First Flight
“Can we puhleeeeeeeeese stop and watch the planes take off?!”
For a few years as a young child, we passed the John Wayne Airport while driving to and from church. Week after week I'd plead with my parents to stop so we could watch the planes. I was mesmerized by all of it: the roar of the engines, shimmery mirage-effect the jet exhaust made in the air, and the miracle of these massive machines taking flight.
I don’t understand why my parents ever indulged me. Perhaps because it was something to do that didn’t cost anything, or just to get me to stop pestering them. Maybe because they concluded it was a suitable activity for the sabbath…because one day they obliged, but rather than satisfy me, it just whetted my appetite for more. I was hooked.
Despite all this, it never occurred to me that I would ever go on a plane myself, because I had this notion that only rich and famous people got to fly…something we decidedly were not.
So I honestly have no idea how this all came about, but the summer I was eight years old, my parents asked if I would like to fly to Idaho and spend the summer with some former neighbors of ours. The Morgans had moved there two years earlier and had agreed to have me come stay them. For two months.
“Of course I want to go!”
Now lets pause for a moment here. I can’t fathom why anyone thought this was a good idea. I had never been away from home before, wasn’t a particularly mature child, and I hadn’t seen or talked to these people in two years--a quarter of my life. They were retired, their children were grown, and they lived on a small farm in a small town in the middle of nowhere.
But they had me at fly on a plane. I didn’t actually think the trip through beyond the flight itself.
The big day arrived and was it was fantastic! Everything my eight-year old mind had imagined it would be. I got a new outfit for the occasion (a rare occurrence), and was treated to a special breakfast. It was a big deal for someone in our family to be going on a trip of any kind, but this was especially significant. After snapping a quick picture of me on the sidewalk in front of our house in my new duds with my favorite stuffed animals, all seven of us loaded into the car and drove to the airport.
Going in to the tiny shoebox of a terminal (as it was in 1977), we handed over my suitcase and they gave me my ticket. Fairly jumping out of my skin with excitement, I said good-bye to my family. And then for the first time, I got to venture past the chain link fence onto the tarmac. Walking to the aircraft stairs, I paused to look back up at my family who were on the second-floor observation deck waving goodbye.
My ride was a sweet, solid yellow Hughes Airwest Boeing 727. I'd dubbed them “Flying Banana” jets and they were my favorite planes at the time. It was a thing of beauty. I considered myself super lucky because the stewardess directed me to the place of honor on the front row! Wearing my new sweater, and with beloved teddy bear in hand, off we went into the wild blue yonder, leaving all my troubles behind. That first lift off was a complete life-rush. What a feeling!
During the flight the stewardesses were kind and attentive to me. I was amazed that they just gave you stuff, like food, for free. Food was always a tricky issue in my childhood; it was kind of hard-scrabble a lot, so someone making me a meal always made me feel cared for. I adored the tiny lavatory--I'd always loved small spaces...like the forts I regularly built out of boxes, in cupboards, closets, or in the shed out back. Everything about the plane just seemed so cool. I stared out the window at the top-side of clouds, and was amazed at the patterns on the land below. It looked like a beautiful, cozy, patchwork quilt was wrapped around the earth. I fell in love with the view.
You know how time seems slow down to a crawl when you’re a kid? Well I discovered that that phenomenon doesn’t hold true on planes, because all too soon the fun was over. Toward the end of the flight I thought up one of the two complete lies I made up as a kid. I was otherwise a very honest child, but decided I could use a whopper of a story to tell my friend, who had visited Vegas many times before. ("We had to switch planes in Las Vegas on the way, and because there was so much time before we took off again, the flight attendants and pilots took me over to Circus Circus to see the show, and I got picked from the audience to feed the elephant peanuts.") Had no idea Circus Circus was a hotel. #busted
We landed and I told my nice stewardesses and pilots goodbye. Mrs. Morgan was waiting for me in the terminal and helped me claim my baggage before heading out to her car. I was just getting seated when I suddenly realized that I’d left my new sweater on the plane. Security being slightly different back then, I raced at top eight-year-old speed straight back out to my favorite Hughes Airwest Boeing 727 Flying Bannana, where the stewardess handed me my sweater and sent me on my way again.
We got to the farm and put my little suitcase in the attic room that I would be sleeping in with the 1970's bead curtain door. Mr. Morgan was a character. His name was simply the letter “K”…and was one of the few adults I wasn’t required to address in more formal terms. They showed me around the house and then sat me down for a talk.
“When we lived near you, we noticed that you were a pretty hyper kid.” K said. “We think it’s because you eat too much sugar, so we’ve decided that during your visit, we’re going to put you on a no-sugar diet.”
Huh?! No sugar? No treats at all? But Mrs. Morgan explained that she would make me special carob treats to eat when everyone else was having chocolate, for example. I had no idea what carob was, but when she showed me it looked like chocolate, and sounded something like caramel, so I thought it might not be too bad. I had no idea.
When they sent me outside to play, I ventured into the heat and started poking around their property. There were a few chickens, and I made a game of hunting for their eggs…Easter in July! It was scorching hot...a kind of heat I was totally unaccustomed to. So hot that I decided to see if I could actually cook the eggs on pieces of scrap metal lying on the ground. How twisted would you think I am if I told you it worked, and that after they were cooked, I fed them to the chickens?
Chicken-fun aside, there just wasn’t much to do. There was a new kind of silence out there in the country. Miles up the road I could just barely make out the farmhouse of their nearest neighbor. It looked smaller than my fort at home from that distance. I was an extreme extrovert from a large, noisy family, growing up in a suburban neighborhood chock full of kids, and suddenly I was very alone. As I gazed off into the endless horizon that hot summer day, I experienced the first pangs of homesickness in my life.
