Rules of Flight

MY FATHER found the airplane nose-down and half buried in sand after a violent windstorm at an airfield near Winslow, Arizona. He was there as a contract welder, but he is a motor-head who carries poetry in his lunchbox. I am sure he thought, at first, he would have fun rebuilding and selling the plane’s engine, but then he was overcome by the optimism and vision with which he had been afflicted all his life. He saw possibility in the rotting fuselage and worn tires. He read potential in the fogged instrument panel. The sagging but undamaged wings were, to him, an unbroken promise.

He hauled the old Stinson Voyager, in pieces, to our garage at home, and began what he called his first aviation rescue rebuild. Weeks later, when he finally fired up the engine, and it coughed into a rumbling authority that turned the chipped and sand-cut propellers, he heard and felt something he was utterly unable to resist: flight. And I was immediately infected with his vision and optimism. He raised his welding hood and looked up at me with a smile that conveyed a confidence I never had on my own.

“Mary, honey,” he said. “I think you could fly this thing.”

Mom is quiet at breakfast—highly unusual for the woman who assails us with a steady stream of instructions the moment her alarm clock rings. She does not want me going “up there,”