Taking Flight

By Anne Woodman

Mom stood on the dock, happily waving a white handkerchief as Dad piloted his little sailboat out onto the open sea, the sunset a brisk Tropicana orange. Then Mom headed back to her tiny coastal cottage to potter around in the sandy garden and wait for Dad to return later in the year.

At least, that was the way it was supposed to happen. Only problem was, Mom hated the ocean (“too sunny, too hot, too much sand”), and the only way Dad was going to voluntarily leave his proud house in the Atlanta suburbs was if we carried him out, prying his fingertips from the wood door frames. That or death.

It was spring of my sophomore year, and the pink blossoms on the cherry trees that lined my Chapel Hill campus were proliferating at an annoying rate, taunting me and increasing my misery. I had to decide that month just exactly what I was going to do with my life. Some options: museum curator, kindergarten teacher or journalist, with the career center questionnaire results suggesting I consider route truck driver. The a la carte possibilities were endless.

I was grumpy and off-center, my career car speeding off the cliff of a crumbling, defunct highway. And anyway, things with my college boyfriend, love of my life, future father of my faceless children, was not going so well.

Yeah. So I clomped my way across campus, back to the career counselor, to divine my future.

“So, Anne, it looks like you have a few areas of interest that coincide with your academic strengths. You have plenty of choices,” the gentle woman began. Easy for you to say, I thought. Career decided, job safe, children raised, and glancing at her ring finger, husband acquired. And you’re not a college-educated route truck driver.

“That’s exactly the problem,” I said, followed by a significant sigh. “Everything I decide now will forever haunt me.”

“Tell me about your parents,” she said, carefully. “What do they do?”

“Well, my father is in banking, and my mother teaches piano,” I said, not clear on how this was going to help.

“Have they always held those jobs?” she asked, kindly searching my face.

“Well, not really. Dad taught English, then worked in human resources, and my mom has been a chemist, stay-at-home mom and bank teller.” I thought I saw what she was getting at. “But choosing to become a kindergarten teacher and then deciding to go into museum curating would be a tough road,” I said, in an only slightly restrained, whiny voice.

“It’s true that some career changes involve more education, but your choices are never set in stone,” she said. “Give it some thought and make your best guess.”

So I did. I chose journalism. All aboard the career train. My first little job covering public relations at a local school system found me living in a small, one-bedroom apartment in which my upstairs neighbor took a shotgun to his waterbed one night. And the winter temperature hovered ten balmy degrees warmer than it was outside, while I stayed cool in summer by blowing cool air through the holes in my tank top.

A friend who was temping at my office joined me for lunch one day.

As we sat at a window table at a pizza joint down the street from work, I laid out my case. “My grandmother is giving me her piano, when it’s painfully obvious I have nowhere to put something like that,” and I was off and whining again, a specific skill of mine in my early 20s. “This is not how it’s supposed to work. First, you get a good job, then you find a good man, then you buy a good house. Then, you get a piano.”

My friend, infinitely wiser, being battle-scarred and much older (at least 28), paused to finish chewing her pesto pizza. “I have never thought of life that way.” And she raised her eyebrow in a manner to suggest how very interesting a sociological specimen I was.

“You haven’t?” I asked, and it stopped me in my tracks.

My friend’s life had not followed my traditional formula for happiness, but at five months pregnant, she glowed with a serenity I didn’t think I would ever possess.

Clearly, my grandmother was still extremely misguided. I mean, who wants to play Chopin or even show tunes with a neighbor toting a shotgun upstairs? I wasn’t a virtuoso, and I valued my life. But maybe, just maybe, my well-laid plans had a few kinks.

After all, my college boyfriend had avoided my attempts to cram him into my full-speed-ahead future. The sophomore slump we had weathered had been a transparent-to-anyone-else warning of trouble ahead.

And at 23, a risky proposition entered my life at about the same time as the piano. A scrappy Englishman with no green card rode in on a motorcycle, no tandem transportation in sight.

