Flying Towards the Sound of Thunder

What is the first sound you can remember? Most might say their mother's voice. I struggle to remember her voice; she died when I was just entering adulthood.  But I do remember her smell, a mixture of clean rain and Chanel No. 5. It's a smell, like that of sandalwood, that I can't catch a whiff of now without going soft and quiet, with this little echo in my chest.

Dad kept a few of her things around, her light blue sweater draped over the armchair where she read all of her books, her robe.  It was as if the presence of her things somehow compelled their home to remain that, more than brick and mortar, but the place that held the sentience and character of the woman who graced it.  Instead, just looking at them in the silence was simply an affirmation of emptiness, and soon, they, too, were put away.

I still have the sweater and the robe, but I do wish I could remember her voice.

One of my earliest memories of hearing comes from the sound of the ocean during summer vacation, flirting up against the sand while I played with a little bucket and shovel while gulls cried around me like mewing kittens. So many sounds as I grew, the clatter of my mom juggling pots and pans, making us dinner every night, the spray of the garden hose as my father washed our station wagon every Saturday, the wind pouring through the masts of trees, and later; the sound of an airplane.

When I travel, I hate sitting in the back of the plane: it's noisy, but what makes it worse is that it is the noise of strangers. Give me the cockpit any day. A cockpit is rarely quiet, but it's a symphony of familiar sounds. The air traffic controller's voice, a reassuring sotto voice, confirms that the two minds are in agreement and that all is well with the world. The sounds pick up as you descend, the gear coming down, the reading of the checklist, and before you know it, there is the ground. It's solid underneath you and hard, and if you flared too high, you'd break your aircraft against its incontrovertible passivity. But sometimes, the earth acquiesced, and the wheels kissed the pavement like lips against a warm neck at dawn.

Aloft and level, though, airplane sounds stabilize into a gentle song with just the occasional background chorus of the air traffic controllers, and you would have time to think and perhaps chat a little. Pilots talk of many things aloft when settled into a long cruise on autopilot, and the adage is true, when with the opposite sex, pilots talk about airplanes, and in an aircraft, pilots talk about the opposite sex. We talk of the spiritual, and we talk of the mundane. We talk about families and jobs, spouses, children, food, pranks played, food again, and surprise—we talk more about airplanes. Then, on descent, the time of “sterile cockpit” with no non-duty talking allowed, we would work in conjoined silence, only the callouts from the checklist heard on the air.

There were nights when we got in a long enough layover to play tourist or simply catch up on relaxation and sleep, carrying the cockpit conversation over to a bar or a little restaurant.  Such were the nights where on a very long layover, we'd have a spot of whiskey, telling tales of adventure of some pilot, who could have been any of us, or none of us, a story that was not boasting but simply a telling, stories that had been lived or inherited, those stories that have been told over whiskey since time began. There was just something comforting in the voices, the words, the recognition of sound in the air, the clink of ice, and if you were in a really low-rent part of the world, the cluck of the basket of live chickens hanging from the ceiling.

Then, there were the days when sleep was hard to find, the day grinding into the night, when the only words spoken outside of flaps and slats and EPRs were, with a quick look at your ‘dinner,’ Hey, I bet this would taste good warm.‘On such days, we simply continued on in silence, surrendering our misfortunes and our joys to God and Pratt and Whitney, which sang to us outside like a Mockingbird in the moonlight.

I think of a flight back before I hung up my professional wings, one long flight over foreign lands.  Up at altitude, across that vast stretch of blue, we laughed and shared. Much of it was happy, but occasionally a story would come back from a compatriot Gone West, and through the laughter, tears stung our eyes as a familiar awe-filled sadness enveloped our little space and we grew silent, remembering him, sounds of mourning and respect. Airmen and soldiers are a small community of thousands, and we never forget our dead.

It was still dark as we flew over the Prime Meridian after stopping for fuel in Greenland. The Prime Meridian is the common zero for longitude and time reckoning throughout the globe. It is the one place where we are all at one point, and the moment stands still, an infinite place where, for a second, time and motion are tethered to our aircraft like a careless rope.

