People Like Cindy and Me: Part 2

... continued from the last post.

When I saw Cindy standing by the fence with three or four of the popular girls, I hurried right over and said hi. She turned slowly and looked at me as if I’d just farted in the pool and bitten the bubbles.

“What do you want?” she looked me up and down. Suddenly I felt naked in my new pink suit. What did I want? I was her best friend!

“I just wanted to say hi.” This wasn’t going like I’d imagined.

“Well, we were talking so why don’t you just run along,” she said, and then she turned her back on me. The other girls laughed. I lowered my head and walked away.

I wanted to run, but I didn’t leave the pool. I had taken my brother so I had to keep an eye on him. And I didn’t want to have to explain to my mom why I didn’t want to be there. So I got in and swam around with some other kids until the lifeguard blew the whistle for rest period. Cindy wasn’t my only friend, just my best.

As I climbed the ladder, I heard Cindy laughing right behind me. “Look at the big pink butt,” she screamed (or maybe it just seemed like she screamed it), and her friends—her real friends—laughed as I hauled my large ass out of the pool and walked as fast as I could to get my towel and wrap it around me. I think I spent the rest of the summer with that towel wrapped around my waist hiding my pretty pink suit.

I didn’t tell anybody about what happened. I was too humiliated, too ashamed that I’d invested so much in a relationship that meant so little to her. I played with other kids at the pool that summer and with the neighborhood kids. I didn’t try to talk to Cindy again and she certainly didn’t sully herself with me. In sixth grade, we were in different classes, and I made friends in my new class who weren’t popular, but who were likeable, loyal friends all through junior high and high school.

I was never friends with Cindy again. In fact, I ignored her as much as possible, which wasn’t hard because she also ignored me. As we got older, she was a cheerleader; I played varsity basketball. She was popular. I had lots of friends without regard to popularity. We were both invited to parties, just not the same ones. I may have gone to more because there are always more not-popular kids.

If this were a movie, I’m sure there would be some crashing moment of epiphany where Cindy would get hers and become much nicer, and I would become a beautiful swan or something and sing a song on stage with a band behind me, and the word popular would take on new meaning. Movies don’t mimic real life.

I never did get into another “friendship” exactly like that one with Cindy. In school, I found real friends, friends with whom I was equals—or close. And I learned to wear a pair of very real-looking big plastic balls so people wouldn’t mess with me. I’m not sure I’ve ever been cool on the inside, but I have many times been able to fake it on the outside—my own cool, not someone else’s.

But sometimes I still struggle with that same ten-year-old girl inside of me who wants to fit in so much that she won’t stand up for herself, won’t say, “Here are my boundaries for how I will be treated. Don’t step over them or we can’t be friends. I am precious and that’s how I deserve to be treated.” I’m often too accepting, too understanding, too forgiving. I will forgive almost anything; I will make up and be friends again after almost anything. If people in a group I’m in get mad and leave, I’m always the one who sticks it out and puts up the welcome light for when they’re ready to come back. I don’t give up on anybody, even when everybody I know tells me I should. Even when, just like with Cindy, I want something different from what the other person wants to offer in the relationship.

And as far as Cindy goes, the part I didn’t tell was that when she was fun and engaging, when she was wooing me, courting me to be her friend (as I see it now), I really liked her. It wasn’t just who she was that made me want to be friends with her. Sure, there was the glamor of walking around the playground with my popular best friend and listening to all the gossip she picked up, but it wasn’t just that. I wasn’t that shallow.

It was also how much fun she could be when she wanted to be. I really liked her. She seemed to know just the right amount of flattery to keep me a step in line behind her. And she wasn’t only flattering to my face, but even more often she made flattering remarks to other people about me. Little crumbs like that kept me coming back for more. (I really am that shallow.) After the birthday party she didn’t invite me to, she was really nice for a while. She invited me to her house for dinner. I had no reason to not be her friend. She could hurt me one minute and really be my best friend the next. To have given her up would have meant not only giving up that cool I borrowed, but more than that, it would have meant giving up having fun with her when she wanted to be fun.

