see; people fall into that same category.  I'm not talking about the homeless, necessarily, but about those people that by circumstance or transplant find themselves in a new city, for a new job, or a fresh start, where they don't know anyone, or are stranded somewhere while traveling for a day or days, due to weather and fate.

I found myself in that position after I hung up my professional wings and took a job in a neighboring state before I met my husband and got married.  Like any new person with little seniority, that meant I would be on duty over the holiday.

I remember walking out to my little VW Jetta from my workplace the night before Thanksgiving that first year there, as the sky spat cold rain, and felt a tear on my face. I'm not sure why, as a professional pilot in my younger days, I'd spent many a holiday alone, on-call or in a hotel.  Years, later, holidays were busy times at work.  But that night it got to me—I really had no place to go but home to my dog and a sandwich, my belongings still not unpacked from the move. I was hoping someone would remember that I had no family near, and would turn around, pulling back into the parking lot to ask me to join them for dinner the next day when I got off work. As I walked to the car, I got a gleam out of the corner of my eye in the darkness, a movement and I smiled thinking someone remembered me and was turning back with an invitation. But it was nothing more than an illusion, that faint glimpse of reflection imagined there as you gaze into the depths of a wishing well, only to find cold stillness.

There was no car, just a flash of light reflected off a nearby road, and it brought back every moment as a child, those moments we have all had when we feared we just didn't fit in, that we didn't belong.

I was always the one inviting the new kid to play with us, befriending the nerdy and the odd.  Perhaps it was because I viewed myself that way. So, when I was a very young flight instructor, living out of a suitcase with no roots, I decided to continue that tradition and share my table with others like me. With most of us on call to give an “introductory flight” to a prospective student, hoping to earn some dollars to pay next quarter’s tuition, or too broke to fly home commercially, many of us had no place to go on Thanksgiving Day. So, I hung a flyer up on the instructor's bulletin board at my airport, for any errant corporate pilot in the area or my coworkers. An invite to come over to my little place for Thanksgiving dinner.

I'd not say I was “friends” with all these guys from the perspective that we would continue to hang out together when we finished college, going off to fly for the military or the airlines.  These were simply people I'd spent hours in the cockpit with getting my various instructor ratings or occasionally getting the &*#@ scared out of us, absorbing the wonderful colors and shapes and shadows of the sky, making temporary homes in a series of small apartments with multiple roommates, cramming as much as possible into the rare twenty-four hours we actually were off.  So yes, we were family, if only related by adventure and empty pockets. And for that, I could think of no better reason than to peel thirty pounds of potatoes, bake five pies, and to bat my big green eyes at the butcher to talk him out of that extra ham at half off.

Yes, thirty pounds of potatoes, for although I expected RSVP's from about six people, I ended up with twenty-seven people, some of the pilots I worked with, some of the office staff who were single, a couple of our mechanics, and a number of corporate pilots that used our facility and stayed at the local hotel while their passengers enjoyed Thanksgiving with family and they got free cable. They arrived with drinks and chips and thankfully, some extra rolls and a couple of pies from the Safeway store.

It was a wonderful evening, with massive quantities of food eaten, countless stories told and much laughter, eating until we couldn't eat anymore. There was something starry in the kitchen that night, where I learned as much about my ability to organize and create as I did about the essential bond that a meal around the table creates, even if it's a bunch of card tables shoved together with white bleached sheets over them.

Did it mean that we all got along perfectly after that night? No, for there were still those days that intruded darkly on hours normally full of light. Those long close-quartered days where we plowed through thick dark clouds to reach ice-covered firmament, cursing the weather and long lines for takeoff. Days where the alarm clock snatched us violently out of wrung out sleep, sweeping us all back into the thrall, impotent for days against returning to home, knowing that instead of getting a nap afterward, many of most of us would be heading off to night classes.  As much fun as flying could be, after a few months of such a schedule, even the best of us got a little self-absorbed. Add in constant travel, books and study hall, and it was a life of scattered adrenalin, little sleep and scant time for real relationships. Just like life for many of us now, with families and jobs and pets and demands.

But that night, if only for a few hours, we had that bond of family and food, warmth and safety. It was that moment when chance aligns with time, whose only foe is death and together death's darkness seems so very far away.

Strays.

You see them at an airport, that frazzled traveler that just missed the last flight, that young person sleeping on the floor after their flight canceled without the means to secure a hotel room. I've offered a hot coffee and a sandwich with a smile to more than one soldier or college student I saw stranded at the airport. Because I have been that young person with a rumbling stomach, surrounded by strangers, wanting only to be home.