The year of the piano and motorcycle and lowly PR girl job began a metamorphosis of my parents’ lives. They were inconsiderate enough to transform into people I was not sure I knew anymore.

With the year-long sailing trip around the world put on indefinite hold, my father took a job in another city, and my mother eagerly followed, fitting in neatly, and quite possibly more comfortably, than she had in our longtime Atlanta home.

Adventures in transportation of another sort ensued. With the additional income and more ideal weather conditions in his new town, my dad began taking flying lessons.

On a more surreal level, Mom soon followed, mentioning “touch and go’s,” “stalls,” and “altimeters” and talking about the Weather Channel anchor-people as if they were old friends.

This is the same woman who refused to grant me permission when I was 12 to ride a go-cart at The Birthday Party of the Year. Too dangerous. Not risk-takers, I would have said my parents were more on the risk-averse side of the curve.

Or were they?

In the meantime, my Englishman, whom I had met in front of a poster store at University Mall, had called to ask me out. The motorcycle being ruled out as unsuitable, I went to pick him up for our first date.

As we sat drinking Coronas in a deserted bar near campus, I questioned my motives. Rebound? Wild fling with unpredictable, no-car-in-sight, unstable foreigner?

“So what’s the wildest thing you’ve ever done?” he asked, and the expectant twinkle in his eye made me want to please.

“Jump out of an airplane,” I said, which was wild before The Real World aired seasons 1-58 of its cast doing it. And it was quite wild and uninhibited for me.

Thankfully, he was hooked. “Tell me about it,” he said, and he listened, eyes on me as the bar filled up, drawn in by my obvious excitement and passion. Never mind that every fifth girl in Chapel Hill had probably aced skydiving just last week.

It soon became clear to me that my parents were living it up and throwing caution to the winds. With my sister finally flown from the nest, my parents began taking trips out West, ignoring phone messages for days at a time, and in a siren song to normalcy, adopted three dogs. Growing up, there was the assurance that the sun would rise each day and the fact that Dad didn’t like animals. Now, a call home meant enduring Dad’s cooing noises and slurpy doggy tongue noises way, way too close to the phone.

When I went for a visit, we walked their three mutts out to the edge of the runway and I tried to persuade Mom that although the dogs loved trips in the car, planes were different. I had nightmares about long-eared puppies in flight goggles wing-walking, the wind flapping in their jowls. My ruling premise of all things in their places was up in the air.

My motorcycle-riding Englishman, predictably, didn’t hear the quiet ticking of our relationship clock. Seven months before his work visa ran out, I laid it all out over pasta and sundried tomatoes.

“So, um, have you been thinking about the whole marriage idea?” I asked, taking a gulp of wine for fortification.

“Well, sure. Sometimes you have to let yourself be surprised,” he said, leaning back in the chair with a satisfied grin.

Hmph. “I’ve run out of time to be surprised,” I said. “Have you ever planned a wedding? Not even a big wedding, but a basic, flowers-out-of-the-garden kind of wedding? You’ll be booted out of the country by the time we can book a caterer, and anyway, we can’t use garden flowers because it’ll be January. I think we need to get moving. Let’s at least look at wedding sites,” I said in a rush.

“January’s ages away. We’ll be fine,” he said. “But if you want to look at places, that’s great.”

Our December wedding was booked the next day. And I met his parents the week of the wedding.

The flight lessons weren’t enough. My mild-mannered banker dad began talking about starting a charter airline with the zeal of one converted. The same man who refused to wear shorts at the beach because he didn’t want his legs on display was having shirts cut off of his back in bacchanalian celebrations of flying milestones. Running an airline after banking? Sure.

In the meantime, Mom was acing her flight lessons, too (though only a piece of her shirt was cut—there apparently are still some levels of decorum to uphold).

Sometimes, on a perfectly calm weekend, I would answer the phone and hear laughter and the sound of a finicky car in the background. My parents would be calling from a remote mountain getaway—they had flown in and were now packed into a Chevette with friends, going who knows where.

My memories of skydiving were taking on the odd qualities of Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Who knows what the next phone call home might reveal?