The truth is, it took both of us to maintain that dysfunctional little friendship. She needed me as much as I thought I needed her. Maybe more. She needed somebody who wasn’t as pretty or popular as she was to stand beside. And I either hadn’t developed yet or didn’t appreciate my own admirable talents: that I was one of the “smart kids,” had musical talent and could make and keep friends without all of the games.

But I don’t really know what it would look like from Cindy’s perspective, so my story is rife with my one-sided judgments and ten-year-old angst. If she even remembers it, she probably would have a totally different story to tell. None of us are reliable narrators of our own lives, and I have been brought up short by my own misunderstandings of situations many times. I seem to have spent a good part of my life feeling the elephant’s ass like a blind mouse.

This story really isn’t about Cindy and what a monster she was anyway. I doubt she was a monster. She had her reasons for how she behaved and I was a willing subordinate. This story is more about a lesson that keeps coming around to me that I wish I had learned when I was ten. It’s a story about how I let myself feel like a victim by not setting honest boundaries and by not being willing to leave a relationship because I wanted to hang on to the good parts, the things that worked. It’s a lesson that comes no easier as an adult.

My friend Andie says I teach people how to treat me. She says I don’t hold people I love to a high enough bar; they can walk right over it. I tell her I’m just a very tolerant person, which only makes her roll her eyes and come back with another metaphor. She says I am a beautiful house, but I let people live in my lovely home rent-free so there’s no room for someone who really wants to live there with me and cherish me. She says I should only let people on my island who want the same things I want and who treat me like the loving, deserving person I am. And if not, I should throw them in the moat. She has lots of metaphors, some mixed, that she extends further than I have room for here. And she’s not easy on me. She asks me hard questions.

So I ask myself: What if I had been honest? What if I had said to Cindy, “When you treat me like that, it hurts. Friends don’t treat each other that way. I want to work things out so we can really be friends, but if you treat me like that, we can’t”? And then, if she didn’t want to meet my bar for the relationship, what if I really did accept the loss and move on…on my terms? Seems like a reasonable thing to have done. She might even have valued me more than I thought and been willing to work on being friends. But I didn’t give her a chance to bring her A game. I accepted her D game.

I’m working a lot on this codependency issue right now. I recently let some unacceptable things slide because I was afraid of confronting them and because I liked some other things too much. I got in water over my head and then burned bridges to save myself. I burned bridges to save myself. Nothing about that metaphor sounds healthy nor am I proud of it. And I’ll never know what would have happened if I had been more honest, set my own boundaries instead of suffering through someone else's terribly mixed messages, kept the bar where I needed it to be….I’ll never know if we might have worked things out and negotiated a healthier relationship. I’ll never know if we both could have played our A game.

So this story isn’t about Cindy the monster at all. It’s about me taking responsibility for letting Cindy be that person she was in our relationship. I’m not saying I could control her; I could only control my own behavior. But I could have controlled whether she treated me that way, and the Cindy story might have turned out better. We might even have been friends in high school, in spite of the whole cheerleader thing.

Speaking of high school, I did get one insignificant vengeful moment of satisfaction when we were juniors. One moment that I’m ashamed to say a low, mean place in my heart still laughs at in spite of my relative maturity.

It was home economics class, and our teacher was teaching the “sex” section of the semester. She’d already shown us disgusting photos of abortions and tried to persuade us that women didn’t have cramps with their periods after they had babies. There was much to mock in her ignorance. Then she moved on to anatomy, female genital anatomy, pointing out the parts on a poster: labia, vagina, clitoris…..clitoris? What the hell is a clitoris? None of us had any idea, but by then I really was cool. There’s no way I would have asked. I just looked bored. Ehh. A clitoris. Looks kind of small and insignificant to me.

But not Cindy. She gasped, leaped to her feet, slammed her hands down on the table and screamed, “Oh my god! I don’t think I have a clitoris! I don’t have a clitoris!” She was not kidding.

There was one second of stunned silence before my best friend Carmel and I burst out laughing. “Oh no! I don’t have a clitoris!” we repeated several times, hands slapped over our cheeks in mock horror. We had no fucking idea what a clitoris was, but look who’s cool now!

