In all your five years of existence, you have never been on a plane. You always went by car to Great Gramma’s farm in Missouri or to Gramma’s house in California. So, when Mommy says that we are going to Gramma’s house, you are expecting to go by car, sitting in the middle of the back seat of your dad’s black Mustang with the top down for hours. Daddy drives, stopping the car occasionally to go pee, get gas or eat. He hangs his brown hands on the steering wheel, one hand tapping out a rhythm in his head. Mommy sits in front, her long black hair blowing towards you in the back seat, her almond eyes glance in the rearview mirror to check on you, her creamy right arm turning bronze as testimony to the time the drive takes. You look forward to Gramma’s hugs and her dog’s licks upon arrival.
So you don’t know what to make of all this when Daddy stops and drops you and Mommy off at a curb saying, “I’ll meet you at Gramma’s house in a few days.”
Mommy tells you, ‘Here we are at the airport. Daddy will fly separately and meet us out in California, at Gramma’s house.”
“Airport?” You ask. “But I thought… where’s Gramma’s house?” You are confused.
“The airport is where we catch a plane to fly to Gramma’s.”
Mommy is dressed in longish white pants and a striped t-shirt and she has her sandals on for going to the park. She gets out of the car and opens the door for you. As you shimmy out, Mommy reaches down, straightens your ponytail braids with white plastic barrettes that match your white sandals, and smooths out your pink dress in the back where the car seat pushed it up. You peer up at the mass of gigantic shiny metal and glass buildings. You hear the whoosh of the automatic glass sliding doors as they open and you walk with Mommy into the tall open building with white tile floors. You hear numbers being called, names announced as Mommy leads you past multiple counters and snake-like lines of people, caravans of suitcases. Families, pairs, people, everyone is going somewhere. Luggage is stacked on carts, Mommy gets a cart and the man helps her put our luggage on it.
You wonder because you are inside but the windows reach the sky. Mommy stops you at one of the large windows, looking out onto a parking lot for airplanes and points at the planes taking off and landing, and she points to the men and women walking by in uniforms and tells you about the stewardesses and airplane pilots, in their crisp dark suits, and what they do in the air.
You hear your mommy chime in as part of the chorus of mommies telling their children to keep up. “We are going to Gramma’s by air, we are flying.” So you trudge along, towing your own little pink suitcase on wheels, following your mommy down long hallways with blue carpet onto and through the people mover, past airline sitting area after sitting area, walls with orange paneling and signs.
You and Mommy get all the way to the plane entrance. You are supposed to walk through the tunnel, enclosed walkway, and ramp to the plane. But you get scared when you hear a high pitched but distant roar and imagine a monster, a great vacuum sucking up all the people that go through the door. You saw all the other people go through the tunnel and not come out and you imagine that they are stuffed as tight as sardines in a can. As you and Mommy get closer and closer, the sound gets louder and you panic, balking at going any further. Just as Mommy pulls you toward the plane, you dig your heels into the carpet – screaming, crying, holding onto chairs. You don’t care that people are staring.
Not into the airplane for sure. “Nooooo!” you holler, your bawling fills the room as you refuse to board the plane. You thrash. Mommy pulls you back as you try to run away. She picks you up and tries to carry you, to comfort you by singing a song in Japanese, but you shinny down her torso and slip out of her arms. You grasp the closest most stable object, a table post and hold on as if anchoring yourself against a level-five tornado. Mommy shushes you, consoles you, and promises you everything to make you stop. Instead you collapse on the carpet, spiraling, kicking, wailing, and rolling on the ground, trying to crawl away.
Through your caterwauling, you don’t hear the stewardess say, “Ma’am, we have to close the door and take off now.” You only see the door close, the door gets smaller and seems to swallow itself and disappear. Then Mommy stops, put her weary head in her hands, and cries. So the plane leaves without you or Mommy.
