From up here, lines and patterns emerge that I am unaware of. I can see the grid-lines of roads and fields, broken by meandering rivers. In my mind I connect the roads to cities to housing complexes to houses. In each house there is a family like ours. Each time I fly from one place to another, I lose the connection between the places.

My father used to take me up in his single-engine Cessna. Usually it was just for the hell of it and we would start and leave from the same local airport. I never saw the point in this except to momentarily change your perspective. One time he took me on a trip to see my mother who lived down in Chico, California.

He decided to circle the house first. It wasn’t hard to spot. My older brother Mark lived with my mother. He was in college and Mom used to let him throw parties. He would buy kegs and stage them on the front lawn and then charge people two dollars for a red plastic cup. The front lawn was so big that everybody called it “The Meadow” and somebody even painted this on the mailbox to make it easier to find when you were drunk.

The prevailing myth was that The Meadow used to be a par-4 fairway on a golf course that was now a housing development. Mom had married some white-haired guy that owned the golf course and decided real estate was more profitable. They didn’t last very long, but she got to keep the house. I never met the guy, so I never knew for sure if he really owned the golf course or if any of this was true. This is just what Mark said.

If Dad knew about the meadow he probably wouldn’t want me to visit. But he had drinking problems and divorces of his own that muddled his mind. We spotted the meadow and did a low flyover at my request. When Dad saw the meadow, he said, “Son, I think we can pull it off.” He pulled the plane around in a wide circle and prepared his instrumentation. I asked if I could put down the landing gear. He said, “How many times do I have to tell you the wheels are fixed on this plane?”

Mark must’ve heard the plane because he came running out into the yard. He threw his arms in the air. They were stretched unusually long. Mark guided us in for the landing. Dad touched the plane down and taxied and parked in front of the house.

Only then did Mom come running out in a daze like she had been sleeping. Her hair was all matted to one side and she didn’t have any make-up on. She yelled hysterically, “You can’t just barge in like this unannounced.” She was looking at me when she was screaming but I’m sure she meant it for Dad. “This is criminal trespassing!”

“What do you want us to do at this point?” I asked. “Turn around and leave?”

As I was deciding whether to get out of the plane or not, my mom grabbed me by the arm and pulled so hard the arm came right out of the socket. Only a few taut tendons and nerves connected my mother and I. It didn’t hurt a bit. In the awkward silence that ensued, she fumbled with my dislocated arm and jimmied it back in the socket, which hurt like hell. It fit back in and stopped hurting, but didn’t quite feel right after that.

Mark was cracking up. But he didn’t say anything to Dad. Neither of them even looked at or greeted dad. Mom calmed down a bit, took a deep breath and said, “Oh lord, what do we do.”

“You dislocated his shoulder,” Dad said. “You deal with it.”

He leaned across my seat and shut the door. He fired the engines back up and turned the plane around. There was a pause where we watched him adjust the controls, then everything accelerated and he was gone. He left me on the ground with Mark and Mom, still watching as the plane disappeared into a grid-work of vapor trails.


En Route, Omaha to St. Louis
July 24, 2002