Cindy blushed and slumped down in her chair, and the teacher sternly calmed us down. She assured Cindy that she did indeed have a clitoris, all women had one. (Too bad she didn’t tell us where it was or what to do with it, or better yet hold a class and tell the boys what to do with one too, but that’s another topic and if you want that one, you're gonna have to ask for it.) And then she showed us more photos of abortions, just to make sure we didn’t try to find those clitorises and have too much fun down there.

I’m not proud of my reaction that day, and had it been anybody else, I wouldn’t have mocked her. In fact, if it had been anybody else, Carmel and I probably would have come down on the people doing the mocking, and Cindy probably would have been one of the mockers. But that’s not what happened and I did relish the chance to feel superior to her for just a few seconds.

I keep working on this issue of being emotionally honest though, and I know I have to take responsibility for my own actions, the part I play in unbalanced relationships. I don’t know what happened to Cindy, but I hope she’s had a good life. Thinking back on that big lonely house, I wonder if she just didn’t have the skills to ask for the friendship she really needed. It’s too bad, because I would have been a good friend, just like I was to my real friends later: empathic, loyal, funny . And finally, if she didn’t go looking for it that day after home ec, I really hope eventually Cindy did find her clitoris….. as well as somebody else who knows how to use it.

to be continued.......

People Like Cindy and Me: Part 1

In the past year I've been studying certain aspects of human relationships that deal with codependence (a much overused term, but still the official word so I'll use it) and the people they are codependent with, because of course it takes two to make a “co.” I don't know of a good word for the flip side of the codependent duality. At least one website calls them ambivalent love addicts (ALA's), but I tend to think of them as "Cindy people" for reasons that will become apparent. Ambivalent love addicts. People who are addicted to people they don’t care about because, in a nutshell, ALA’s can’t make themselves feel superior to other people if they don’t have anybody to feel superior to. They need orbiters, people to move around them as if they were the sun, no matter how badly they treat those people. That’s the simple explanation, but for the most part, I’ll let the story define that pathology.

Al Anon and ACOA (adult children of alcoholics) literature covers the topic thoroughly from the perspective of the codependent. Alcoholics and addicts are notorious people-users, and they always have family and friends who love them enough to try to save them, so they tend to draw (or more specifically infect) those around them into codependent relationships. That's one kind. The codependency experts* also talk about the yin of that yang: love addicts (people who are addicted to that first heady feeling of falling in love) and relationship addicts (people who hold on to a relationship even when they know it's not healthy for many reasons).** It's the latter that I'm interested in right now.

In order for one person to be codependent, of course another person has to also be dependent. It really does take at least two to make a "co." But it rarely looks like that person is dependent because she*** is a user: emotionally unavailable, distant, selfish, self-centered, controlling, often addicted to something else like alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, sex. This isn't a person who looks like she needs anybody else, and in fact prides herself on not needing anybody else, yet nothing could be further from the truth. She needs her codependent(s) to orbit her or she has nothing in her universe. That's the piece you rarely hear about. Because while codependents desperately want to find a way to get out of these kinds of relationships--or better yet, change them into something healthy--the ALA rarely does. Why would she? She’s the fucking sun.

I admit I haven't read that much of the literature about codependency. I grew up with the disease of alcoholism so I'm all too aware of the dynamic of people who give too much and people who take advantage of those who give too much. I'll bet it's not hard to figure out where I fall on that continuum. But I find too much reading about it depresses me, and I've got plenty of real-life observance to support what I want to say about it.

My first experience with an ALA was in fifth grade, when Cindy S. chose me to be her new best friend. I was not one of the popular girls. In elementary school, I was shy and tentative; I always felt awkward and left out. I was the oldest of five, so I didn't have anybody to go before me and then tell me how to navigate the war zone that was school. Many of the kids who had older sisters or brothers, especially the Catholic kids, seemed to know what they were doing; they seemed to enjoy built-in popularity, familial cool. I wasn't cool. I was just trying to survive. If I had one good friend in my class, I felt lucky. Having a recognized best friend was second best to being popular. I was OK with second best if it meant I didn’t play alone at recess.