As we crossed over, I synchronized my watch with my copilot’s and attempted to capture that time, to somehow gather it for us. Only then did it hit—all we have experienced from this cockpit: different languages and sights, smells, and sounds; the roar of a turbine engine, as it started with that artistic endeavor of curse words and meditation; the underlying scent of jet fuel, oily and dark, that hung in the mist on an early morning ramp.

This morning’s air had burned with cold as we traced the soft scratches in the panel with gloved hands, trying to keep them warm while we waited for orders—the red “remove before flight” tags on the gear pins lying like frozen icicles against the landing gear as the crew chiefs finished their tasks.  Yet such thoughts disappear as the sound of the engines brings us back to our tasks; we're still at the Prime Meridian where there was precision and accord, spoken with the deep anesthetic hush of sameness.

We sat in that quiet hush, veins flowing with need, the nourishment of salt that comes from flesh and our eyes, that old blood that has explored new lands and ancient skies, the hardships of separation and the circumstances that lurk, to hurl us into wonder, or to snatch us from that blue, into the dark.  We've seen glory, tears, and abrogated peace from this windshield.  Though we missed being home, we'd not have missed this day aloft, given a choice.

The sun began to awaken as we neared our destination, the shadow of our craft skimming the clouds. The descent was at hand, and the day surged towards sunrise, or would if we could see it through the prevailing, thin mist of a foreign world. The sound of conversation ends there. We simply basked in the hum of the engines and the view out the window to our world. The clouds gathered up in a huddle of virgin thunderstorms. Up above, through a small portal of light, the trail of another aircraft 1,000 feet above fades into the blue as we started the ballet of preparing a jet aircraft to land, staring mutely through a spattered windshield across which the wipers swung like metronomes. We fly towards the sound of thunder for it's all we know.

The morning sun hits the windshield, an explosion of white light that leaves nothing—no bone, no ash—just a vast, deep plane of blue, the altar onto which we lay ourselves down as the flaps are lowered for the approach. For just a moment, I leaned my head wearily against the left side wall of the cockpit as the sun, my ship, and I were, for a moment, joined, an eclipse of light, sound, and motion.

Up ahead is the outline of land, there in the thin clouds, dissolving away beneath unfettered rain as if eroded by the sea. I sensed, more than heard, the steady hum of the engines outside my window. It's at once, the sound of an ocean, the laughter of a young girl, all wrapped into a bright continuous hum; the music of motion that pushes us towards home. - Brigid

Until I return - a Pictorial

I'm on vacation this week, so I will leave you with this in memory of not-so-pleasant weeks.  

My work week if I were a dog  - A Pictorial

MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

FRIDAY YAPPY HOUR

To Have a Book

I don’t own a TV – having given the giant flatscreen to AmVet years ago.  But I don’t know what I’d do without my books. Remember the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury? It was set in a dystopian future in which firefighters intentionally burn any house in which a book was located because it’s illegal to possess them. Ultimately, a fireman who secretly grew to love books escapes the city of big screen, reality-based entertainment to find a small group of book-loving refugees banded together. Each person was assigned to memorize one complete book—including Plato, Dickens, James Joyce, and more—so the books would survive until society was ready to possess them again. I loved that book when I was in high school. I did not read many popular novels, though I had a rather large collection of classic literature while growing up. When my grade school classmates were reading and loving their mysteries or the Captain Underpants series, I was reading Jane Eyre and Henry David Thoreau, and a whole world beyond my quiet, hushed one at home opened up to me.

Reading is, for me, not just intellectual but physical. I love how the spine of a book feels in the crook of my fingers; the smooth, hard-end boards snug on either side of the pages sewn together, their edges flush and perfect. I totally lose track of time when I read. I read somewhere that time, as most of us think of it, is an illusion; the past, the present, and the future are here, now, captured in a touch, the blink of an eye, or perhaps, simply between two pages of a novel. Today, between two pages of a favorite book, I found a photo of Mom in her garden. Outside the window here now, a plant waits for spring, when it can spill forth its seed onto the soil. I remember days of working in the flowerbeds that my mom so lovingly maintained.

