A man approached me in the Flying tent at the EAA's AirVenture airshow last summer and thanked me for, as he put it, "working a miracle in my life." He explained that his wife, who in 20 years of marriage had never been willing to go flying with him, had finally agreed to go after reading some of my columns.
"That's nothing," I remember thinking as I listened to his tale. "You want to know a real miracle? I finally took my mother flying with me last week."
Flying, you see, does not exactly run in my family. My father is not a pilot. His father wasn't a pilot. None of my uncles, great uncles or any of the other men in the family were pilots. There were some pretty impressive ladies in the clan-my father's grandmother had a college degree (in 1880) and supported her family raising rabbits, and my mother's mom worked herself through Smith College in defiance of her father-and went on to get a master's degree-before women even got the right to vote. My mother had a career in politics and has run an environmental organization trying to clean up the Bronx for the past 19 years. But none of them ever went near small airplanes.
When we were kids, my sister Gail always said she wanted to be a pilot-as well as a fireman, a baseball player, an adventurer and an astronaut, of course-but she ended up traveling the world and teaching Spanish, instead. My computer whiz brother David in Silicon Valley can kick my proverbial tail end in any computerized flight game but, as far as I can tell, never showed any inclination to try out the real McCoy. And even today, the only friends I have who are interested in aviation are pilots I've met since I got my license.
When I learned to fly, I started hearing other people reminisce about going to the airport with their parents when they were young; of wearing their dad's old bomber jackets; of taking the controls when they were too little to see over the instrument panel; of knowing they wanted to fly before they could drive. They're interesting stories, but I've always listened to them with the bemused curiosity of a foreigner hearing tales of a strange land she's never seen.
My flying has always been much more of a solo endeavor for me, in more ways than one. When I soloed and then passed my private check ride, there was nobody in my world to share the achievements with me. So I just took myself out to dinner to celebrate and noted the events with simple postscripts to my sister, who was in the Peace Corps in Africa at the time.
My flying has been so separate from my family, in fact, that my parents didn't even know I was a pilot for the first eight years I had my license. I'm not kidding. I didn't purposely hide the fact from them-they knew I spent every weekend at the airport, and that I'd changed careers to become an aviation writer-but for eight years, it seemed that the subject always got mysteriously changed whenever I tried to edge them closer to an idea of what I was doing with all that airport time.
Looking back on it, I can't believe that my dad never pursued the question, even if my mother never did. Looking back on it, he says that he can't, either. But the bottom line is, it wasn't until my first book was published and my mom read the "About the Author" section in the back that my parents discovered that their youngest daughter was a pilot.
