Chapter 33

Cindy’s turn:

It’s a little early in the year, and there’s no way he could beat me over there and put a bow on it to make it my birthday present anyway, but Dan and I and Tina are on our way to Mississippi to pick up my Stearman.

Tina? She’s gonna fly our Cessna back. Dan and I are flying the Stearman back together. There were two certified parachutes in the cargo space.

Dan looked apprehensive.

“Don ‘t be, baby. A loop. An aileron roll. Maybe just one leeetle bitty snap roll ... Just so she remembers her roots.”

We landed at the airport in Mississippi. Mister Jester had her rolled out in the sun, bright yellow, decked out in the livery of the World War II training facility in Pensacola, Florida. Lovely. She shines.

“Here she is, Mizz Cindy,” Mister Jester said.

“Beautiful.”

“She prob’ly ain’t shined like this since she left the factory,” he smiled. “We flew ‘er yesterday to double-check the rigging. She’s straight and true.”

The guy behind him smiled broadly. “I’m Brian Price. Mister Jester hides me. I’m one of his mechanics.”

“Glad to meet you, Brian,” Dan said, shaking his hand. “She sure looks good.”

“Flies good, too. Mister Jester says that if I work on it, I have got to go flying in it. I did. She flies.” He grinned.

“Beautiful work, guys,” I said. “We’re gonna fly ‘er home. Uh, I’ll send you an invite to our fall fly-in. It’s informal, just visiting and eating and flying and playing around airplanes. If that’s your thing...”

Mister Jester shook his head. “Yeah, it’s kinda been my thing for forty-odd years. I’ll get there.”

“Great,” I said. “We got everything there from this thing and Mister Barton’s ‘46 Aeronca to an almost new Pilatus PC-12. From ultralight to the top of light aircraft. If you can fly something in for the visit, great. If you drive over, that’s great, too. Just show up.”

“She’s serious,” Tina inserted. “We have flour-bombing and spot landings.”

“And great food, and if you hang around after dark, we have music to go with it all.”

“What kind of music?” Brian asked.

“Uh, we’re good from classical through bluegrass. Toss in a little Cajun. Other odds and ends. If you can’t find something you like...”

“Oh, sounds like fun. Family oriented?”

“Very much so. We got ‘em from under a year to over seventy.”

Tina jumped in. “MY family’s in on it. Step-daughter’s fourteen, I got a three-year-old. Made for friends and family.”

“I’m gonna try. Wife’s been talking about an excursion.”

“This one won’t cost you anything but getting there and whatever you do to stay. We even have a couple of RV hookups.”

Then it’s time ... Dan and I mount up, crank that zero-timed Jacobs engine up, and we’re off. One circuit of the field is prudent, and we do that while lazily climbing to fifty-five hundred feet, our cruising altitude back to Auburn.

I notice Tina’s getting our 180 off the ground. I pop the button on the intercom.

“Next week’s gonna be a busy aviation week, babe,” I tell Dan. “You and me, we’re going to Louisiana. Checking out Bill and Haley on the other Stearman.”

“You mentioned it. I guess ‘mention’ is the same as ‘bet on it’.”

“You don’t mind, do you?”

“No,” he said. “We spend a week there, that’s good for us and that Louisiana bunch. They’re growing. Nothing I can do here that I can’t do there.”

“And the week after...” I continued.

“I know, baby,” he answered. “Don’t for a minute think it’s not a big effort. Wally, you, me, and we need co-pilots. Probably need Wally to fly back with whoever’s bringing Lenya back. That means a couple of taildragger pilots in each of the 185’s.”

“Big deal,” I said, “is geography. Twelve hundred miles, straight line. A hundred forty knots cruise on a 185. Eight and a half hours at cruise. Add another hour for climb, landing, refuel...”

“I’d hate to do that in one day...”

“You and me both, if I have a choice,” I stated. “But if somebody does want to do it, well, it’s doable.”

“I’m thinking we do a half way trip one day, finish the next. Six hundred miles gives us an hour or so fuel reserve.”

There are plenty of other things to talk about. I’m just a little bit giddy, though, grasping the stick of this bit of 1930’s technology, even though the panel now hosts electronics – navigation and communications radios, a transponder so we’d show up on radar in an official manner, back in the tail behind my seat is an emergency locator beacon in case I put us into the fields below.