Some days after that…
You know Daddy works at the Air Force Base. You see him in the living room photos with other uniformed men standing in front of steel-nosed airplanes. When Daddy comes home from work, he always smells of oil and gas, a greasy machine smell. Today, on this a sunny day in Colorado Springs, Daddy is driving you to The Base.
He drives you past a building that looks like a giant white cheese grater and explains that this is the Air Force Academy Chapel, saying, “This is how you know you are at the Air Force Academy; when you see that chapel.”
Then he parks and takes you to a huge building, which Daddy called a hanger, and there are three or four planes. Daddy asks you, “Do you know I am an airplane mechanic and this is a garage for planes. Did you know that I can fly a plane?” He takes your hand and walks you to the hangar, showing you all about the planes he was working on, pointing out engines, propellers, wings, wheels. He tells you, “You can walk around but don’t go too far and don’t touch anything.”
After Daddy finishes working on a small size plane in the garage, he invites you to walk up the stairs into the plane to see the insides. He hoists you up the metal stairs and holds you as you climb. Then he follows you and gives you an extra boost to help you step on board, through the plane’s portal. Once he steps in, he pulls the door handle shut and gives another tug to make sure it is locked.
Daddy shows you the tiny restroom and points out all kinds of gadgets and doo-hickeys inside the plane. Your footsteps made a knocking sound as you walk around. “See, you could sit here and look out the window.” You sit, noticing the springiness of the musty cushion and put your arms on the rests. Daddy adds, “You gotta put on your seatbelt just like in a car.” You manage to put one end into the other and they click in place. Then you push up the shutter of the porthole window and look out onto the tarmac.
When you look around, Daddy quietly goes to the front of the plane. He walks into the cockpit and you get up and follow him, he sits down in the seat, telling you about different knobs and levers, how these control the plane.
“Wanna see how I make the plane go?” Daddy looks at you while he flicks switches and adjusts knobs. He says, “Listen, we have to wake up the engine.” It sounds like starting a car but many times louder. You feel the floor start to rumble and your ears vibrate. As the sound becomes higher pitched, you feel your heart beating faster. Daddy keeps telling you, “That sound is from the engine and propellers I showed you earlier.” He turns on the plane, and drives the plane out of the hangar. When you feel the plane move, Daddy says, “See? There is nothing to be afraid of.”
Daddy drives the plane all the way out of the hangar. You don’t notice when the plane rolls out onto the tarmac. But all you see is your Daddy sitting in the seat in front of the plane, you are looking at all the dials and buttons and levers in front of him. He is telling you, “You are a brown miniature version of your Japanese mom. If your mom had never taken a plane, you wouldn’t be you. And you will be brave and soar like Mommy did when she came to marry me and live in this country.”
Then you notice, you are a little scared, but Daddy isn’t scared. He is talking to you and you are talking back, so you aren’t scared as you feel the plane move.
You watch him intently and he is watching you as he asks you about the other day when you didn’t get on that plane. You tell him how scared you were, how it was this dark tunnel they wanted you to go into and how you couldn’t see what was down there. There was a big whooshing sound and you thought there was a monster. But you are not scared now.
You ask him, “So how do you know when you are off the ground? How do you know when you are flying?” You ask Daddy because it doesn’t make sense that this big plane could go in the air. He is telling you about how the plane goes faster and then the nose lifts off the ground.
Daddy says, “It’s hard for me to describe – there is a moment just as the plane lifts off. It’s like that feeling when you jump up in the air and just before you come down. I can tell you all kinds of ways, but you just have to feel it for yourself, know it yourself.” Then he adds, “You are flying now.”
A few days later, Daddy drives you to the airport. As he drops you and Mommy off at the curb, he says, “I’ll meet you at Gramma’s house in a few days.”
After this, every time after that, you walk down that long dark hallway, to step into the plane and you put your baggage in the overhead compartments, and you sit by the window, and you wait for the feeling of the plane accelerating and lifting off the ground, and you know that you will soar.