I had a flight between two Midwest cities a few years back after I'd picked up a couple of days work as a contract corporate pilot after getting a call from a corporation I’d done some part-time flying for in a neighboring state.  The city where I was flying out of to connect with that aircraft wasn't home, but it was near where I was spending Thanksgiving with friends.  Easy money and the holiday was over anyway.

The sky was cold and cloudy as I waited for my return flight, to be followed by a long drive home, but there was no precipitation. All of a sudden, our flight was canceled, with no reason given, but we were only told we'd be on another flight real soon. I didn't see any mechanics at the plane, and the flight crew was all there, so I called Flight Service, for the aviation weather, providing them the registration number of the plane I'd just flown in, the previous night.  There was severe icing aloft, unusual to be so widespread, but deadly. No one, big or small, was going to be flying out of that airport, and likely for the rest of the day.

At this point, we were standing in line to be re-booked; the word not having gotten to the gate that the airport would essentially be shutting down flights.  There was a well-dressed gentleman behind me. We had chatted a bit and it turned out his wife worked at the same bank one of the folks I had spent the holiday with worked at. I quietly told him about the weather and explained that NO ONE was going to be flying, and I was going to get a rental car now, as the flight was just a “hop” and getting home back to where my car was parked was just a three-and-a-half-hour drive. A couple of other people overheard.  I asked, “Do you want to go with me?”  With a quiet nod, four of us snuck out of the line.  For it only takes a word that the last flights are canceling to start the disturbed buzz of voices in the customer service line, like bees, before they move in an agitated swarm to the rental car counters, with stinging glances to the Priority Customers, the worker bees hoping for one solitary car to be left.  I wanted to get out before THAT happened.

The weather out of the clouds was great, just a little snow and we made the trip in four hours, everyone calling their spouses or friends that they would be a bit late and whether they needed a ride from the airport. On the drive, we were strangers and we weren't.  We talked about holiday plans, kids, and vacations when it got warm.  There were bad puns and WAY too many references to the Trains Planes and Automobiles movie—something only folks that saw that movie would appreciate. “You're Going the Wrong Way!” one of us exclaimed and the whole car erupted in laughter like we were a bunch of grade school kids, the cool kids—“Those Aren't Pillows!” as we laughed again, just having fun, with no fears of rejection or hurt or loss.

With a stop for sandwiches at one of the toll plazas, we soon made it, only to find the terminal pretty much deserted, most of the flights coming from north or east also canceled inbound.  They thanked me for making that call and offering to pay for the rental car. I had let them pay for gas, and that's all I wanted.

We said our goodbyes and walked away towards home. The sun, whose brilliant form dwarfs us all into the smallest of particles upon the earth as we are held within its glare, was hidden behind the steeled gray of cloud cover. With its brightness now captured behind a stratified door, the night fell upon us as we walked to our cars; it was as if we were all just shadows, covered with a fine, soft scattering of night, falling like ash.

I never saw any of them again.

Thanksgiving for me that first year after a career change was one of those “sandwich days,” not for lack of an invite with friends, but personal and work-related.  Still, it gave me time to think and reflect, something that is as important as giving thanks.  The human heart is large enough to contain the entire world, and it's small enough to be felled by just one being, yet it is valiant enough to bear all burdens when you realize you are not alone.

As the phone rang tonight with the cherished voice of my husband, to let me know he had reached his destination safely, I realized I had much to be thankful for. Even in an empty house, there was a gentle doggie snore of an adopted friend until it was time to join them in slumber.  With a quick warm hand pressed for a moment on top of a cold square box in which my former furry best friend lay, I left the house and walked to a little store a block away, a can opener and a little plastic bowl in my pocket. I got some cat food and put it out in a bowl along a solitary fence.      
- From True Course - Lessons of a Life Aloft by Brigid Johnson                                                                                  

Are We There Yet?

For my pilot readers, yes, that is Jeppesen CSG-1P Slide Graphic Computer (E6B as we knew it as student pilots) used by Spock to figure the time before impact. I wonder if I still have one.

In a few weeks, as soon as the doc gives the OK, I need to get back out and get a checkride in an airplane for currency. I don't fly often but it's a skill set I not only enjoy, but don't wish to lose. Even if it means a checkride.

For, like any pilot, I hate taking exams.

Written or otherwise. I think it started in early school years when I got a question really wrong.

The question was: "Where do women mostly have curly hair?

