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Wednesday, June 5, 2002
Model Airplanes

When I fly to Connecticut as I did this past weekend, the first leg of my trip is always on a DeHaviland Dash-8 turboprop. It's a frighteningly noisy and small aircraft that looks more like someone's hobby than a legitimate form of transportation. When boarding one, I'm unable to remove from my mind an image of it crumpled and still in the middle of a field or river with perhaps some smoke rising up from the wreckage.

Oh, and my lifeless husk lying just beside it. I picture that too.

This weekend was a tough one with my pop still in the hospital. I'm uncertain how to deal with watching someone I love suffer so and I let myself think about it for three to five minutes a day and that's it. Really. Any more than that and I go a little nutty. How do people do this? Personally, I haven't the foggiest notion and am gripped with the fear that I'm going about it all wrong and that ten years from now, I'll regret every decision I made. The sense of unfairness and anger and grief wash over me sometimes with such force that it knocks the breath out of me and then I put up the wall. I call it "Doing the Jackie O". Nobody, not even I, can tell what's going on under the facade. It's working out fairly well so far. In fact, I'm writing this from behind the wall.

I took the above photograph from my window on the way home Monday. At the time, the propellers were a complete blur and nearly invisible. The resulting image looks very WWII, doesn't it?

And like it's about twenty minutes from crashing into the Atlantic.