In fourth grade, I was glad I had a best friend in my class, Julie Mac. We played together every recess, usually pretending we were riding palominos around the playground and solving mysteries, like Trixie Belden. I wasn't popular, but I wasn't alone. Things took a turn when I entered fifth grade. I was in Miss Parker's class, and so was Cindy S. And that year she chose me to be her best friend. I was (almost) popular.

I will admit I was a shit to Julie Mac. She was in a different class and had a different recess but it overlapped ours. I could have played with her part of the recess, but I dumped her when Cindy chose me to be her friend. Even when I had a chance, I walked around the playground with Cindy and didn't play with Julie. When Julie confronted me about it, I just shrugged. I had traded up.

Cindy was special. Her family was the wealthiest family in our small rural town. In fact, both of my parents and my brother worked at various times for businesses her family  owned--new and used car dealership, rock quarry, construction. Businesses that had the word “incorporated” in their names. My mom's husband works for them now. They were a big Catholic family who lived in a sprawling new brick ranch, and Cindy was the youngest of the bunch of kids, most of them highly popular and desirable. To be chosen by someone like Cindy S. was an honor I never imagined I would earn. And earn it I did, in so many small and humiliating ways.

Cindy had everything going for her, even when she was ten. She was slender and graceful, with long red hair like most of her siblings, always expensively dressed. I'm sure nobody made fun of her red hair like they did mine. I can't imagine anybody ever asked her if she had rusted or if she had a hot temper. In fact, I doubt anybody ever teased her or her siblings about anything, including their retarded brother (insert the PC word of your choice here if you don't like that word) who lived in some kind of institution most of the time and drove around town for hours every day in a brand new car on his visits home.

In contrast, I was a little overweight, a shy red-head who never felt like I fit in. I was watchful, trying to figure out how to navigate a cruel and often arbitrary culture where cutting remarks and random acts of violence, such as tripping or hitting, came out of nowhere…as long as a teacher wasn’t looking.

When Cindy chose me to be her best friend, I was protected from bullies; I was cool…ish. Inside I knew I hadn’t really changed at all, but I could fake that I was cool because I could borrow Cindy’s cool. Even at ten I knew it was a mask, but I was more than willing to wear it if it made the world a little safer. It didn’t, really. Cindy was not only a user, but she was a liar and she had a mean streak. But impressions matter, even at ten. I may not have been safe with her, but other kids gave me some respect, damn it. Oh, I had other casual friends; in such a small school everybody knows everybody else. But Cindy was my best friend….and I was hers.

I have to admit though, being Cindy’s best friend didn’t mean I became one of the popular kids. First, I was a Methodist. Most of the popular kids were Catholics. And second, I think Cindy only chose me that year because most of the popular kids, certainly all of the girls, were in one of the two other fifth-grade classes. And third, I suppose she recognized someone she could use, hard as that is to admit. I am absolutely certain it wasn’t because she liked me, hard as I tried to be someone she would like. In fact, although we were recognized as best friends (the elementary school version of platonic going-steady) because we always played together at recess and belonged to the same Girl Scout troop, I wasn’t invited to the things the popular kids did outside of school—the birthday parties and sleep-overs, the play-dates. In fact, I wasn’t even invited to Cindy’s birthday party, to which she invited both the popular girls and boys. When I asked her about it, she said, “Oh, you should be glad you weren’t there. It was so boring.” I had no answer to that. I just felt small….but evidently not as small as I would have felt if I wasn’t Cindy’s friend. Right?

I never invited Cindy to my house, although that wasn’t uncommon. I was rarely allowed to invite kids over, and Julie had never been invited to my house either. But I was invited to Cindy’s house once. I was so nervous and excited when Cindy’s mom called my mom and asked if I could come over after school to play and stay for dinner. I grew up in a very small town. We played outside in our neighborhoods, but play-dates, at least in my life, were rare.

We walked to Cindy’s house from school—that monstrous brick ranch on a big landscaped yard. It was perfect inside—beautiful carpets and furniture, polished wood tables. I don’t remember specifics, just an impression of wealth and luxury (that probably wouldn't impress me today). Cindy’s room was decorated, not with hand-me-down furniture and hard-wood floors like mine, but all in pink and white. Everything matched. It was more like a TV show house than real life.

