What Would John Denver Do

Ian left, Jeremy right 


Today I come home from the previously mentioned 6 weeks of training. My first little bit of mental free-space is being used toward reviving the now 6 weeks dormant McCartertwins blog: Using wisely my time between flight attendant’s announcements and layovers.

I was being served biscuits and gravy by a waitress who called me honey this morning when my soul came back to life. Last night, after several weeks of simulator training I flew the plane for the first time in Idaho Falls. That is where I was, in a hotel restaurant along the Snake River, when St. John’s vocals rang through the Radio Shack stereo and nudged me awake. John Denver singing ‘You fill up my senses’, with all of his glowing conviction, and all of a sudden I felt something again. I did not think it. I felt it. Whatever it was.

After six weeks of emotional deprivation, of being surrounded by fluorescent lighting, institutional carpet, the sound of a well ventilated building with no windows, the smell of hotels trying to smell good by covering the bad smells. Surrounded by people who speak acronym and want to test my knowledge of their weird and inefficient language; people who quote Top-Gun with suprising regularity. Airports of glass and steel, more hard carpet, and continuous loops of recorded generic voices reminding you where to stand, smoke, park your car and put your stuff. Then John Denver shows up with his big, dumb heart and sings ‘come let me love you, let me give my whole life to you. Let me drown in your luaghter, let me die in your arms’ and my Salt Lake City-dried heart lurched around in my unexercised, accustomed to sitting down body and my bacon got a little saltier as I leaned over it listening to John sing it and mean it.

How can you fault a guy who loved so much? He died in his own airplane. I don’t know the details except that he ran out of gas. I picture him buzzing around slowly with his Grapenuts hair-do and a silly grin, looking at trees and mountains, loosing himself in the beauty around him, estatic at the magic of being above it all. Right up until he ran himself out of gas and into a smoking hole in the ground. Living so freely that he died.

And here he is singing for me, on the banks of the Snake River. Me, who has spent a month and half of life training in efforts to not die in this shiny airplane. Practicing every event that could kill you, so that it doesn’t. And in so doing have died to everything else that is good. I have no senses left to fill, until John Denver comes along and the thought of going home makes me cry in my bacon.

I ache to see my little stretching, yawning, smiley monkey boys, and the hero-wife woman who played single mother of twins so our family will have a dad who likes his job. If we die in each other’s arms today it will be from her sleep deprivation and my overwhelming relief of being somewhere real, organic, warm and free. Home.

Given the choice today I am not sure which is better, to become figuratively dead by trying so hard to stay alive; or to die of life-loving induced stupidity. But since I am literally alive and able to recover from my temporary, figurative death, I will call it a success and absorb all the life of my family cheerfully; until around 8 o clock tonight when the stretching, smiling monkey boys will be screaming inconsolably. Then maybe the smoking hole wont look so bad.