But I’m sitting on a parachute and this thing’s welded steel tubing and wood and fabric, and there are wires holding the wings together. I ponder the sense of history. Real men learned to fly in these things then went off to war.

And here I am, a little Alabama girl, flying it.

Only ONE aileron roll on the way home, as in “Rolling left.”

“Huh?”

By that time we were already passing sixty degrees. Went all the way around. Kept the nose up so we didn’t lose altitude, and that’s where ‘up’ was rapidly changing in relation to the wings and the horizon.

“Geeze, baby!”

“You know I HAD to do it.”

“Yeah, I suppose so. You’re gonna loop, too, right?”

“Yep.”

“Go ahead. Get it over with. I have my parachute.”

Tina hurried ahead, having forty knots of speed advantage, but a toddler waiting on her. And a husband. And a married and unusually serene pTerridactyl.

Who doesn’t live there any more. Yep, just as young wives have done since time immemorial, Terri’s moved in with her husband. I remember that time with my Dan, although it was well before we had a bit of paper making it legal.

“That cheesy movie, The Scorpion King,” I opined a couple of days after Terri and Jerry’s return from their honeymoon. “You don’t think...”

Susan played the straight line for me. “Think what?”

“The sorceress in the movie had powers of prescience at the beginning of the movie. She kept them as long as she hadn’t been with a man...”

Tina laughed. “Hon, look who’s talking, okay, Little Miss ‘Help Me Though Middle School’. When you connected with Dan, you took off. Tell us that ain’t what happened.”

“Well, in my case, Dan took a lot of stress out of my life,” I said defensively.

“Uh-huh,” Tina giggled. “I bet he did. And you don’t think that just maybe Miss Terri’s got one or two things she doesn’t worry about any more?”

“True,” I said.

Dana chimed in. “She’s pushing mobility options of robotic platforms. We’re being shoved past wheels and tracks and legs and feet. The centipede was only the beginning. We’re working on one that slithers.”

“Yeah,” Nikki inserted. “Jerry’s got a couple of juniors stuffing tiny little motors into segments of this worm. He’s got some mobility things going.”

I know about that excursion in robotic mobility. After all, I AM supposed to be riding herd on this stampede.

Well, Nikki and I are ... with Aaron Kettler as titular CEO.

Aaron and Tara seem to have fit together quite nicely as a married couple. Tara shows up here from time to time, alternating between the robotics side and the engineering side as she works toward her bachelor’s degree. There’s talk that she’ll graduate a semester ahead of her little brother.

Her little brother, though ... We all stopped sweating over Terri and Jerry when they finally got married. They’re legal.

Rachel and Derek, though ... before her wedding, Terri confided that she thought that Rachel and Derek had progressed well into the realm of touchie-feelie.

“She told you that?” I asked.

“Not directly, but I told her that I got some very hard to ignore feelings when Jerry and I kissed and hugged. She said she knows all about those. That it’s hard to ignore and they’re not too successful sometimes.”

Rachel’s turn:

Three people know – me, Derek (naturally) and Terri. Terri’s been my sister since the first day we met.

Derek – I don’t know how to explain it, but the first time I saw Derek – the first time he saw me – we KNEW. He wasn’t, forgive me for the term – yucky like other boys my age. Or any age. I mean, I have many men I know and I have great respect and admiration for them. Dad’s at the top of that heap, but it’s a gigantic heap and the top layer’s very broad, what with a bunch of great men we have in this community.

Guys my own age, other than Derek? None of them comes close. Just so you know that I’m not being all starry-eyed and hormonal like young girls my age often do, I have had serious talks with my parents and with many women whom I consider to be role models.

We have a wide range to choose from. Mom, obviously. Mizz Lee, our English teacher, who’s in her seventies. And the Sisterhood, the young wives of the community here.

It didn’t take long for them to understand that just as some of them were precocious in relationships, so might I be.

Derek had similar conversations with a few of the males in the community. Dad’s not one of them, though. I think that sometimes when Dad thinks too long about me and Derek, his head almost explodes. He’d talked with Mom about moving us away. Mom pulled up short on that idea. There really isn’t any other place that comes close to this.

And there really isn’t another guy like my Derek.

We didn’t even start holding hands for weeks after we first met, and when we first did that where people could see it, it was Vicki and Terri, and they started to make funny noises. Derek and I were twelve.