But I soon noticed we were the only ones there in that big house. I had never come home to an empty house before. My mom was always there, usually with a pan of brownies or chocolate chip cookies she’d just baked. Often my grandma had stopped by on her way home from the hospital where she was a nurse and they were drinking coffee at the kitchen table. And of course my sibs were always around making too much noise. Cindy’s house was dead silent. And extremely clean.

We played for a while in her room and wandered around the house. Really I don’t remember much of what we did. The house was so big and quiet. And then Cindy said she had to fix dinner.  I asked where her mom was, if she wasn’t going to fix dinner. Cindy said no, she had to do it, and her mom would be home in time to eat. So we fixed dinner, something I had never done before by myself. We fried pork chops in a pan and heated up a can of corn. Cindy poured big glasses of milk and we set the long, shiny dining room table with three place settings. When Cindy’s mom came home, the three of us sat down to eat. Nobody else showed up. Mostly we didn’t talk, at least that I remember. By then I was feeling very uncomfortable. I ate all of my dinner, but I couldn’t finish the big glass of milk Cindy had poured me. I remember the look of disapproval they both gave me when I said I couldn’t drink it all. Cindy and I washed the dishes while her mom disappeared again. And then somehow I got home.

I wondered what Cindy’s afternoon would have been like if I hadn’t been there. I imagined her all alone in that big house, and then just her mom coming home for dinner. I don’t know where everybody else was, but because they weren’t there that evening, I imagined that’s how it always was for her, just the opposite of my noisy, rambunctious house where my dad came home and wrestled with us while Mom cooked dinner, and where we ate packed around the kitchen table. For the first time, I felt a little sorry for Cindy.

But she didn’t really deserve my sympathy. All that fifth-grade year I was her constant companion, whenever she wanted me to be. Of course, she was invited to all the things the popular kids did and I wasn’t, but when she told me about those events, it felt kind of like a privilege just to hear her stories. I ignored her cruel streak, like the time I wrote a story about a boy in our class I had a crush on. In the classroom right before recess, she grabbed the paper out of my hand and ran with it, saying she was going to show it to him. I ran after her and tried to get it back. I grabbed the back of her hair as she got to the outer door to stop her, and even got my hands on the paper, but she scratched me, tore it away and ran out the door, leaving me with about a fourth of the paper in my hand. I stood there while a sixth-grade boy laughed and taunted me for…I don’t know what. Losing the fight? And then I went back into the classroom and spent that recess at my desk with my head down. I don’t remember if she showed it to my crush or not. My impression is that she did.

What I do remember is that I forgave her every time she did something thoughtless or cruel. I wanted that bad to be her best friend. And she wanted someone who would admire her so she could feel better than….well, than me. I wanted so much to be cool: to wear cool clothes, like minidresses and go go boots, to listen to the latest pop songs, to be invited to birthday and skating parties. But I just wasn’t. I remember saving up my money and getting to buy a 45, “Build Me Up, Buttercup,” my favorite song. I ran up to Cindy and told her, thinking I’d get some cool points for that. Her response? “That song is so old. Why didn’t you get “Aquarius”? No, I was not cool. The only cool I got that year was from being friends with Cindy S. It was some painful cool, but it was mine….OK, ours.

Every school year ends though and when summer rolled around, the only place I saw kids outside of my neighborhood was the pool. Everybody went to the pool. I turned eleven that summer, and I hope I never turn eleven again. I started to put on prepubescent pudge and grow breasts and get hair in places I really didn’t want hair. My mom gave me a perm that made my hair stick out in red frizz all over my head. But she also bought me what I thought was a groovy pink swimsuit, one piece with a row of white ruffles down the front. I was never allowed to wear red or pink because I was a redhead, so getting a pink swimsuit was a big deal. I couldn’t wait to show it off at the pool. I couldn’t wait to show it off to Cindy.

to be continued...... 

*Melodie Beattie is probably the most famous expert, although it's a well studied phenomenon.

**This website that describes various types of love or relationship addicts and their opposing partners. I find it depressing, but thorough. However, I do think some of the paragraphs about relationship addicts and narcissistic addicts to be relevant to what I'm talking about here.

