~:: How to Catch an Airplane ::~

This morning I had the weirdest little experience.  I was on the treadmill, watching something I had recorded, and suddenly, there was this commercial.  It’s not long.  If you have a minute, you might take a look.  I avoid commercials almost entirely, but the first few seconds caught me, and I watched it.

And as I did, my throat had closed up.  I was weeping, my whole face dissolving.  I made G come and watch it so I could ask him why – why it had hit me so hard.

I knew it was totally fake. The CG and post production work were good;  when the front gear of that plane dropped into the payload, the truck jerked and winced and the tires smoked.  But no truck could ever be able to support even a fraction of the weight involved here, even if it could drive fast enough to catch such a thing.  But they’d had me long before that played out – they had me when the woman pointed to the airport monitor and suddenly, I was thrown into live news coverage of a terrible situation.

My throat closed up?  Why?  Was I remembering the morning of 9/11?  Or Columbine High School?  Or any one of a number of disasters brought into my living room by obliging news services so that I can stand there – horrified and helpless –  watching them unfold?

Am I so poised now for terrible disasters that the slightest suggestion pushes me into such powerful emotion?  Am I that afraid underneath all the time, just waiting for a trigger?  And all you terrorists out there – let me assure you that this has very little to do with you.  It has to do with life.  With the tight rope we humans walk constantly over a sea of could-be disasters.  And then there are the tiny distresses that knock us askew, sometimes coming in long series, finally adding up to weariness.

I have good friends who laugh because they feel like I am too careful about things.  And about some things, I will admit, I do try to take great care.  Bringing up children did that to me.  Hostages to fate.

I don’t trust fate.  I do trust God, but I certainly don’t trust that he’s going to prevent bad things from happening, even to the kind of people who are trying hard every day to do the right thing – which is not me.  The trying hard part – not me.

Because that’s not what life was designed to be – a garden of Eden.  It was designed to present challenges so that we can test ourselves against them, proving our own steel, the strength of our hearts – growing in strength and nobility as we make our choices.  It was designed to allow for pain and grappling with grief so that we learn compassion and courage – the fragility of life, and thus it’s tremendous value.  What kind of adults would our children grow into if they were simply constantly given nothing but safety, comfort and all the things they yearn for?

I love the idea of being able to take function and happiness for granted.  I also ache with guilt that I might forget that while I am happy, someone else is suffering somewhere.

“You can’t do that,” my mother would tell me.  “You can’t take responsibility for each person’s life.”  And I wasn’t.  She was WAY overestimated my level of personal responsibility. I just have a terror of forgetting the people who are sad.  Of leaving them alone in it.  I am not saying this well.

I don’t think that my reaction this morning was about fear or alarm or underlying distress, though I’m sure that was part of it.

I think it was far more about bravery.

So funny – that commercial was so clearly unreal.  But it brought back to mind a story my dad told me back when he was Deputy Director of the Dallas/Ft. Worth International Airport.  A real story that happened on his watch.

A big airliner was coming in, and on approach realized that it had no landing gear.  The system had failed – they couldn’t’ get the gear (the front and back wheels) down and locked.  The tower waved him off, advising that the pilot circle the airport until he was totally out of gas – lessoning the possibility of an explosion if the plane ruptured, or as the friction of landing heated up the body of the plane.

While that pilot circled, the airport did everything it could.  It cleared the best runway. The emergency units, moving like war-time Air Force ground crews – streamed into place all along the tarmac.  There were huge trucks spraying the runway with foam – a largely futile effort to reduce friction.  And ambulances – phalanxes of them – to handle hundreds of injured.

The runway was lined with helpless people – waiting to do what they could, hearts in their throats.

Then in came the airplane.

The pilot brought her in deliberately – as though this were any day, any normal day.  He leveled out over the tarmac as he always would, reversing the engines – holding, holding – and then, as smoothly and straight as anyone could possible do – he set that airplane down on its curved belly.

And that was the moment – the crux.  I imagine the sound of steel tonnage driven into the surface of the runway – screaming, tearing sounds of ripping metal.  And the pilot, grim in his seat, holding onto those controls with every ounce of his strength, keeping the wings level against all odds.  On tip, one tip caught, and the plane would cartwheel, tearing itself apart along with everyone inside it, and anyone in the path of the flying debris.

But he held it.  And the plane held.  And it finally came to a simple stop.  I imagine then that it tipped, leaning on one tired wing tip.

There was silence.

And then all of those people on the side, all who had been watching, gripping their tools, praying – they all stood up and began to clap.  A standing ovation for a man who had simply done his job.  His impossible, unspeakable, brilliant job.

I had not remembered that story for a long time.

And then G reminded me of another pilot who, finding his own equipment faltering in the sky after take-off, coolly turned the plane and put it down neatly in the middle of the rough Hudson river.  The crew, efficiently moving the people out onto the wings.  And all those New York boat guys jumping into whatever boat they had, speeding out there to pick the people up before the plane sank into the river.

Acts of tremendous heroism and kindness.  People doing what needs to be done.

And as I thought about these stories, the picture in my head broadened.  Bravery.  Courage.  Kindness.  People taking action on every level of life every day.  And in my life, things I have witnessed.

I have not broken this with pictures.  I don’t have pictures of these things.  I don’t have pictures of Rachel, fighting fiercely for her life in the hospital several years ago, determined to bring up her children – enduring and holding on through awful nights – but still laughing, seeing the absurd and hopeful side of everything.

I don’t have pictures of my son’s grit or my husband’s, going to work every day to make his business happen, even when the contacts dry up or the work is slog.

People who get up every morning even when their hope is threadbare.  Women who have built their own lives, piece by piece, architects of their own fates.  Parents who, though sleep-deprived and tired and worried about how they’re going to make it in the world, still putting their children first, controlling their tempers, giving love, dispensing needed and reasonable discipline.  Or kids I’ve known, students, friends, whose families are breaking up all around them, or suffering tragedy, but who hang on to sanity and character, trying to do the right thing through it all.

I honor those who can see through their own comfort to recognize and offer aid and service, however small.  What is that quality that sees beyond the need of self and takes action?  And people who are brave enough to stand up against the small and large wrongs, making phone calls, writing letters, going before store managers, school administrations, governments, writing publicly—changing the world, maybe only in tiny ways.

I love people who have the courage to believe in a God they can’t see, a good they only know by observation and instinct and philosophy.  People who are true to what they believe, but also wise enough to understand that belief should be a constant search for and testing of truth.  People who are brave enough to change their minds, or to explore new places and ideas.  To start things.  To make things.  To open their hearts to others.  To serve when it’s not easy or convenient.

And people who say no to themselves.  Who absolutely want something that isn’t right for them in that moment, or maybe in any moment – and say no.

People who do what has to be done.

For some of us, the bravest thing of all is just to get out of bed in the morning.

And don’t laugh at me, but I think people who “blog,”  putting themselves out there, sharing what they know, teaching, celebrating what they have learned is good in life – I think they’re brave, too, stepping out of the shadows, revealing their hearts and minds.  And the people overcome shyness or laziness – who answer them, bothering to make a conversation, not leaving a risk-taking writer out there to dry.  I think that’s human service that pushes past the self.

I guess I’m winding down with this.  But may I say to all of you – family, friends, strangers – all of you who have been there for me with mercy, with kindness and patience – there are times when I am a fast, heavy load coming down with no gear to support me, and through my life, there you were with your little truck and your little payload, ready to catch that weight and diffuse it.  Something like that may  not look heroic or significant from the outside, but to me?  To me, I assure you, those moments have been a very big deal.

And maybe that was what this morning was all about in the end.

Maybe it was.