Sentimental Journey (68 page)

I look at my watch. The hands are dragging. By now a crowd of VIPs are gathering in bleachers to watch. My mother will be among them, standing head and shoulders above every woman there, and above every woman I have ever met in my life. She complains to me about never seeing any grandchildren, and I tell her when I meet a girl like her, I’ll marry her in a heartbeat. And I will, too.

My dad is there. I love my dad. When I was a boy, he taught me how to tell the weather by the moon and the sky; how to find my way home by a star; how to shoot a dove off a fence with a single shot and to bait a fish hook. He taught me to understand the land and the soil and the truly important things: to take a man for who he was, not how he looked or spoke. That it was okay to be alone in the world. Dad taught me all the things a man should know, the things his granddaddy taught him, the things my mother says make you into a good man.

The men in my family are good men. My best friend is a good man. He isn’t here. He can’t be. Jim is somewhere in the jungles of Viet Nam. But the General and his wife Kitty wouldn’t miss this. They are his father and mother and my parents’ closest friends. They started out as strangers, over a quarter of a century ago, but were brought together by war, kept together by the bonds of its experience, their lives irrevocably entwined even until today, even in the generation after them.

The call comes. Nothing complex, simply a statically rasping voice over an intercom and the flash of a green light on a pale wall in the waiting area filled with orange Naugahyde furniture and brown tweed carpet.

I walk down the halls, into an elevator, out on the boarding ramp, then inside the cockpit, my crew walking along with me. I’m the pilot, a boy’s dream come true after a lot of hard work.

Thank you, Grandfather.

I take my seat and buckle in. Before I begin system checks I pat my chest pocket for luck. Inside is a small hunk of smooth turquoise over seventy years old that has seen the farm fields of Texas and the battlefields of war. Also there are the photographs I needed to bring with me today: an old shot of a dashing RAF pilot in uniform standing next to a Spitfire, his expression serious, and a newer one of a tall red-haired man looking out from the cockpit of a twin-engine Cessna with a grin as big as Texas; the man who gave me life, and the man who taught me how to live it.

I am about to live this life like few men can. For the next interminable minutes my time belongs to others. I do my job, checking and rechecking the systems, doing the work I’ve trained for.

And then it is time. I close my eyes. I feel the speed like no other aircraft on earth; it consumes my body. In my earphones I hear “Houston. We have liftoff.”