***As always pronouns are such a pain in the ass. In order to make this understandable, I'll use "she" for the user or ALA since I’m calling them Cindy people, and "he" for the codependent. None of these terms or pronouns satisfies me, but I need to write on.

In Which I Fly

I'm going to just come right out and say it: I flew an airplane. I did. This is something that wouldn't even have made it on my bucket list simply because I couldn't imagine it would ever happen. It wouldn't occur to me. I used to fly on commercial jets a lot more than I do now. But even then, it's not like the pilot gives the passengers turns at taking the wheel up there in the cockpit. Or maybe they do that in first class, but not back where I sit eating tiny bags of stale pretzels with my tiny plastic cup of orange juice.

I love flying a whole lot--the powerful thrust of take-off .... the rush of landing and feeling the wheels touch the ground again at speeds that I can't really wrap my head around. I could do it every day and still maintain my wonder at the act of lifting off the ground and soaring way above the earth and even the clouds. It's one of those unbelievable privileges of being human, the use of such a machine.

As I said though, much as I love flying, I never imagined I would ever take the wheel of an airplane myself. I was excited enough when one Saturday the Pilot (you might remember him from a bike ride I described below) said we finally had clear weather and would I like to go fly that night. We'd been waiting for months for a time to go up, so I didn't even hesitate. I cut short my time at an all-day women's retreat and begged off a dinner party in the evening. Nothing was going to keep my feet on the ground that night.

I picked him up and we drove to the small county airport where his plane is housed. A little voice in my head went "squeeeee" every 30 seconds as we checked to make sure all the lights were operational, pulled the plane out of the hanger--seriously!--took a final pee break (I admit I was kind of afraid I'd have to do that up there; it's not like you can pull into a rest stop, is it?), and then climbed up over the wing into the plane and put on our radio headsets. The Pilot, who tends to be a pretty funny guy most of the time (he often tells me to "have a groovilicious day" in his emails), ran through his checklist, saying each item aloud as he checked controls and gauges and gadgets that had no meaning to me. It was a side of him I hadn't seen yet: serious, focused, in control of a machine that can fly thousands of feet in the sky with nothing but air under the wings. (OK, I'm familiar with Bernoulli and I know it's all about the air flowing over the wings, but I'm taking poetic license here. I'm a poet, not a pilot.) Soon we were wheeling to the runway and then we were picking up speed and then we lost touch with the ground. I felt like I left everything else in my life behind me on terra firma, and for over two hours, I thought of nothing except the experience of being the sky. In the sky!

It doesn't really matter where we went. What mattered was being up there, not held to the earth by the force of gravity. Odd as it may sound, when I fly I feel two things that I never feel on earth. The first is that I feel like I can't fall. No, it doesn't make sense to be 3000 feet above the earth and believe I can't fall. But flying is about the suspension of a lot of things we believe about the weight of objects and gravity and where our little human bodies should be in relation to the earth.

That I love to fly at all is a mystery to me. I shouldn't love it. I should be terrified to leave the ground--terrified that I'll fall. After all, that night I was 3000+ feet above the earth in a little metal shell, propelled by an engine I could only hear roar, but not see. It's a leap of faith to think that the simple act of air flowing over those short wings would lift us two humans off the ground and take us high enough that rivers look like ribbons and houses like tiny boxes and people just disappear. Even the thought of it should stop my heart, because I am terrified of falling. For years I had various recurrent nightmares about falling, and in them I sometimes even hit the ground and died. I've heard that people who experience their own deaths in dreams will actually die in their sleep, but I didn't. I just woke up and felt like my heart had stopped... and then reluctantly started up again.

The dreams finally ended after I really did fall one Sunday afternoon just before Christmas--face-first into a brick hearth. I should have died that day, but I hit just right and only broke up the bones in my face and lost 6 teeth. It took a while to recover, but I didn't die from it. My fear of falling was locked into my very muscles and bones though. Anything that makes me feel like I'm falling sends me into a panic, often accompanied by flashbacks, whether I really fall or not. Actually tripping and falling can give me flashback panic symptoms for hours after. Doing something on purpose that feels like falling--riding a roller coaster, for example--makes me almost catatonic with fear. Why I get a feeling of utter safety and peace when I'm thousands of feet in the air going over a hundred miles an hour is a psychological puzzle I'll never unravel. I could guess that it's because the ground is too far away to fall into, but that doesn't make sense. It's one of those things that just is.

