Dancing Cheering Christmas Miracles

Watching a group of us adults figure out "We Cheer" and "Dance Dance Revolution" would have probably been highly amusing to anybody watching in the windows, but I think we've got it down. Slightly better directions would have been handy, but hey, we figured it out eventually. ;) I spared Grandma and just took photos of Kaylee cheering, but Steve got a full video of the both of them. As far as Dance Dance Revolution, nobody took a video of me doing that as far as I know, but it doesn't count because I wasn't dancing anyway, just figuring out what I was supposed to be doing. ;)

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Now for tying in Christmas and Flying (have I mentioned I'm getting really twitchy these days??): there was an article in the Kansas City Star that I sort of enjoyed; it is a true story, but is based off of the memories of a young, non-pilot lieutenant back many years ago. I'll provide the link, but basically so you don't have to read it all, three soldiers were on a mission to deliver a new car to a WWI legend who had fallen upon hard times later in life, and they were flying down in a small airplane with an instrument rated pilot. On their way home, they hit some bad weather-bad enough that it knocked out some of their instruments. The pilot asked them what he should do (uh, I have a problem with that) and basically they all thought they were going to die. They were in the clouds over bad, mountainous terrain, and he was just trying to hold the plane level as long as he could. Here's the rest of the story:

But then another unexpected light wrapped them. Not the ragged, terrifying brilliance of a lightning strike this time, but a softer, steadier shaft lancing up from below reflecting from the clouds on every side.

It was the kind of beacon that they could have had no reasonable hope of seeing.

With a cry of relief, the pilot banked sharply. And like a fireman spiraling down the firehouse pole, he followed that beam until they broke into the clear beneath the storm, and could see then the twin rows of green runway lights that promised there would be a tomorrow after all.

•••
It was utterly unaccountable. Call it a miracle. Call it anything you like.

The man at the little mountain airstrip — an angular, bearded country man — explained afterward that it was just a place used by fly-in hunters and occasional vacationers. He rarely was out there at all at night, and never in a storm.

But he’d been working on his gasoline accounts when he heard — or thought he did, through the rain tapping on his shed’s tin roof — the hum of an engine up there in a tumult where no small plane ought to be.

Just on the chance, then, he’d stepped outside and aimed a floodlight skyward through what he thought was a hole, or at least a thin spot, in the murk. And on a further chance, he’d switched on the lights along his short gravel strip.

That’s how, in the days that followed, the four travelers were allowed to keep their lives and have their Christmases — the colonel and the sergeant at their quarters on the base, the pilot at his home somewhere, and the young lieutenant at his in Kansas City.

It’s by such improbable luck that destinies are shaped, if one prefers to believe it is luck — not something more mysterious – that actually governs.