Up, Up and Away

Up, Up and Away

   Tomorrow marks the services for my aunt, and it was on my flight over that I truly began to reflect on just how much we can let slip away, or somehow blindly choose to assume all will be as it always was.  Take for example our jet going from a slow taxi out of the gate, pausing at the end of the runway, then accelerating with enough speed to lift off of the ground.  Easy, right?  Happens all the time, thousands of times a day, in fact.  So why be concerned...or amazed?

    But as I looked at the full flight and thought of how heavy the plane itself is (the usual 737s are close to 100,000 lbs. empty), plus the dead weight of its 150 or so passengers, plus the weight of the jet fuel (larger jets such as the 767 burn about 800 gallons of jet fuel per hour per engine!) I tried to picture how so massive an object could go from a complete stop to a speed so great that it would soon have enough airflow to actually lift everything --plane, people and fuel-- away from the ground.  Within minutes, our flight would reach an altitude of 10,000 feet, something that would have taken me two or more hours of steady hiking to accomplish.  What sort of force was at work here?  Burning fuel's explosive power captured and released in a controlled-enough fashion to direct this giant object filled with complacent humans up into the sky over and over.  How did we capture this fuel and refine it enough and purify it enough to make sure not a single speck would clog this steady burn rate?  It seemed boggling, even as my heart maintained a steady calm beat, unworried and unconcerned.

    Then, after a short hour plus of flying, came the landing, something one pilot described as a "controlled crash;"  and looking at it that way, it was a perfect description of all that it was, a guided descent down with just enough power to land back on earth, this heavy, lopsided craft of nearly 150,000 lbs. now trusting a series of nitrogen-filled tires to bear the full weight of the winner of the battle, gravity vs. power.  Down we came, slowly and gradually as we complacent humans oohed and ahhed at the scenery closing in, the electrical towers that loomed so large from the ground now just pieces of a child's play set, the trees passing under us giving no hint of their 8-storied height.  Then closer and closer and closer and closer and BAM, a rattling and jerking shock thump so loud that everyone awakened anew, gulping down a second's worth of surprise then following it with a series of artificial laughs as if we knew it'd be all right, which we did.  No big deal, happens everyday, thousands of times a day.  All was normal.  We had survived and all without a thought.

   Then somehow I realized that this was my aunt, this was my mother, this was my wife, this was my friends and my animals and my world.  Amazing at it seemed, it somehow all worked flawlessly, not that I understood how exactly, to be sure, and sometimes a bit surprising and unexpected;  but rarely was any of this a total surprise, something so out of the ordinary that it would shake me from this day-to-day bubble...until it happens.  This can be a result of old age, or cancer or a car veering out of control or a plane crashing...somehow, someday, someway, it would happen.  Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow.  But maybe sooner than we would expect, maybe even when we reach the age of 90...it would all likely come sooner than we would expect.

   There were many laughs with my aunt, many memories, and somehow her entire life will be now be wrapped into a sort of ZIP file, compressed by speakers and friends and family tomorrow, a file so large and yet now ready for storage, something to be put away like digital photos.  This was our thought as my brother and I gazed now at old paper photos, their corners battered and their glossy fronts smeared with many unintentioned fingerprints.  But somehow flipping through them again, especially after years of being hidden away in some other battered envelope or box, we were there again, not the lonely viewer sorting through a computer screen, but a member of a group, a bunch of us everyday complacent humans and relatives casting uneven nods and laughs as we shared our varied memories.  Then came my wife, and my brother's wife, and my mother, all joining the photos gathering ever more fingerprints on the table, and more giggles and laughs came through.  We were unzipping her file, decompressing it and opening it back up with the photos, with the memories.  And despite the fact that it took her passing away to do it, to bring us all together again and have us share this moment, I couldn't help but once again think of my flight...all of us with moments of both genuine and artificial laughs, as if we knew all along that it would be all right, that this sort of thing happens all the time, thousands of times a day.  But still, it was all so amazing...what sort of force was at work here?