Creative

It’s a chilly morning here on the day after Thanksgiving, and I was reminded of a Thanksgiving day 41 years ago. Not because it was equally cold (actually, it had already snowed in Wisconsin by then), nor even because it was Thanksgiving – although the fact that it was is probably the reason I can remember the exact date so well.

I remember November 27^th, 1980 because it was the first time I went up in an airplane.

And not just any airplane. This was a Cessna 150 piloted by my dad. And that made it pretty cool, because I’ve always seen my dad as a kind of genius. He and my mother built the house in which I grew up. He taught me something about cars when we rebuilt an engine (well, he rebuilt an engine while I puttered around) that had been sitting in the trunk of a Ford Custom 500 in the back yard for a couple of years (as I remember it, he and my sister were the ones who took it apart and put it in the trunk in the first place). [As an aside, he didn’t even try to kill me when I replaced a corroded brake line on that car with a rubber hose and tried to drive it some time later. I knew very little about hydraulic pressure at the time. But I certainly learned.]

And he taught me to drive that car – infamous (to me at least) for being the same three-on-the-tree vehicle that put me into a panic when he was trying to pull our boat out of the river and it wasn’t going too well. His solution was to make me sit in the back seat and shut up while he took care of business. If the car was going in the drink, so was I. At least that’s how I remember it.

And he was brilliant like that. As an adult, I can understand the stress of the situation now, and he certainly didn’t need me freaking out (I couldn’t have been more than 10 at the time, I suppose). My parents were creative that way. Punishment was more often having to sit on a chair for a while. Or, one that I found most memorable: when my sister and I were fighting, he had us each sit on the floor on opposite sides of the bed. The first to get up, hug and apologize to the other could leave. My sister didn’t hesitate (she’s smart that way). I had to sit for a while.

I’ve got a few more of those memories of my dad, but the Thanksgiving flight stands out (and even more so since I’m reminded every year). I remember early on that morning, getting into the car with him and driving to a small airfield northeast of my hometown. There were a few inches of snow on the ground, and the place had a grass-runway, so that was covered with snow too.

We took off, turned left, flew back southwest over our house, kept going down to Aunt Sandy and Uncle Wayne’s place in Berlin (I think they were still there), turned around and came back over Lake Poygan. We landed in a crosswind. There’s not much more to say. I was flying. And it was wonderful.