Chapter 27

Nikki’s turn:

We’re still talking about new toys, right? Cindy was PIC for the flight back from Colorado with the new plane. Fair enough. After all, Cindy IS ‘Cindy of the Skies‘. When we landed, though, we had the entire community standing there waiting on the arrival. It’s a big deal.

Cindy exited first. Me? I stood in the door, my butt still inside indescribable luxury and newness, and said, “Okay, who wants a ride?”

We have seating for eight – one of their ‘executive’ options – plus two flight crew. One of the flight crew is me. I see Mister Wally standing off to the side. Wally’s been the aviation daddy to the community since we first formed up on Auburn, so he deserves this.

“I can take eight, plus Wally. Wally, you get the right seat.”

Then it was Johanna and Stoney, since this is all their fault, and my Dan and four Munchkins and Tara. First load. Cindy climbed in, too, playing the part of flight attendant, giving the safety briefing, then she climbed out, closed the door, then walked off to my front and gave me a thumbs up.

Wheeeeeee! I handed Wally the checklists. “This is YOUR fault,” I said. “Let’s start with ‘Before starting’.

He started reading, watching me attend to myriad details, then we went to the starting list. I started the turbine up. Sweet!

“Man, I like this panel,” he said.

“It’s something, ain’t it? I can’t wait to show it to Mister Barton,” I said. Mister Barton regularly flew in to our weekend flying socials. His 1946 Aeronca Champ didn’t even have an electrical system and had a total of three flight instruments, altimeter, airspeed and compass, and four engine instruments, fuel gauge, tachometer, oil pressure and oil temperature. He’s an old ag aviation pilot, and I think that seeing this will make him happy.

The second flight, Stoney held onto the baby and Johanna got the right seat. The third flight, I got MY Dan beside me.

“You really get off on this, don’t you?”

“Baby, this is YOUR fault.”

“Nope. Cindy’s.”

“Okay, but Louisiana girls are supposed to be getting jobs as cashiers at grocery stores when they’re in their twenties.”

“Tell me another one,” he said. We made a twenty mile loop around the area again.

Finally it was time to put the new toy away. Today she’s got a place of honor on the big (and getting bigger) apron in front of Wally’s original hangar. The stakes are in the ground for the new hangar, though, where this thing will reside. I’ve seen the plans. We have provisions for a clean place to store the seats we won’t be using on many trips, and a place to store supplies and provisions for an external power unit and an air-conditioned office and waiting area.

The new plane’s basically the same size as Wally’s biggest, newest Air Tractor. Both of them have those impressive five-bladed propellers and almost identical engines, except the Pilatus is rated for two hundred more horsepower, and while Wally’s plane cruises at a hundred forty knots, my plane cruises at twice that. I know. We just came home at max cruise.

There’s a little work involved with putting her to sleep. Cindy and I take care of this together with husbands in attendance, along with Johanna and Stoney and son.

“He’s already been to sea, in keeping with his Viking roots,” she explained. “Now he needs to be immersed in flying. Our son will know no limits.”

I’m looking at this red-headed baby boy soaking in all the activities and thinking how fortunate he is to be born into this world.

There are all manner of covers and wraps and tie-downs to be applied. It’s a couple of orders of magnitude, maybe more, over even the Cessna twin. You don’t just leave five million bucks on the ramp to be blown around or become a homestead for insects.

As we’re loading onto the four-wheelers to go home, I see Wally’s big Air Tractor coming in a bit early for the end of his day.

Wally’s out there waiting on it. He flags our four-wheeler down. “Thank y’all for letting me fly that thing.”

“Wally, you’re our winged godfather, you know,” Cindy said. I immediately recalled my ‘aviation daddy’ thought from earlier.

“Y’all are outrunning me, redhead,” he said. “Now, one more time – what’s the story behind that tail logo?”

“That’s ‘Three sigma’ with the Greek letter,” Dan 1.0 said.

“You gotta help me out here, Dan,” Wally said. “I’m just not up on my Greek alphabet. I thought ‘sigma’ was like a pointy, backwards ‘3’.”

“That’d be the capital letter. You saw that one in math, right?”

“Yeah,” Wally snorted, “right before I dropped out and went to flyin’ full-time.”

“The logo has the lower-case version. It shows up in statistics. It means a standard deviation within a population. We kind of thought that our team, Nikki and Cindy and the girls and the Munchkins, they’re laying way out on the intelligence curve. At least three sigmas.”

He shook his head. “Nobody’ll ever figure it out.”

“Yeah,” Dan said. “Darned few people know what either of the sigmas represent. We use the uppercase version on our corporate stationery.”

“That’s what confused me. Cindy, Nikki, don’t you two make me start back into math...”

