October 1

Those of you who know me, or who read my book, which is pretty much the same thing, know that today's topic is inevitable.

Today is October 1st. Long a bad luck day in our family.

So, for those who don't know the story -- judging by my sales for Wyoming Trucks, there are a lot of you -- today is the touchstone for it.

Many years ago, before the turn of the century, back in ththere was a young woman who married an Air Force fighter pilot. There she is, posing on one of the planes.

A paragon of sixties loveliness.
After a few years -- five years of fertility worries, actually, but that's another story -- a baby came along. Not a paragon of loveliness, but reasonably cute.

Alas, the story is a sad one. October 1, 1969 rolled around and my dad died when his fighter plane crashed, along with his wing man.

I've written about it before. How my mom and I found the field where they crashed, the trees still broken off halfway up, 25 years later.

Other things happened on other October 1sts throughout the years, some greater, some minor. None as significant as this one. But enough to keep us careful of it.

We're hoping that will change.

My stepsister-in-law, Alison, is checked into the hospital now, to have her first baby.
There's sorrow around this one, too. My stepbrother, Davey, lost his mother to cancer a few years back. And Alison's mother is now fighting serious health problems.

My mom and Dave will head out to help with the new baby tomorrow. My mom will be playing grandmother for the duration.

We're hoping the baby will be born sometime today.

Not from Around These Here Parts

My New Hampshire boss complains about the aesthetics of the West.

In this way, Lincoln is a city of the West, while otherwise most of us would lump it into the Midwest. She doesn't like the lack of trees, the ugly buildings, the inefficient parking garage. She asks why the storage sheds are purple and orange, if people really believe rocks on astroturf are a good landscaping choice and why no one tries to disguise their Dumpsters.

While it irritates me, I find it hard to defend.

My North Carolina father, when he arrived in Colorado to attend the Air Force Academy, wrote home that he'd never seen a thousand shades of brown before. And I remember when I first saw Kentucky (where my boss grew up), I thought it looked artificial, a theme park of emerald grass and alabaster fences, gleaming horses trotting about for show. But this isn't about the acquired appreciation for the aesthetic of the western landscape, for the sere plains and treeless crags. This is about culture. About the difference between people who build pretty little fences around their Dumpsters, painted to match the building, and those who figure garbage is garbage and why dress it up?

Some call it western practicality, implying an attention to something greater than frou-frou considerations. I'd hazard that it's an extension of the frontier mentality, living on the edge of survival, where all energy is focused on food and shelter and marauding cattle thieves, not on painting the ranch house. The thing is, those days are long over, but the stubbornness lingers. Western folks take pride in not caring, just like they take pride in not having the good stuff.

"We don't need that...." "We call this nice weather around here..." "I'm not throwing money away on..."

The myth of the cowboy is a story of sweat and grit, not white-washed fences.

We Have Splashdown

The news has been chock-full of the recent plane crash at LaGuardia. (In a recent writing discussion, one person chided an author for misusing the idiom as "chalk-full." Another poster responded that, since no normal person uses the phrase "chock-full," that it didn't matter how it was spelled. I, of course, couldn't resist.) This plane crash has captured everyone's attention, not just because airplane disasters always do, but because no one died. Amusingly, I notice that the article I linked to here refers to the incident now as a "splashdown."

By now you have the details: taking off from LaGuardia, the US Air jet sucked birds into two engines. The birds were big enough to cause immediate, devastating damage, knocking the spinning turbines off enough that one engine burst into flames. The pilot, Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, reported the double bird strike, requested permission to return to LaGuardia, then said "unable," and asked permission to land at a New Jersey suburban airport, again came back with "unable." He then told the passengers to brace themselves because the plane was going down, and he landed the plane in the river. Hence the "splashdown."

What's remarkable here to me, is that Sullenberger kept his head so well that he not only navigated a spectacular landing, but he kept communicating the whole time.

Those of you who know me know that I have a consuming interest in plane crashes. In many ways the plane crash is both a seminal incident in my life and an ongoing metaphor for me. Sullenberger trained first as an Air Force Academy pilot, like my father. And where many cockpit recordings from plane crashes yield only frantic babbling, this one shows a pilot so well trained that he continued to let everyone know what was going on, even as he dropped an Airbus loaded with people into the Hudson River.

They're calling him a hero, and that's probably appropriate. The kind of hero who coolly walks through the plane twice to ensure all the passengers were off. The kind who smiles and nods graciously when people thank him for their lives.

But I think what really captures us here is that this is different than the usual metaphor. If a plane crash symbolizes how everything can go abruptly wrong, snipping threads in an instant of impact, then this is the reverse. The threads that weren't snipped; how it almost happened, but didn't. How someone who keeps his head can avert disaster. That a disaster can be magically converted to a splashdown.

December 29

December 29 was my father’s birthday. If I’d been writing this blog on that day, I would have posted this then. But I’m a believer in the significance of timing. New Year’s Day is not just January first, but the beginning of something entirely fresh and untouched. An auspicious day for starting new ventures. It was important to me to begin on January 1.

But, just as every new venture is built on what came before, so is the past relevant here. So, I’m posting this one week later.

Last Monday, the 29th, my mother reminded me via instant messenger from Tucson that it was my father’s 70th birthday. No, I’m not a negligent daughter who forgot to send a card, failed to find a gift, or needed to be reminded to make that birthday phone call. My father, John Theodore Mize – Ted, to absolutely everyone – died in 1969, when I was three years old. Next October will be the 40 year anniversary of the F-4 plane crash that took his life. 2011 will be his 50th Air Force Academy class reunion. But Ted is forever 30, knowing nothing of these things.

In an interesting parallel, the following day Misty Evans, the writer, mentioned to me that her 10 year-old son announced at dinner that he wanted to be a fighter pilot. So she told him the story of my dad. (The first essay in Wyo Trucks is “Inheritances,” which tells this story.) About the great responsibility someone like that takes on. The grave and terrible risk of it all.

I wonder, if my father could have a do-over, what he’d choose? He wanted to fly. He wanted to leave his small town in North Carolina and be something more. More than his mother who finished 5th grade and raised her younger sister and then her sons and a passel of nieces and nephews. More than his father who finished 7th grade and worked in the furniture factory. The Air Force Academy lifted him up and out, into the sky. And dashed him to the ground again. Would he have traded that time in the sky for all the birthdays and anniversaries?

Somehow, though I never knew him, I think he’d say he got the better deal.