After her death, I kept it going as long as I could for my dad until he, too, was called away. As I toiled in the garden, the sun kissed the top of my head, the touch a benediction, a blessing.

I missed having a used bookstore a bicycle ride away, the owner having retired and closing it.  But there were often yard and garage sales here in the Village, and I could usually find old books for pocket change. The last time I was at a used bookstore, I found an old cookbook, two generations old, that I opened to browse and purchase. I could picture my Mom using a book like that, and it would look nice on the shelves with her books that remain in my house. In it was a dried flower carefully pressed within the pages so many years ago, a story untold within that small remembrance.

 I've many books like that old book, purchased from stores that contain more light than dust, containing within them things old and forgotten, things that in the wrong hands would only grow older. Finding the right one was like finding treasure. Fingers trace the spine, fingers that are gentle and forgiving, not wishing any further scarring upon that which binds. Such books find their way home, where they are pulled out to be read on late nights, the mind marveling that other minds marveled; the mysteries and the mistakes play out across the pages as if they were penned today. They tell their stories like some old and lonely shut-in would do to anyone willing to listen; lessons are given without rancor or heat. So many words need to be said while they can still be heard. I always make sure I have a book with me when I travel.

The last time I took a really long trip overseas, I had to downsize a bag as the little turboprop airplane piloted by who I believe was The Incredible Hulk was weight-restricted. My books were left behind for materials I had to have for the trip. Instead, I would have given up my lunch, poncho, and hiking boots instead of my little collection of paperbacks and a small leather-bound book of Shakespeare sonnets. Let the weather wreak havoc on my itinerary, let the grocers sell the last chocolate bar, but if I were to end up alone in the middle of nowhere after I bust a move down the Himalayas and break my leg, I wanted a book.

Curled up in strange places next to an artifact of the family that is toted around in my suitcase, I might be lonely, but I would be content. For I have a book. It’s a big old, paper-made, dead tree book. I want to hold something in my hand that feels alive to me, even if a living thing died to create its pages. Some words form pictures laid out upon a living thing that never slept, never dreamed of the soft perch of birds or the sharp blade of the ax, and never mourned the tender leaves that it nourished and abandoned. It’s a piece of wood that could be warmth, support, shelter, or the perfect, pristine bed of memory laid down bare.

My house is empty tonight, but I am not alone. In my head are history and the cries of warriors, rushing forth immortal beneath disported sabers and brandished flags, and men were rushing forward into time, propelled by gunpowder and righteousness, underneath a sky of thunder. I have a book. I am caught up in battles and loves, both forbidden and forgotten, coursing like blood as long as the words will—that immortal, fresh, abiding blood that bears respect above regret and commitment above the ease of dishonor.

My chores are going to be put aside for at least an hour or two before bed, and I’ll pick up a mug of hot tea and that book. I’ll let it transport me to somewhere far away until a chime will toll for warriors, for battles won and those so easily lost. As my hand turns the pages, I will move among people who lived and died, or perhaps never existed at all, their shadows not of flesh or blood but imagination, shadows as strong as finely-honed steel, and shadows as quiet as murmuring breath, forgotten until they were put upon paper. Then, upon hearing the sharp, clear, and quiet blade-like sound of that chime, perhaps a clock, perhaps something that just travels within me, I will fall off into sleep. The book lies prone on the nightstand next to me. The book and I are two forms, creating one shadow. The stories in both of us never cease, even at rest. Outside, the world continues in that illusion of change, the sky letting go of its tears, washing a parched landscape anew. 

Simple Things

Amount spent on fancy puppy toys to keep Sunny from eating the sofa:  $397

Amount of interest in said toys:  Less than 10 minutes and that was for the $9 "Hurl a Squirrel".

New Favorite Toy:  Abandoned Rubbermaid trash can.