Apparently, the correct answer was Africa.Checkrides are the one part of the job that I think most civilian commercial and military pilots hate. It doesn't matter how many hours you have, how many missions you've flown. And they don't get any easier. Doing maneuvers to perfection while everything on the airplane seems to fail, one after another, while a check airman is peering over one shoulder and those stripes on your uniform are resting on the other. It never mattered how many years I'd done it or the fact that I'd never failed one, taking that first step into the briefing room to start the oral, my mind would go completely blank. Circumstance and fear had a way of subtracting information from my brain with surgical precision.

Yet somehow, when the first question came up, everything resusitates, not by sheer brilliance but simply from the fact that I'd studied my rear end off for weeks ahead of time. To this day I can still draw the entire electrical system of a 727 on an unfolded cocktail napkin.

I think it looked something like this.

click to enlarge

A Toast to Aviators

Definitions:

Pilots: People who drive airplanes.

Naval Aviators: (from a friend of mine, a retired NFO) "Cold, steely eyed, weapons systems managers who kill bad people and break things. However, they can also be very charming and personable. The average Naval Aviator, despite sometimes having a swaggering exterior, is very much capable of such feelings as love, affection, intimacy and caring. These feelings just don’t involve anyone else."

Before winter set in I had a chance to meet up for dinner with some long time friends who are retired militatory aviators who I have worked with after their service ended. 

To my favorite Naval Aviators -

 Pickle, Pause, Pull

or Pickle, Pull, Pause (oops).

 It's always good to talk to you and when I get a chance to see you in person again to share a meal and drinks, it's even better.

And thank you for never once saying "I told you so" regarding that Air Force airman that broke my heart before I met my husband (who you all actually approved of for once).

These times are few but they are prescious. We catch up on hobbies, on kids, on who is working where now.  We talk of old careers and new careers and how no one wanted to tell the guy who scheduled that tabletop not involving ground based folks that "Practical Exercise Not Involving Soldiers" does not make the best acyonym.  We talked of lost loves and new loves and who has left us.  But as we raise our glasses to toast those airmen Gone West, to Lex, to others we respected, we realize that those that left us, did so doing exactly what they loved, despite the cost.

It may be years before we meet again in person. But I know that in this instant, this moment, nothing else matters but shared stories of our past, a simple toast, to loved ones gone or simply far away. This is true friendship, something you can never buy, like the heat of a candle that warms me from the inside out.

You three gentlemen have always being there for me, listening through the bad times and helping me celebrate in the good times. I love you guys. You were, and are, a shining  example of what being a patriot and an airman can be.

Cheers.
B.

Field Dressing

Before I had my first piece published in a magazine, I got a couple of rejections. I'm a scientist by education, not a writer, it's just the way I relax and work through things. But I thought it was as good as some of the stuff I've read out there, at least with a good editor, so I went ahead and tried. One well known outdoor magazine said my work was really, really good but "too philosophical" for them. A woman editor at another publication that had a mostly male demographic suggested I perhaps write for a fashion magazine if I wanted a wider audience.

Oh yes, fashion is MY middle name.

The best outing I've had in ages with a handsome male, I wore a ballcap. I own one dress, the cobalt blue screen of death number and the last time I wore a ball gown was some Presidential Inaugural Ball thingy I got invited to. My house is decorated in "Outdoor Life" and I have more guns than shoes, so I am NOT the person to go to for fashion advice and I'm not sure how I'd write about it.

"She had been waiting, knowing her target would come, moving through the trees with certitude. She holds her gun in solemn readiness, waiting just for the perfect moment. There, between an oak tree and  the ditch line, was the buck. She drew in her breath, bringing up her bright and shining weapon, which coordinated perfectly with her caban coat, in quilted napa leather so soft and weightless it practically floated and her Mongolian Tapestry boots.

What was that? She looked through her chic but dark shades of Persol PO 2720S Sunglasses. The buck was almost into view, moving quietly as if simply formed out of still air. The muscle memory in her is poised to call him to her, as her finger moves towards the trigger, its touch but a final kiss.

But she hesitated, distracted by a sound above, removing her finger from the trigger guard, the Chanel lambswool glove a perfect match to her hunting ensemble. There! Overhead. A formation on the wing, the honking just saying "Canadian Goose season opened yesterday in the South Zone". It would be a perfect shot. She is torn, undecided. Should she bag the buck that's coming into range or something in genuine 100% goose down? What's a girl to do?"

In next month's issue: Hair Accessories That Work and Reviewing the Latest Fall Trends in Fur.

