The Shuttle Tour

I was down in Cocoa Beach the other day when the last shuttle landed for the last time and it reminded me of this story.
Sometime not long before 9/11 I was a student pilot flying out of Orlando Executive. One fine day in a rented Piper Cherokee I was working with an instructor doing touch and go’s at Titusville airport. We finished what we were doing and didn’t feel like heading for home. He asked me if I had ever done the shuttle tour.
Since I didn’t know what that was I admitted that I had not. He got on the radio and called the controller at the shuttle landing strip at Cape Canaveral. There was no mission going on and nothing else much happening there either as far as I could tell.
Apparently they keep the control tower manned all the time over there. The controller must feel like the proverbial Maytag repairman, long days with nothing to do and no one to talk to. My instructor asked permission to come into his airspace and “take the tour”.
Permission was granted. “Come on along, maintain 500 feet”.
That is a VERY large landing strip. I could have landed that Piper sideways on it with just a bit of headwind. It is something like three miles long. At eighty knots or so it took several minutes to fly the length of the thing. The instructor and the controller chatted on the radio the whole time. I just gawked. There are States in New England that are smaller than that landing strip.
That was cool! I think the next weekend we flew up to Umatilla and worked on short field landings, that strip is about as long as my driveway, but that’s another story.

On Education

There is a difference between schooling and pursuing a course of study, even though the concepts are often confused.
Schooling, as commonly practiced, is mostly a way to warehouse young people that the society at large has no real use for. Learning can and does take place in schools, I’ve seen it happen, but it’s not really what they’re for. Please don’t take this as an attack on the various school systems that are in place. I have no better suggestion to make as to what to do with youth until they can sort out what to do with themselves. A lot goes on in a school aside from learning.

I just wish to point out that if one takes on the goal of learning, of study, of gaining significant knowledge of some subject or discipline, then a traditional school may not be the best way to do it, or even the best template to copy from.

Anyone with a computer and internet access has at their disposal information, or at least data, far in excess of that available at a first rate university library, indeed it includes the resources of a number of first rate university libraries.

A little bit of God’s best work

The first significant amount of time I remember spending with her was an night in Athens Ohio when we were very young. I think I was still in High School, which would make me about 16. She was 2 or 3 years younger than me.

All these memories are foggy with time. Anyway this is a story about the memories more than the facts, where any facts existed, behind the memories.

She had taken some LSD. It was her first time experimenting with the stuff. I hung around her most of that night. I was as straight and sober as I ever was in those days. I don’t remember if other people were around or not. I don’t think anything of note really happened; I just was sort of looking out for her to be sure she was OK. She was. Eventually I took her home and dropped her off.

The next time I remember spending with her was several years later. I was an OU student living in an apartment on Hocking Street, down near the river. We bought a bottle of Black Tower wine at Sutton’s carry out, sweet white German wine. We walked around that part of town just talking. Eventually we walked out over a bridge that had just been built over the river and dropped the empty bottle over the side into the water.

I think she spent a few nights with me at my place then. I think we had slept together occasionally before then but  the details are cloudy. When I first knew her the fact that she was (I thought) much younger than me made me almost afraid to touch her. I was past that by this time. She was so pretty it almost hurt to look at her.

I don’t think she lived in town at that point, off somewhere going to school no doubt. Most likely we hooked up from time to time during that period. The details have been lost over the years. I don’t think we even had sex many of the times we were together back then. I do remember the sex but it was not intense noisy and athletic, it was comfortable and relaxed.

A year or two later I had the bike wreck. I was crippled and spent a long time in the hospital. When I was finally released I came back to stay at my dad’s house. Friends had put together a party. Just about everyone I had ever met was there. She was there too. I have a picture in my mind like a still photograph of her sitting by herself on the window bench in the dining room, big dark eyes and just smiling at me.

I lived at dad’s house for about two years after the wreck and at some point during that time someone gave me her phone number.

She was living in Cincinnati and working as a nurse. I called her up and to my surprise she wanted to come see me. The Amtrak train ran from Cincinnati to Athens in those days and she rode it to town. I went to pick her up at the little station on West Union Street late one evening. It was cold and dark and blustery and she came walking up wearing a knee length coat with her black hair longer than she usually wore it. She looked like something out of a 40’s detective movie. Man was she beautiful.

She stayed with me for a day or two in the basement bedroom with the red carpet that was my room when I was a boy. I remember my step brother, who was about 5 years old, popped his head in and saw her there in bed. His eyes got big, I could tell even he was impressed.

I would get that “How does a scruffy guy like you rate a babe like this?” look a lot back then. I didn’t quite believe it myself.

I went and saw her in Cincinnati a time or two and she came to see me. She had a little place in Mount Adams. She worked the graveyard shift at the ER at Cincinnati General Hospital. It was a VERY intense job. She dealt with crazy shit all the time that would make combat soldiers want to run and hide.

She worked very hard. She studied very hard. She was scary smart. She was not fearless but she was very brave. When things got harry she was the most capable person I have ever seen. Maybe that was something she learned working in the ER but I suspect it was most of the reason she was so good at that kind of work. From time to time she played hard too.

I was getting ready to open the tavern in Athens about this time. She left Cincinnati and came back to Athens. She and I moved into a little house that my father owned off the road to Amesville. She took a job where she gave kidney dialysis to people as out-patients.

She moved into my family as if she was born there. My big family was close in its own slightly dysfunctional way. I have had quite a few girlfriends over the years and spending time with me was spending time with my family. The family was always polite to my friends but she was something special. She was part of the family. She could and did spend a lot of time there when I was nowhere around.

