Friday

Yesterday morning I was up in the 172 with a student, and I heard a familiar voice on the radio calling inbound to land.  I paused for a second and then keyed the mike and said "'Mornin', Jim."  A second later I heard "'Mornin', Laura."  It made me smile, just a little thing, but it's a little like the TV show "Cheers", sometimes you wanna go where somebody knows your name and maybe even they're glad you came.  lol  Like it makes me smile when I'm talking on a radio and I hear Steve talking on a radio in another airplane. It's a feeling of...home, I guess.  Acceptance.  Hard to explain as I'm finding out trying to write that.  ;)

There's a pilot who has a blog, he's a bit of...he's very opinionated, which is fine, and if you disagree with him, he's very contemptuous, which is I suppose not atypical, and that means I sometimes feel a clash with his personality, but rarely do I actually feel a clash with his actual opinion.  Here's a post he made recently that I enjoyed. (I cropped out uninteresting parts to keep it shorter).

Lifting gracefully and unhurried from the runway, the takeoff was the escape. The island where they went, the environment, and a new outlook on life were the results. It was the aircraft’s departure, though, that represented freedom. Be it books, movies, or stories told, the moment of survival, the actual point where escape is made, is the moment people depart and are transported to another place. In all three, this is most often an airplane. Think back to how many movies you’ve seen where the goal was to get to a plane and take off? The more you think about it, the more you’ll begin to see the pattern. There’s a reason for this.

Aviation offers humans what may be the greatest window to freedom. So much so that the mere sight of a plane lifting off washes you with the feeling of relief. That is why it is commonly used. It’s an easy way to trigger a positive emotion.

Since the beginning of aviation, pilots have attempted to describe it. Most have felt it, strongly. Nearly all are compelled to explain it. The expression of sights, scents, and sounds have been used. Emotions and physical sensations have been, too. Few, if any, have ever achieved a perfect verbal painting of that thing aviation offers most, freedom. As for me, I believe there’s a reason for this.
One cannot touch, taste, or own good. Good is good. This also means one cannot create good. It exists with or without us. Yet, though it is beyond what we are, we can see it, use it, experience it, and benefit from it.

This is why I believe flight has captivated so many. Those who experience it, uncorrupted, see and feel what others do not - the freedom offered by another dimension; a dimension in which good is created. Read the works of aviation’s best poets and you’ll feel it in all of them. One man, John Gillespie Magee, finished off “High Flight” with the following words.

“And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God."

This is why angels have wings. It’s why the soul is always said to lift from the body. And it is why only the coldest of hearts or pure evil seek to restrict it.

Flight is a medium in which good travels. Climb the highest mountain and you will still be Earthbound. Deliver open eyes to the heavens and you will glimpse another realm. It is there, behind the curtain of clouds. Enter it and you are changed. Life, from that point on, will be a battle between the chains of society and your unwillingness to accept them.

MY flights in the pattern in the 172 today were cut down because of weather that moved in, but that's okay as I'm still recuperating, and I had several other things I needed to work on anyway.  Kaylee is at a basketball game tonight doing her pep band duties.  She said "I could be using this time much more productively" and I said "You could, but you wouldn't, you'd sit at the counter and watch TV shows and you know it."  She stuck her tongue out at me.

She and I had a really nice heart to heart today too, for about two hours, about all sorts of stuff, from love and arguing to alcohol to personality traits that are strengths and weaknesses to courage and fear.  She is an enjoyable person to talk to.  I hope she always talks to me as openly as she does at 14.