By the time my Englishman and I got married, the thought of being a kindergarten teacher seemed idiotic. Why in the world would I have considered that? My life clearly had one direction, and that was a burgeoning career in public relations, buying a house (the piano needed a home) and having children. In that order.

My career was clicking along the tracks, picking up speed in a carefully modulated way. We had the house. My motorcycle babe had even ditched the bike and had a respectable Honda Accord. It was time for kids. It was now or never.

“So, I was thinking that I’m ready to have a baby,” I sprang on my hubby over cheap champagne one New Year’s Eve.

“I don’t think we have enough money yet,” he said, in a measured, neutral tone. I wasn’t sure, but I thought his mouth quivered as he took a sip of his drink. Oh, and he was either turning green or the lighting was bad.

“How much is enough?” I asked, trying to keep the rising anxiety out of my voice.

“Oh, twenty thousand dollars,” he said, and the randomness of the number assured me that he had pulled it out of the air. It also confirmed that he was using my Anne-with-a-Plan certainty against me.

“Twenty thousand?” I asked, and I wondered where we’d get that so soon after sinking our savings into our cute little house.

“I’m not getting any younger, and we don’t even know how hard it’s going to be to conceive,” I said, and it was clear that I was as comfortable with whining at 27 as I had been at 19 and 23.

“Let’s do our best to save all we can,” he said, and he kissed my pouting lips.

My dad’s charter airline has, of course, taken endless planning. But the venture has an equal part of the uncertainty of taking a breath and jumping that is a must when starting any small business.

Visions of Dad’s retirement were once connected, in my mind, to seafaring or napping quietly in a hammock in our backyard. The reality is constant marketing, meeting with the FAA, charting figures, hiring pilots and pleasing clients.

And Mom is in training to become a flight instructor.

Instead of going to visit Mom and Dad in a tiny coastal bungalow, they fly up to visit us in their Baron. We have become familiar with the little airports they call FBOs, the pilot charts they are constantly updating, and what it means when they talk about wind speed and a ceiling of 1500 feet.

I have learned what it means to derail what I once thought was a meaningful career. My two children, who are three and five, teach me more in ten minutes than I could have learned in the intervening five years on the job.

My five-year-old son has inherited my need to plot out the future.

“Mommy, I don’t want to live at college,” he said one day recently. Never mind that the thought probably frightens me more than it does him.

“OK, honey, you can live wherever you want,” I said, smoothing his buzz-cut hair.

“I think I’m going to live in the house next to you and Daddy,” he said. “I’m going to work at the sandwich shop and make you and Daddy lunch every day.”

“That sounds great,” I said. “I can’t wait.”

He paused, with his brow furrowed. “But I might want to be an astronomer… can I still bring you lunch?”

As the kids edge their way towards elementary school, I know it’s time to ease the train back onto the tracks. I try not to get too anxious about it. After all, I’m a planner in recovery.

I can imagine my Life Planner’s Anonymous meeting.

“Hi, my name is Anne.”

“Hi, Anne!”

“I used to need to know the future. I needed to know how my life would turn out. It felt so satisfying to cross things off my To Do list and consult next year’s calendar. I lived for the ‘where do you see yourself in five years?’ question that interviewers ask.

“But for now, I’m taking things one day at a time.”

Now, when I think about my parents growing old together, I’m never sure how the story is going to end. Will they train for the Ironman? Go bird-watching in Madagascar? Grab a few sherpas and make a bid for Everest? I guess I won’t know until it happens.

If they keep the plane, I might take them to the airport one day… the sky a bright, Carolina blue, the clouds puffy (ceiling of 5000 feet). The minivan full of both kids and dogs, we’ll get clearance to drive through the security gate. Mom, in her baseball cap and jeans, will pre-flight the plane. And Dad will energetically load the luggage into the tiny compartment.

When the plane’s ready and it’s time to taxi, who knows? I might be standing along the shimmering runway, waving with my kids or strapping on my parachute to jump out at 3000 feet. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll be sitting in the pilot’s seat, flying the plane myself. I’ll wait and see.