Chapter 43 - Strays
Walking through my neighborhood with
our rescue dog yesterday, I saw a cat, arrested within the eyes of that dog,
pulled up high in the apostrophe of fear as he held poised for fight or flight. I pulled her gently away, as she has been
around cats since being rescued and we weren't in for a rumble. But I didn't
want her to get a clawed nose for her curiosity. The cat's coat was in good condition as far
as I could tell, but it was very thin, likely a stray. I was going to see where
it went, where it might have a home, but it was gone in a flash before I could
check on its well-being. I'd seen it before, always hanging around the same
spot in the fence, where she likely had found a safe place to sleep.
I’m glad we adopted our rescue dog
after our last dog died suddenly from cancer. She had been dumped heartworm
positive at a high-kill shelter. A stray. We’d see them on the streets, in
shelters, the fortunate ones collected by rescue groups, the unfortunate—the look in their eyes, heartrending.
But animals aren't the only “strays” we
see; people fall into that same category. I'm not talking about the homeless,
necessarily, but about those people that by circumstance or transplant find
themselves in a new city, for a new job, or a fresh start, where they don't know anyone, or are
stranded somewhere while traveling for a day or days, due to weather and fate.
I found myself in that position after I
hung up my professional wings and took a job in a neighboring state before I
met my husband and got married. Like any new person with little
seniority, that meant I would be on duty over the holiday.
I remember walking out to my little VW
Jetta from my workplace the night before Thanksgiving that first year there, as
the sky spat cold rain, and felt a tear on my face. I'm not sure why, as a
professional pilot in my younger days, I'd spent many a holiday alone, on-call
or in a hotel. Years, later, holidays were busy times at work. But
that night it got to me—I really had no place
to go but home to my dog and a sandwich, my belongings still not unpacked from
the move. I was hoping someone would remember that I had no family near, and
would turn around, pulling back into the parking lot to ask me to join them for
dinner the next day when I got off work. As I walked to the car, I got a gleam
out of the corner of my eye in the darkness, a movement and I smiled thinking
someone remembered me and was turning back with an invitation. But it was
nothing more than an illusion, that faint glimpse of reflection imagined there
as you gaze into the depths of a wishing well, only to find cold stillness.
There was no car, just a flash of light
reflected off a nearby road, and it brought back every moment as a child, those
moments we have all had when we feared we just didn't fit in, that we
didn't belong.
I was always the one inviting the new
kid to play with us, befriending the nerdy and the odd. Perhaps it was
because I viewed myself that way. So, when I was a very young flight
instructor, living out of a suitcase with no roots, I decided to continue that
tradition and share my table with others like me. With most of us on call to
give an “introductory flight” to a prospective student, hoping to earn some
dollars to pay next quarter’s tuition, or too broke to fly home commercially,
many of us had no place to go on Thanksgiving Day. So, I hung a flyer up on the
instructor's bulletin board at my airport, for any errant corporate pilot in
the area or my coworkers. An invite to come over to my little place for
Thanksgiving dinner.
I'd not say I was “friends” with all
these guys from the perspective that we would continue to hang out together
when we finished college, going off to fly for the military or the airlines.
These were simply people I'd spent hours in the cockpit with getting
my various instructor ratings or occasionally getting the &*#@ scared out
of us, absorbing the wonderful colors and shapes and shadows of the sky, making
temporary homes in a series of small apartments with multiple roommates,
cramming as much as possible into the rare twenty-four hours we actually were
off. So yes, we were family, if only related by adventure and empty
pockets. And for that, I could think of no better reason than to peel thirty
pounds of potatoes, bake five pies, and to bat my big green eyes at the butcher
to talk him out of that extra ham at half off.
Yes, thirty pounds of potatoes, for
although I expected RSVP's from about six people, I ended up with twenty-seven
people, some of the pilots I worked with, some of the office staff who were
single, a couple of our mechanics, and a number of corporate pilots that used
our facility and stayed at the local hotel while their passengers enjoyed
Thanksgiving with family and they got free cable. They arrived with drinks and
chips and thankfully, some extra rolls and a couple of pies from the Safeway
store.
It was a wonderful evening, with
massive quantities of food eaten, countless stories told and much laughter,
eating until we couldn't eat anymore. There was something starry in the kitchen
that night, where I learned as much about my ability to organize and create as
I did about the essential bond that a meal around the table creates, even if
it's a bunch of card tables shoved together with white bleached sheets over
them.
Did it mean that we all got along
perfectly after that night? No, for there were still those days that intruded
darkly on hours normally full of light. Those long close-quartered days where
we plowed through thick dark clouds to reach ice-covered firmament, cursing the
weather and long lines for takeoff. Days where the alarm clock snatched us
violently out of wrung out sleep, sweeping us all back into the thrall,
impotent for days against returning to home, knowing that instead of getting a
nap afterward, many of most of us would be heading off to night classes.
