My biological father (my dad), whom I didn’t share many experiences with, had one major talent and that was making amazing paper airplanes. As a child the few times I saw him I would beg him to make one for me, and he would, and it would fly so beautifully. I would ask him to make another, and he would. I would have so much fun running around, throwing the airplanes made from yellow legal paper, torn from the same pad where he was making his “big business deals”, this paper folded so expertly and I would toss them and see them fly so smoothly. Sometimes they would get stuck high up in things, and disappear. I wonder if they ever came down.

My stepfather John was one of the biggest assholes I’ve known. He was a former commercial pilot, who learned to fly during the Korean War of the 1950s. He had over 30 years flying experience as a pilot and captain when he was laid off in 1990. From here he “retired” to the country where we moved and he raised cows while my mother got a teaching job, but only because he was too old to get a flying job again as a pilot as he was too close in age to the FAA mandatory retirement age. He missed his days in the sky piloting commercial jets. One of my last memories of him was in the first few weeks of him having cancer. The cancer made him humble for once, and for the 1st time I was able to have a semblance of real connection.

It was winter 1994. I was 15. We were visiting my Me Ma in East Texas, and we had driven our red Ford Econoline van to her farm. I don’t remember why. It was just John and me in the driver and passenger seat. We were in the pasture/hay fields, the same pasture I had grown up in with my Me Ma. We started off by John giving me tricks and tips on learning how to drive a car. Then John said, “do you want to know what it feels like to take off in an airplane?” I said I did. So he put his foot down on the gas of the van, and we went bumping across the pasture, faster and faster and faster. The van literally came up in the air at times we were going so fast and the grounds so unstable and muddy. We were laughing, together, at the absurdity. I just knew something was going to break. We went 30 MPH, then 40, then 50. We broke speeds at 60 MPH, not a big deal on a smooth highway but insane in a hay field in East Texas driving an old van. We came to a stop at the barbed wire fence near Highway 11. “That was max vector speed” he said excitedly, “or V1, the point of no return”. From here I learned that when airplanes reach a certain take-off speed on a runway they have to take off and fly, no matter what happens. It is a funny rule in flying. Of course we reached no such real speed in our Econoline van in a hay pasture, but it felt real. It felt like we really were about to take off and fly into the wild blue sky, in a van none-the-less, though he would be dead in a matter of weeks, and this was one of the few memories where we would share a moment in the same vein of joy and bliss, the masks of life dropped in a rare favor of living in a moment. At his funeral the famous poem of another famous “John” pilot was spoken:

High Flight
By John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds –
and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of –
wheeled and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence.
Hovering there I’ve chased the shouting wind along
and flung my eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
where never lark, or even eagle, flew;
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.”

That day taking off in the van in the hay fields at mock V1 speeds is my
favorite memory of him.