I don't think so. I'll stick with what I like, even if its appeal is lost to the masses.
- Love, Brigid

Veterans Day - A View of Home

Dad's home sold earlier this year.  Last fall he made the decision to go into assisted living. He swore he would live out his days in his big old house, but he needed 24 hour looking after and with ice and winter storms his nurse's aids couldn't always make it safely to his home and at one point he just said: "I'm ready." He did NOT want to live with family, he wanted his own space.  I get that.  So my cousin Liz did some checking around and found him a really nice assisted living place.  It's very new and not in the town I grew up in, but it's a short drive away, so his friends can still visit and it's only an hour away from where Liz's partner Keith's family lives so they can visit often after they helped him move in.

Still, it was really hard seeing everything from the home that's been "home" to me for 60 years, leave, to be sold or donated to charity so the funds could pay for the care I'd been providing since my brother died in 2014. When I saw that the last of the house's contents were gone, I could only stand silently, as something like the wind, chill and solitary, blew through me.  So many memories within those walls.  Dad took it better than I did, I think, feeling at first a bit miscast but then accepting his new surroundings as a safe shelter.  He has grown to love his new place with a view of the woods, and someone there all the time if he needs help. He has made friends with other Veterans, and they spend many an hour sitting out in the garden area exchanging stories and bad jokes, their rapport not like that of siblings, but as people who had breathed and endured wartime, the internal scars of which they all still bore with honor.

I visited him just a few weeks ago, and one of the drives we made was down the street of the old house.  It looked to be occupied by a family, there were a couple of kids bikes out front and new flowers had been planted and the trim around the windows had been repainted. Dad was happy to see it went to someone who would care for it as he did with the laughter of children within those walls no longer only an echo.

On Veterans Day today, I thought back to one last flight before the house was sold when an Honor Flight Group was at the airport as I arrived.   How wonderful to see the crowds of people who stood up and clapped as these brave Veterans were wheeled past, and the line of officers that shook their hands and thanked them for their service. I had brought a tiny little point and shoot out on this trip and got one discreet picture, even as a tear ran down my cheek.

Good people honor their Veterans as we are taught to honor our parents. Dad bought his house 10 years after his service in WWII when he left the military for good.  He did everything he could to make sure we lived in a safe world, even before we were born. That is why my "vacations" the last 30 years have been back and forth to Dad's house to care for him and my step-mom when she had Alzheimer's and later just my Dad. My big brother, a retired Navy Submariner who worked for Electric Boat, made sure the house stayed in good condition, with  both of us making sure there was enough money in his account to handle its upkeep (you can't see it from this angle but my brother and I got him one of those recliners that lifted him up to a standing position). I handled cooking and cleaning, canning and freezing, so meals when I was gone, were easy. Clothes were mended and the gutters were cleaned. After my stepmom died and Dad was recuperating from a minor stroke, my brother moved in with Dad so we didn't have to pay for in-home care, which he was needing more of.

When my brother died I realized just how much he had been doing for my Dad that was now up to me so more frequent trips were made and nursing care was arranged so Dad could stay in his home as long as he wanted to.

When I came home that last time before the house sold, he did something that my brother always did for me, leave a couple of balloons tied to one of my stuffed animals (yes, they were still in my room) on the bed.

My bedroom looked just the same as when I was a teen, with the rainbows painted when I was 14 out of the horrid colored 70's leftover paint (I do NOT want to remember which room the aqua one was, but I remember the awful salmon color as my childhood bedroom paint scheme).  The rest of the house had been repainted prior to sale, my room, being the last to be "updated".

Being in that house that last day brought back so many memories. The houses on our block were all were erected in the 50's, sprawling across what used to be farm fields, rich soil that lay at the foothills of the mountains, small squares of cedar and brick, laying in the shadows of tall unaxed trees and the log train that serenaded a little girl to sleep.

The neighborhood back then was different than the dynamics of a neighborhood now.  Families moved in and didn't move out. There weren't foreclosures popping up every few houses, and kids tended to live in the same home from the time they came home from the hospital until they went off to the lumber mills or college. It was a small mill town, most of the kids ended up there, drawn by the lure of a log mill wage at 18 that seemed like a fortune until you saw the brutal tax on your bones and your spirit after 40 years of it. Only a few of us made our way out beyond those snow-capped mountains.

We knew all of our neighbors, the other Mom's home during the day, welcoming in the noise and the occasional dirty footprint onto the linoleum.  We knew which Mom made the best chocolate chip cookie, and which one would be as stern a taskmaster as our own Mom when it came to playing quietly in the house.  (Look it's NOT a hallway, it's a Hot Wheels racetrack and I needed 6 extra kids as a pit crew).