As much fun as flying could be, after a few months of such a schedule,
even the best of us got a little self-absorbed. Add in constant travel, books
and study hall, and it was a life of scattered adrenalin, little sleep and
scant time for real relationships. Just like life for many of us now, with
families and jobs and pets and demands.
But that night, if only for a few
hours, we had that bond of family and food, warmth and safety. It was that
moment when chance aligns with time, whose only foe is death and together
death's darkness seems so very far away.
Strays.
You see them at an airport, that
frazzled traveler that just missed the last flight, that young person sleeping
on the floor after their flight canceled without the means to secure a
hotel room. I've offered a hot coffee and a sandwich with a smile to more than
one soldier or college student I saw stranded at the airport. Because I have
been that young person with a rumbling stomach, surrounded by strangers,
wanting only to be home.
I had a flight between two Midwest
cities a few years back after I'd picked up a couple of days work as a contract
corporate pilot after getting a call from a corporation I’d done some part-time
flying for in a neighboring state. The
city where I was flying out of to connect with that aircraft wasn't home, but
it was near where I was spending Thanksgiving with friends. Easy money
and the holiday was over anyway.
The sky was cold and cloudy as I waited
for my return flight, to be followed by a long drive home, but there was no
precipitation. All of a sudden, our flight was canceled, with no reason given,
but we were only told we'd be on another flight real soon. I didn't see any
mechanics at the plane, and the flight crew was all there, so I called Flight
Service, for the aviation weather, providing them the registration number of
the plane I'd just flown in, the previous night. There was severe icing
aloft, unusual to be so widespread, but deadly. No one, big or small, was going
to be flying out of that airport, and likely for the rest of the day.
At this point, we were standing in line
to be re-booked; the word not having gotten to the gate that the airport
would essentially be shutting down flights. There was a well-dressed
gentleman behind me. We had chatted a bit and it turned out his wife
worked at the same bank one of the folks I had spent the holiday with worked at.
I quietly told him about the weather and explained that NO ONE was going to be
flying, and I was going to get a rental car now, as the flight was just a “hop”
and getting home back to where my car was parked was just a three-and-a-half-hour
drive. A couple of other people overheard. I asked, “Do you want to go
with me?” With a quiet nod, four of us snuck out of the line. For
it only takes a word that the last flights are canceling to start the
disturbed buzz of voices in the customer service line, like bees, before they
move in an agitated swarm to the rental car counters, with stinging glances to
the Priority Customers, the worker bees hoping for one solitary car to be left.
I wanted to get out before THAT happened.
The weather out of the clouds was
great, just a little snow and we made the trip in four hours, everyone calling
their spouses or friends that they would be a bit late and whether they
needed a ride from the airport. On the drive, we were strangers and we weren't.
We talked about holiday plans, kids, and vacations when it got warm.
There were bad puns and WAY too many references to the Trains
Planes and Automobiles movie—something only folks that saw that movie would appreciate. “You're Going
the Wrong Way!” one of us exclaimed and the whole car erupted in laughter like
we were a bunch of grade school kids, the cool kids—“Those Aren't Pillows!” as we laughed again, just
having fun, with no fears of rejection or hurt or loss.
With a stop for sandwiches at one of
the toll plazas, we soon made it, only to find the terminal pretty much
deserted, most of the flights coming from north or east also canceled inbound.
They thanked me for making that call and offering to pay for the rental
car. I had let them pay for gas, and that's all I wanted.
We said our goodbyes and walked away
towards home. The sun, whose brilliant form dwarfs us all into the smallest of
particles upon the earth as we are held within its glare, was hidden behind the
steeled gray of cloud cover. With its brightness now captured behind a
stratified door, the night fell upon us as we walked to our cars; it was as if
we were all just shadows, covered with a fine, soft scattering of night,
falling like ash.
I never saw any of them again.
Thanksgiving for me that first year
after a career change was one of those “sandwich days,” not for lack of an
invite with friends, but personal and work-related. Still, it gave me
time to think and reflect, something that is as important as giving thanks.
The human heart is large enough to contain the entire world, and it's
small enough to be felled by just one being, yet it is valiant enough to bear
all burdens when you realize you are not alone.
As the phone rang tonight with the
cherished voice of my husband, to let me know he had reached his destination
safely, I realized I had much to be thankful for. Even in an empty house, there
was a gentle doggie snore of an adopted friend until it was time to join them
in slumber. With a quick warm hand pressed for a moment on top of a cold
square box in which my former furry best friend lay, I left the house and
walked to a little store a block away, a can opener and a little plastic bowl
in my pocket. I got some cat food and put it out in a bowl along a solitary
fence.
From True Course - Lessons of a Life Aloft by Brigid Johnson
But sometimes you get it right. Light, crunchy, perfection with just a hint of Cardamom.
Like all of these recipes, it did require a special tool, one that is passed down from mother to daughter.