Cindy giggled. “You can do math and let me have the Air Tractor.”

He shook his head. “Yeah ... uh-huh...”

Tara’s turn:

I’m spending a couple of weeks getting into what’s happening in the robotics lab. Electrical engineering is not just ONE set of skills. It might have been, a century ago, but today you can run off into dozens of sub-disciplines. Even here in the robotics arena, there are divides, the people who do power and mobility, the people who do control, the sensor people. I’m dabbling.

Major Kettler, or if you want to get personal, Aaron, is in the lab today. He doesn’t have to be. The nuts and bolts of what we do are not important to his job as liaison to DoD’s involvement in our research, but he’s here watching.

We’ve been on several dates, if you can call them that. I say that with reservation. It’s been him and me and Derek. I don’t know what he’s trying to do here.

OK, he’s pretty nice looking, but nothing terribly unusual. And I’ve seen military uniforms before, so all the glitter and major’s gold leaves aren’t unfamiliar -- nothing special, and most of the time when he’s here, he’s not wearing his dress blues. And that isn’t the point anyway. The thing is, he’s funny, and really smart. And it doesn’t hurt that he’s an engineer, either.

But what I never anticipated was what I saw over in the Hogwarts lab yesterday. Beck asked me to go over and tell the Munchkins that she’d give them a ride out to the Pavilion for their English lesson (in her mom-mobile, of course.)

And I walked into the lab, and over in one corner, Aaron was holding a sub-assembly while Rachel and Derek were attaching some brackets to the corners. Neither Derek nor Rachel noticed me, and Aaron didn’t notice me -- he was watching the kids with an amused grin on his face. JUST LIKE DAD USED TO DO when Derek was much smaller!

And I thought: “Tara, be careful, you idiot! You’ve always heard that girls want to marry their fathers!” Yup, I suppose we do. But then I thought about where the roots of that idea might originate. I had, in my estimation, a perfect father – good provider, as evidenced by the fact that we’re not starving and penniless, and intelligent, as evidenced by him pushing me into Auburn for a degree from his old alma mater. There’s nothing wrong with any of those characteristics and I’d be a fool to abandon them in the face of some pop psychology trope.

So I’m regarding Aaron then, watching him smiling and working with Rachel and Derek and I see a definite ‘big brother’ vibe. ‘Big brother’ to my little brother and his pony-tailed girlfriend translates very easily into questions as to whether or not this is suitable mating material.

Short assessment – yes.

But he’s in the Air Force and that fact has him on a short leash. They say move, he moves ... I am rooted right here for the time being, and I really like it. Derek likes it. I’m of the impression that no place on the planet would even come close.

Such a situation poses problems, i.e., Tara wants to stay at Auburn, at least for the foreseeable future, and Major Aaron Kettler, USAF, needs to follow orders and go off to Lower Slobbovia.

So, I take the direct approach to gaining knowledge. I take him to lunch. Or he takes me. or we do dutch. I dunno. Further discussion is expected. A small argument which I will gracefully lose.

Over a burger and a shared portion of onion rings (part of the ‘if you keep eating like that, you’re gonna need to buy new jeans from the ‘big girl’ rack’ concept) I asked him.

“How’s that work in the Air Force? How do they decide where you’re going, and for how long?”

He looked at me like he was assessing what was behind this line of questioning. “Needs of the service,” he said. “I’m in technical services. I took this assignment from the previous officer, Major Roth. He got promoted out of it and they moved him. So here I am.”

“So if you’re REALLY good, you don’t get to stay here?” I said, proud of my thinking.

“Not necessarily. And I’m not due for promotion any time soon. I’ve been a major for a year.”

“So how long? Six months? A year? Two?”

“Probably closer to two, maybe more,” he said. “It’d help if you guys built something impressive.”

“Oh, you HEARD the conversation about the aerial robot, then...”

“I distinctly remember the smirk on Terri’s face when she wanted to name it ‘Bot-fly’,” he laughed. “What do you DO with something like her?”

“I dunno,” I said. “I’m sure that her dad and Tina would welcome suggestions.”

“So would Jerry,” he said.

“I know, right...” Conversations about Terri and Jerry were apt to take place from time to time by those who knew them. To those of us who loved and accepted them, well... “They’re hanging in there.”

“Boy’s got the patience of Job,” Aaron said. “Speaking of ... Derek’s going to be at Rachel’s bat mitzvah next month. I’m working with him for his own bar mitzvah, since he asked.”

“So’s Sim Weismann,” I said. “Sim’s stepped in since we showed up, acting as the male adult in Derek’s life.” I watched Aaron’s face to see if parsing that ‘male role model’ comment changed his expression.

“Just passing on what my father gave me, and his father before him ... Sim’s a good man. I’m sort of offering the same...”