So I am a sucker for an Instagram reel that is sentimental and tonight I watched one about a female pilot who climbed into a souped up amazing, powerful, beautiful Air Force plane, and all around her the men who sent her off were high-fiving her. I found myself in tears watching this. I’m not sure why I always have a gap between my passion and my emotion and the reality of why I am feeling these feelings. I remembered when I was in seventh grade and it was summertime in Maine and all I wanted to do was hold hands with Toby Thacher at night on the beach and make out with him. Toby Thacher was the first boy I ever kissed and I will never forget being in Lincoln Fosters basement on a hot Summer’s night and hearing “Little Surfer Girl” playing on the hifi and then Toby taking me in his arms and holding my face delicately in his teenage hand and kissing me. All I could think about was when he would do it again. In any case that summer for some reason still bewilders me though it’s so many years ago, and I don’t care to count them.

 My father decided that I should take flying lessons. Now let me tell you that my father was an excellent pilot. He was probably a better pilot than he was a father or a husband or a boss or any other role that he undertook in life. When he was a pilot, he knew what he was doing. Once,when we were flying to Stowe,Vermont during a snow storm, I was sitting in the copilot seat next to him as I often did, and there was a sudden silence in the cockpit. I didn’t say anything because I was trained by then not to say anything, but my father looked at me and he said “Well I forgot to switch gas tanks and sometimes the engine doesn’t start when it stops and its so cold outside!”

He switched another switch and flipped another something and lo and behold we were running again and we landed in Burlington,Vermont and had a hamburger.During this period I never said a word, but to this day, I can vividly imagine how bizarre it was to think to myself that at the age of 11 I might die and I have no one to share that piece of information with. It was stated as a cold hard fact by my father, and then when it didn’t happen, it was as if night had turned into morning and we had breakfast and I went to school and it was just another day.

My father decided in my seventh grade summer that I should take flying lessons from Bob Styron who ran the airport in Owls Head,Maine, and was a big man with rather greasy black hair and a receding hairline and a big stomach and who always wore a dark long sleeved shirt that had US aviation printed on the pocket. Bob said to me that I should call him “Bob”and he gave me a huge book that was very heavy as I recall, and had three rings in it and much information about lift, thrust and drag.

I could care less about those things and in those days I found them even less interesting than I do today. I remember getting in the plane with Bob Styron and he piled pillows behind me because though I wasn’t particularly short, I wasn’t as tall as most people who flew airplanes, mainly men. I just remember how I thought that this was something I really didn’t want do and I knew I wouldn’t be good at because I was afraid of it.  I was not sure why my father wanted me to learn to fly, but maybe I was thinking he loved flying and so in some kind of warped way, he would think I would love to fly, but I didn’t love anything that he loved. I didn’t love sailing. I didn’t love flying and I really didn’t love getting angry and losing my temper. As a matter of fact, I rarely did it. I remember that Bob Styron told me if I paid attention I could solo during that summer and that would make my father happy. I wanted to say to old Bob what? It would make my father happy if I were to die for my lack of ability to fly an airplane? In any case every day for what seemed like months, but was actually probably one month I went out in front of our house on the grass strip and Bob Styron would land a single engine Piper Cub and I would get in and perch on many pillows and Bob would tell me what to do in order to take off and land in the plane. It was so painful for me to be doing this because I knew I was a failure from day one. It’s really hard to try to please someone if they want you to do or be something that there’s no way you can ever do or be.

Luckily, this started in the beginning of August, so by the end of August, it was time to go back to Connecticut and start school again. I think by then my father had forgotten that he wanted me to learn to fly because he always forgot things that he tried to make me do after a period of time. Being a smart kid I realized early on that all I had to do was wait it out. But the flying thing was really weird. Why would you try to make a kid who was timid to begin with fly an airplane?

I was an artist and I still am. I am a poet and I am a pacifist and I am a lover of people and of children and of gentle behavior and even though I  read Le Petit Prince at a very early age I never believed that I could travel through the sky with ease. In my dreams instead of flying the way most kids do I always took the Merritt Parkway.

Lucinda Watson