The second thing I feel when I'm up there is the absence of this little bit of constant claustrophobia that I associate with being on the earth. I can never see the whole picture when my feet are on the ground. Up there in the sky, I get the overview. I can see the context of the earth, how the skin of it all fits together. The only time I've ever felt the same feeling was years ago when I was sitting on the side of a mountain in Montana by myself with nothing around me but tall clear sky and the slope of the mountain below. Otherwise, I'm always conscious of something on the horizon, whether near or far; something is always blocking other things from view, always touching the edges of my vision. Up in the sky nothing but the curve of the earth blocks the view. And on the night we flew, even that was soft and fuzzy from far away clouds. I felt like I had a perspective of living on this precious planet that I can never get from the ground. It's almost godlike to be up there and look down on the chunk of rock that gives us life.

The Pilot pointed out landmarks as we flew south, and asked if I wanted to go anywhere in particular. I didn't. Just up, and we were already up. I'm not sure if he asked if I wanted to take the controls or if I asked if I could. Either way, he said I could and I put my hands on the controls in front of me--there are two sets-- and he said, "The plane is yours." My response, I learned, was, "I have the plane." And then I was in control of the plane.

I flew us back west and north, following an interstate highway, one I've driven on. Flying a plane is not like driving a car. The wings have to be level, the nose level, and the altitude has to be steady. I tried doing it by reading a gauge, but I think I did better by just looking at the wings and the nose of the plane and trying to keep them in line. A couple of times I had to give the controls over because I didn't calculate turns right and I lost the highway. (It was still down there, of course.) The plane doesn't respond as quickly as a car. Once we were too close to a cloud and he said, "I'm taking the plane." I said, "The plane is yours," and he made a sharp bank and took us away from it. The telling of it doesn't begin to compare to the experience itself. I'm not that good with words.

Eventually the sun went down and we were flying above the city in the dark. Even better. That feeling of being safe and held by an invisible hand is even stronger at night. It's like being in love and untouchable at the same time. We made two landings at another small airport so the Pilot could stay current for taking passengers up at night. He'd done it weeks before so we could fly, but he has to do it every 90 days. We reset the clock and did my favorite part of flying, taking off, two extra times. Bonus. And I got to turn the airport lights on and off by clicking a button on the steering wheel.

When we finally landed for good and pushed the plane back into its hanger, I couldn't believe we'd been up there over two hours. Time just flew by.*

The other day I was talking to my mom on the phone. "Mom," I said, "you won't believe what I did. I flew an airplane."
"What? You flew an airplane? Did you wreck it?"
"No, Mom, I'm pretty sure that would have made the news."
"Did you land it?"
"No, I just flew it around in the air. The Pilot landed it."
"Is this man safe?"
"Probably not."
"What? Then why did you go up with him?"
"Oh. I think he's a good pilot."
"Hmmm. That still sounds pretty scary."
"Nope, it really wasn't."
"Well, I would have been scared."


So would I have been...except that I wasn't. Never have been, even the night they closed the Atlanta airport right after the plane I was on took off, because of severe thunderstorms. That plane bucked and tossed and rose and fell sharply a few times before the pilot finally got it above the storm. Some people were crying, and the ones I could see were white-knuckling their chair arms. Even that night I wasn't afraid. For some reason I can more easily believe that plane will stay aloft than that it will drop from the sky. How is it my mind can make up stuff like that?

The Pilot also does Angel Flights from time to time, ferrying people who can't afford to go to doctor appointments to the place they need to go. Just like the night landings, he has to fly a certain number of hours to qualify, so our flight will add to those hours. He doesn't get paid for it and just the fuel for the plane costs a lot. But he says it's a privilege to own the airplane and it's a privilege to be able to help people that way. I guess it's a way to level out the karma. I would want to do that too....if I were the kind of person who would ever fly a plane. Which I'm not. I'm really not....but I did. I flew an airplane! Squeee!


