by Ken Renshaw
The next morning, I awoke to the sound of Tina humming and the smell of breakfast and coffee filling the air. I lay in bed and reveled at my new domestic scene. We lolled and loved away the day, my best-ever holiday.
In the late afternoon, we were sitting on the couch in the living room still in out bathrobes. Tina, leaned her back on me as I read a book, and she was working with my iPad.
"I have been researching German World War I flying," said Tina. "At the start of the war, nobody was very experienced as a pilot. Also, they hadn't figured out how to have the machine guns shoot through the propellers. The machine guns were mounted on the top wings of the biplanes so it was difficult to reload them. They had to stand up in the cockpit–that must have been scary–or use cumbersome track sort of things to pull the guns down to the cockpit to reload. It sounded very awkward.
"At the start of the war a medal, nicknamed the Blue Max, but officially the Order Pour le Me‘rite, was awarded to pilots who shot down eight enemy aircraft. There weren't that many enemy aircraft to shoot down, and they had to spend too much time messing with their guns during a dogfight. Eight victories, as they called them, were an achievement.
"Later in the war, they invented a way to shoot the guns through the propellers, so the guns could be sitting right in front of the pilots where they could be reloaded or unjammed easily. There were also more enemy aircraft to shoot down. They had to raise the award level to sixteen.
"Even later in the war there were thousands of enemy aircraft, many piloted by boys with only a few hours of training who had no flying skills to use evading attackers. They had to raise the award level to thirty.
"Here is a picture of the medal," she said as she handed the iPad to me.
I looked at the picture and felt my heart sink. "Wow!" I said, "That creates an emotional response in me. That must relate to the experience in my space-time recall with Tom." The medal was a blue cross with gold eagles filling in the space between the arms of the cross. On the arms of the cross were the words, Pour le Me‘rite.
"That award must be why everyone was so competitive in my recall. I can really feel the energy on that. I must have been striving to win the medal," I said as I handed the iPad back to Tina. "A strand of my 'web of life' must be tied to that space-time if I can feel intense emotion from looking at the medal."
Tina turned a few pages on the iPad and then handed it back to me saying, "Look, here is a picture of one of their old airplanes."
As I looked at the picture, my body again reacted and I felt an emotion of loss or of grief. "That must have been one of the kind of airplanes I flew." I closed my eyes a few seconds and thought about the airplane. "Wow! as I think about it, I know exactly what is smells like, the sound of the engine, the exhaust fumes. I also can perceive the jolts on my rear end when it taxies." I paused for another moment and said, "I also know exactly how it flies, the response of the stick, and the G's as it turns and rolls. I can hear the machine guns. They are really loud.
"Let's change the subject or do something else. This subject is freaking me out."
"'Freaking–me–out' is not good." Replied Tina. She squirmed a little bit and then exclaimed in a false southern accent, "Oh dearie me, just look how my bathrobe is falling off my shoulders. What am I to do?"