From a child lying in the grass beneath the spreading Willow tree watching the hawks fly above, I always wanted to fly. The family joke was that I learned my letters and numbers from helping my father sort pages in his flight manuals. And that the first words I could read were not cat or dog. They were "add," "delete," and "replace." followed by “this page intentionally left blank.” I knew the three letter designations for all the airports my father, flew into from EWR (Newark, NJ) to JFK (Kennedy, NYC) to SNN (Shannon) to RJTC (Tachikawa Airport, Japan.)
On high school prep for the pilot’s ground course exam became any extra curricular activity. But we never were able to afford a plane or build a strip in the back 40 acres like was originally intended when the farm was originally purchased. So the dream became filed under not going to happen.
After school reality crept into the dream. Professional opportunities were restricted.
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| Flight crew wings. J. Boganski collection. |
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| Lockheed Constellation from the Golden Age of Flying. My favorite bird. |
Female fighter pilots had not crept into cockpits so I looked at commercial airlines. Young and pretty got you in the air but not in the cockpit. And there were other obstacles. My father repeatedly told me I was too good to be a stewardess. other flight crew we knew from the time I was three, outright refused to provide a recommendation or assistance in getting a slot in stewardess school. That was both the cockpit crew and the cabin staff.
So I started writing fiction and flying was done in spaceships or with dragons. This snippet about flying is not about winged creatures, but from a short story written as a teen watching fighter jets takeoff in pairs from the runway not far from my house at Clark Air Force Base, Philippines.
From a world between yesterday any tomorrow, an excerpt from Hearth and Sand: Stories From the Front Lines and the Homefront.
"Live or Surrender To Technology"
The crowd on the moving walkway shrank away from the lean figure in the dark blue uniform. Although there were no outward symptoms, it was as if they knew he had within him a contagion from another planet. Staring at the crumpled message flimsy in his hand, John Chippi saw the words without really comprehending them. Riding without conscious thought, automatically switching between speed rails, he found himself on a small transfer platform. He felt alone, despite the press of riders around him. Once again, he straightened out the flimsy. This time the smeared words penetrated his mental fog. A glance skipped over the innocuous opening, “Sorry to inform you,” but his hands shook again as the official red stamp, “Rejuvenation treatments—Denied,” glared off the page.
The wandering Chippi crammed the note into a pocket already full of medical reports. Each doctor’s face hovered briefly before him, ending with the resigned expression of the last one. The physician’s sad eyes belied the impassive tone with which he pronounced what was in reality a death sentence. After dealing with millions of deaths from Martian Fever over the past two years, where they once used sympathetic words, doctors were now reduced to impersonal facts. They had learned to turn off emotion rather than feel the patient’s pain when announcing the news of a six-week life expectancy. The notification was made more difficult by the knowledge treatment existed which could save the patients' lives.
In the ultimate irony, Chippi’s treatment was being withheld due to his artificial heart. Too many years piloting aircraft at high altitudes to protect the planet had damaged the original one.
~till next time Helen
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