*What? You've never made a bad pun in your life? Suck it!

Losing Cruise Control

The other night I was zipping down the freeway on my home, the left lane clear ahead of me. I'd just exited one interstate and slid onto another, picked up speed again and hit the cruise control button on my steering wheel. When I took my foot off the accelerator, the van slowed down. I sped up and hit the cruise again. Same result....four more times. Mice learn faster than I do sometimes. "Damn it," I said aloud. "My fucking cruise control won't work. It just figures."

I was distracted and thinking about a conversation I'd just had: a difficult, uncomfortable conversation. The night was so much fun in the beginning: drinking in a pub and listening to a three-kid combo cover old rock standards. Walking around a ritzy outdoor mall barefoot in the summer heat afterwards, holding hands, talking. Sitting on a park bench watching people walk by.....a perfect evening. And then I had to go and change the mood by talking about some things that were bothering me. I really hate these kinds of conversations, especially when I'm bringing the shit up and the other person doesn't seem to know what's going on or doesn't have a problem. Actually, I'd intended to talk about those things a couple of other times the week before, but I was having such a good time I didn't want to ruin it. As I drove home, I wasn't sure I was happy with my decision to do it that night either. I wondered if I should have just swallowed my feelings and focused on what was working.

I finally stopped pushing the cruise control button and looked at the dashboard to see if I could determine what was wrong. And that's when I noticed I was going 77 mph.....in a 55 zone. Whoops. When I turned off the other interstate I'd just resumed the same speed--pretty stupid given the number of times I've traveled these highways. I let up on the gas and as the van started to slow, I noticed a car with no headlights pulling across the median and onto the left shoulder. I touched my brakes as the highway patrolman picked up speed and merged in front of me. Just my luck, I thought. I'm busted. Good thing my cruise control didn't work or I'd have been going faster though.

It's kind of funny how losing my cruise control paralleled the decision I'd made that night about having that hard conversation. I'd been cruising along, picking up speed, trying to ignore some things that had happened even as my intuition told me something was wrong. Something would happen and I'd try to hit the cruise control and keep going, living in the moment, going along for the ride. When I finally started paying attention, something bigger that I couldn't ignore pulled in front of me, and I had to do what I thought was the right thing: stop and confront some of the issues. It wasn't comfortable and, just like I didn't want that cop in front of me, I didn't want to be the one spoiling the good times. I could have chosen not to, but that would have hurt me--was hurting me. Sometimes the situation leaves no choice but to slow down, pay attention, and take the consequences.

Fortunately for me, my cruise control saved my ass that night. I have no idea why it didn't work; I'd been using it earlier on the other freeway and it kept me at a steady 75 mph. But if it had worked, I would have been....hell, I don't even know what happens if you get busted for 22 over. They probably take all your money and whip you naked in the public stocks. As it turns out though, the cop took off after somebody else, probably somebody  who wasn't paying attention....and the next day my cruise control worked just fine and has since. Pretty strange.

I'm not sure yet how things will turn out with the other issues, but I hope like the cruise control my intuition was right--even though I was reluctant to slow down and focus on how I was feeling. And maybe that metaphorical cop who's been causing me problems will hit her lights and speed off after somebody else so I can get back to driving fast and having fun.

Introducing Laura

I worked on the poetry service I wrote about below with Laura, a gifted poet, writer, therapist, teacher, friend. This young woman makes me cringe at how immature I was at her age, and I'd been married for seven years by then. She's a little younger than my son, so I'm old enough to be her mother big sister, and yet she possesses wisdom and courage that must come from being an awfully old soul. She's so talented, I was a little intimidated sharing a poetry pulpit with her. And she was homeschooled so that just makes her that much more special to me. She's moving away very soon, and she will leave a hole the size of the moon in many lives.

 I want you to read her "I am what I am..." poem. It's amazing and insightful and it will make you want to know her too. You can find it and a bunch of her other writing at her blog, Autodidactic poet. Leave comments so she'll keep writing. She doesn't believe how superfantastic she is.