The town's only grocery was across a two-lane 50 mph roadway that leads to the mountains. We were NOT allowed across it on our bikes without a parent, even if there was a four-way traffic light at the intersection with the grocery and the gas station. There was no even THINKING of breaking that rule. We knew the consequences of being reckless, and it was not a slap on the wrist or a taxpayer-funded 'stimulus'. Outside of that, there were all kinds of places to roam, and in the summertime, we were pretty much outdoors from breakfast to supper, no helmets, no sunscreen if we could help it, no hand sanitizer, no shin guards.

We'd ride up and down the block, usually playing Man From Uncle (I always got to be Ilya Kuryakin whom I'm sure started out his Secret Agent stuff, as I did, with training wheels).  We'd play soldier and spy or cowboys and Indians in our back yard where Dad and my favorite Uncle, an engineer, built a cool A-frame playhouse for me.  I could usually squirrel away some of the Hostess products from the kitchen, inside its structure for the Indians to run raids on. I was ready, I had my cereal box Colt six-shooter and a BUS (back-up slingshot).

But, like the examples of our parents, and the lessons of TV, which did not yet involve drugs and spandex, we were careful with our weapons, even if they were plastic.   Besides, should those rules be broken, we knew who the Sheriff in town was, and it was Mom, even if she gave up her actual Deputy Sheriff badge and an 18 year career in Law Enforcement, when they adopted both of us.

Those were glorious days.  We'd drink from the hose or come in for KoolAid, and a hug, soda pop being something not in a budget of a single income family, reserved for a treat while on vacation to my Aunt and Uncle's ranch. We'd count marbles, candy money, and coup, and we'd roam as far as we could without crossing that highway.

Many of the houses had fences, many did not, but there was an alleyway of grass that ran behind our house where we could run covert missions into a neighbor's place. The ones without kids were off-limits, we were taught to respect others' property, but we did raid one retired couple's little decorative pond at the back corner of their place for the occasional frog which we'd use to scare some sissy kid, and then return it safely. (Seriously, if I ever give you a shoebox with holes in it with a big bow on top, don't open it).

On Saturdays, the cars came out to be washed and sometimes waxed. I could earn spending money for candy by washing the station wagon for Dad and gladly did so, learning early the correlation between labor and putting food on the table. Our Dads would mow, and our Moms would get groceries and bake cookies for the week.

In the late afternoon, Dad would curl up with some sports on TV for a couple of hours, his only break in a long week of work and family. Mom would go to her needlework or crafts while the neighborhood kids continued to play those glorious summer games that were relegated to single days off during the school year for us. For Sunday was a day of worship, of rest, reading, board games and music, not raids on a local fort or trying to blow something up in the garage.

Now, so much of the area has changed  I see houses down the street where there's no money to repair a roof, moss taking over, plants growing in the gutter, but there's a new fishing boat and Hummer in the driveway of the very modest home. On others, there are bars on the front doors of the homes we'd run up to ring the doorbell on Halloween, without any adult in trail.

I love my Dad, as I think we all do our parents, even when we don't see eye to eye with them, both sides occasionally causing hurt even to someone they love dearly. Such is human nature.  But I also admire him even as I tease him a little that he has a picture of Ronald Reagan riding a horse on his desk.

So I did all I could to keep some continuity in his life as long as I could. Having buried two wives and two children, a daughter they lost in their late 20's and my brother, Dad needed that sense of stability, even if the martini making duties have been inherited by my husband.

The very last look at the house - it was completely empty, nothing at all left, but walls that held within them so much.

The span of that empty space is as wide as our grief.

As I left the house that last time, I looked up to the Heavens and told my brother told him I loved him, went to the car, climbed in and started the engine and gave my Dad a hug there as he waited for me. You can't NOT take the opportunity for a hug.  For it might well be the last one. Dad and I are not related by blood but we are, by a life lived, commitment honored and memories made. He touched my cheek, with work-weary, dry, thin hands, an old man's fingers, yet still, his hands, my Daddy's hands, touching my rosy cheek where the strength of his blood still flows within me, will flow, even after his long journey back to his reward.

I looked at the house as I left it that last time, my family pictures now adorning the walls of Dad's new place.  All of those memories seemed to condense in it, as if the house alone were the source of them, shining from it from that big picture window, glimpsed just for a second as my rental car pulls away, like that 10 point whitetail you see the split second after he sees you, when he's already gone, even as you yearn for him to return.

.

Solar Powered Dog

Larelei Lab - our puppy mill rescue dog adopted early this summer.

I think a nap in the sun sounds good myself.

I Vote for Thor Michaelson

Music Gives a Soul to the Universe

“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” ― Plato ( and yes, this is all hand-written for guitar).