Sometimes the Sunday night poker games at my dads house got a bit inebriated. Dad could be an accomplished drinker when he chose to be. At one such occasion after having too much to drink I wandered into the living room and passed out on the couch for several hours. When I got up at daybreak my dad was still sitting at his place at the dining room table where he had been all night. He had his head in his hands and looked at me with a big grin and simply said "I'm drunk!". Then I heard her voice calling to me from the kitchen, "Do you want some eggs?". The two of them had sat up all night. He was sitting there being stupid and she was cooking breakfast for everybody!

Once she took me over to see some of her patients. They were an elderly Greek couple. The man had kidney failure and she gave him dialysis. The woman was pestering her about not having a husband, the way that old European women sometimes do.She brought me over there to prove she actually had a boyfriend.

She did not behave possessively towards me very often but when she did it made me feel wonderful. I never wanted anything more than to have her claim me.

Like I said before, she was not fearless. I recall one hot summer day we were putzing around in the yard. I took the garden hose and squirted the water up in the air and she started to dance in the drops like a child playing in the sprinkler. Then I started to squirt her with it directly, playing a little too rough. She got scared which caused me to stop immediately. I never wanted her to be scared, but her being scared of me was more than I could bear. My every instinct was to protect her.

We went on one of those family trips about this time. My dad and stepmother flew out to the Midwest; no doubt pop had some business thing going on. We drove.

I borrowed a big Vista Cruiser station wagon from a friend and she and I and several siblings piled in. We had too few 8 track tapes along, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and an old Willie Nelson tape with “Hello Walls” on it.

We spent time with one Aunt and Uncle and plenty of cousins on their Minnesota grain farm. We spent time with another set of relatives at their river cabin in Illinois.

Man we had fun! That’s what she and I did most all the time, we had fun. Though I was not at all aware of it at the time, I now believe that much of the reason she would hang around with me was to blow off steam as a respite from her more usual pursuit of working and studying hard.

When she needed a break she would come find me and tie one on until she was literally dancing naked on the tables. I was proud to be a part of such adventures. She was very good at naked.

I’ve worked hard almost all my life, but about this time I was starting to fade in a way that she was not. The booze and the dope were starting the process of kicking my ass. I was in trouble and I knew it, but I had no clew what to do about it.. I knew our relationship couldn’t last but I was going to hang around as long as she would let me.She was the most competent person in the world, I was starting to loose it.

Eventually the day came when she told me that she wanted to leave. I was not surprised but it hurt me and I’m afraid I was a bit of a dick about it. I hope she forgave me for that, I think she did.

She moved out but we would still bump into each other from time to time. When she wanted something she would show up at my folks place or leave me a message to contact her. She would still show up occasionally for Sunday dinner and the poker game.

I recall her riding with me in the car going somewhere about this time and her telling me a story about how she had suggested she sleep in the spare bedroom when we were living together and I had told her she could just go ahead and move out if she wanted to do that. When she told me this story I didn't remember the incident she was describing.

Her point was that she liked for me to take the dominant role. That surprised me quite a bit, all the feminist propaganda at the time condemning dominant male and submissive female roles.All the stuff you see about "What women want" is silly of course. Men don't know what women want. Women don't know what women want. It's all much more complicated than that.I know for sure that I have always been a complete dope when it comes to girls.

Not too much later she moved up to Columbus and went back to school. I talked to her at least once on the phone at that time about something trivial. I don’t know when the last time I saw her was. I think perhaps she was at my father’s funeral some years later. I have a memory of looking up and seeing her at the back of the crowd in the church, but I’m not really sure that happened. It was a chaotic time. If she was not there she would have wanted to be.

I continued the process of becoming a hopeless drunk. Eventually I left town and wound up in Atlanta.

I finally sobered up and spent some time at Georgia Tech learning a salable skill. I had lost track of her completely. My dad was dead and my family was scattered. She would have not been able to contact me the way she had before even if she had wanted to. I hope that from time to time she wanted to, but I don’t know that.

I’ve had a good life since then. I married a wonderful woman who I am crazy in love with. We have a small farm and I’ve got a good career.

Every little while I would think of my old sweetheart, she’s a peaceful and pleasant memory. One of the few things I was sure of was that she was out there somewhere and doing just fine.

Here it is some twenty years later. I have reestablished contact with lots of friends from the old home town because of Facebook and email. I put her name into a Google search one day. I figured she was probably married with a different name but what the hell; the name she started out with was fairly unusual.

Several results came back that I thought might refer to her. They were mostly medical research papers and references to the same. Many of the references added a DVM after her name. The middle initial was right, but I didn’t know about the DVM, she had a couple of cats but she never talked about wanting to be a veterinarian.

Another article referred to her as “An epidemiologist working for the State of North Carolina”. I had to look that up. It is the study of factors affecting the health and illness of populations. That did sound like her.

I thought maybe there was some other medical credential that was a DVM. Then I saw one article that gave credit for a contribution but said she had died before it was published. I thought that it could not be her. The article was dated 1997.

I looked some more and found where she had indeed graduated from OSU College of Veterinary Medicine. It included pictures of her receiving an award. That was her, DVM and all.

Then I found it, a picture of a headstone; her name, correct middle initial complete with the DVM. Feb. 13, 1958 – Oct. 5 1995. The last confirming detail was to go back to the OSU publication that had the story of her graduation and award. I had noticed that it had obits at the end. I found the second 1995 edition and there it was.

Just damn. I have no idea what happened to her. I asked some of our mutual friends but no one knew anything about it.

I may never know what happened. She didn’t even make 40.

Life goes on for me but I know fewer things for certain any more. Just that she was a little bit of God’s best work and that I liked it better when I was sure she was out there somewhere doing just fine.