Life, Love, & Laughter

by S. L. Menear

  I and the other flight attendants trusted the pilots with our lives. We called them sky gods because they always brought us home safely, no matter what.

  In the mid-1970s, I transferred to Miami and joined the Pan Am Flying Club. Three months later, I earned my private pilot license. The Pan Am sky gods were kind to me. They let me fly a Boeing 707 for two hours over South America on a flight with few passengers and good weather. I also savored the thrill of flying a Boeing 747 en route from JFK to Frankfurt, Germany. The jumbo jet felt as steady as flying a big house.

  That was my light-bulb moment: I wanted to fly jet airliners. During my free time, I concentrated on earning the necessary pilot certificates and ratings. In late 1978, I quit Pan Am to work as a flight instructor and charter pilot, eventually landing a job as a commuter airline pilot.

  Two years later, I was the first woman hired as a copilot with US Air (later changed to US Airways and now American Airlines), bypassing the flight engineer position to fly right seat in a BAC 1-11 jet. After six years flying the BAC 1-11, B727, DC-9, and B737, I earned my fourth stripe and joined a handful of female captains worldwide.

  I had achieved my impossible dream and transformed myself from stewardess to sky god. The view from the left seat in the cockpit of a Boeing airliner is the best view in the entire world.

  Thank you, Pan Am!

  Winter Wonderland

  D.M. Littlefield

  An old man was slumped on a bus-stop bench as the snow silently floated down around him. He seemed unconscious, and I wondered if he was all right. I nudged him upright and caught a strong whiff of alcohol. He squinted up at me through bloodshot eyes and murmured. I dropped my luggage and brushed away the snow on the bench.

  “I understand, buddy,” I said as I sat beside him. “If I had to live here, I’d stay drunk too. I’m on my way back to sunny Florida where I can golf and fish all year.”

  The old man blinked. “Ta Florida?”

  “Yeah, I moved there after I retired, but my wife developed a fear of hurricanes after we endured three in one year. She began yammering about moving back to Michigan to be close to her sister and free of hurricanes. I let her drag me here just to stop her nagging, but I kept our Palm Beach condo.”

  “Condo ... Palm Beach.” The old man sighed and sagged against me, a captive audience.

  “It snowed here the day after we moved in. I admit I felt peaceful watching the fluffy flakes slowly drifting down on the trees and landscape.

  “We awakened to a winter wonderland, everything covered in a beautiful white mantle. The wife and I built a snowman in the front yard. She made hot chocolate for us while I shoveled our sidewalk and driveway. For the first time in thirty years, I enjoyed shoveling snow.”

  “Ugh, snow,” the old guy grumbled.

  “Later, a snowplow blocked our long driveway with a foot-high strip of compacted snow from the street. The driver smiled and waved. I waved back and shoveled his deposit, assuming he didn’t mean to block our drive. These things just happen.

  “That night, it snowed an additional five inches, and the temperature dropped to ten degrees. Branches littered our yard, broken off from the weight of heavy ice and snow. After shoveling our driveway, the snowplow blocked us in again. The driver smiled and waved. My hands were too frozen to wave back or shovel more snow.”

  “Huh, damn snowplowssss!”

  “I started my car and rammed the narrow two-foot snow ridge like a mad man. The front wheels went up the hard-packed snow and crashed down on the other side, leaving the rear end dangling an inch above the ground. It took me an hour to shovel it free. The cost of snow tires for both cars set me back a bundle.”

  “Yeah, a bundle,” he said, burping.

  “The next day our guesspert weatherman said it was much warmer. Hah! He doesn’t know what warm is. That night, the temperature dropped with more snow. That didn’t deter my wife from daily shopping trips that always ended with her car in a ditch and me hauling it out.”

  “Wimmen drivers!”

  “I decided to save myself some grief and buy her a heavy-duty four-wheel-drive Range Rover. I should have bought her a surplus army tank. It takes a supreme lack of driving skills to get stuck in a Rover. But my wife proved to be quite adept at ramming the Rover into mountainous snow drifts, so I insisted on being the designated driver.

  “A few days ago during breakfast, she announced she would spend the day baking for her family’s Christmas Eve dinner. She reminded me to shovel off the entire driveway to make room for her relatives’ cars. When I stood on the drive, I looked up at the roof on the house and garage and decided to shovel it first, starting over the garage.”

  “Roofs ... too high fer me.”

  “I backed up the Range Rover to make room for the snow I’d shovel off the garage and used a safety rope tied to a tree in the backyard while I stood on the front of the slanted roof. After shoveling a mountain of snow, I went down the ladder and retrieved the safety rope. I tied it to the front bumper of the Rover and carried the ladder behind the garage.

  “I was halfway through shoveling the back of the roof when I heard the Rover’s engine roar to life. Before I had time to react, I was yanked up the roof’s peak and down the front side. I had a death grip on my shovel as I dug it into the shingles in a vain attempt to delay my nosedive. My wife couldn’t hear me scream as I landed face-first in the mountain of snow and plowed through it.”

  “Plowed ... hah!”

  “My wife was looking over her shoulder while backing out and didn’t see me. I lost my shovel in the snow pile, and a wad of wet snow gagged me when I tried to yell. I was emerging from the mound when she finally spotted me. Her look of horror was little consolation as my heated profanity melted my snow mask.”

  “Hah, swearing ...!” He nodded.

  “Apologizing profusely, she brushed the snow off me while explaining she ran out of eggs and couldn’t find me to drive her to the store. I had a bruised body and a mountain of snow to shovel before the family arrived, so I told her to drive carefully and started searching for my shovel. Merry Christmas my ass!”

  “Merry Christmasssss!”

  “The next day, we got another eight inches of the white crap. The expensive new Rover was covered in salt and brown crud. That damn snowplow came by twice, and I was beginning to think the driver was giving me the finger instead of waving. It was hard to tell because of his thick gloves.”

  “Hah, the finger!” He struggled to sit straighter but slumped back down.

  “That night, it snowed again before the temperature plummeted. The next morning, I dressed in several layers to brave the fierce chill and staggered through three feet of snow to our frozen mailbox. In an effort to pop it open, I pounded it so hard I left a dent the size of my fist.”

  “Dent,” he mumbled.

  “While I was fighting with the mailbox door, the snowplow buried me waist deep. My legs felt like they were encased in frozen concrete. That SOB was lucky I couldn’t move. Otherwise, I would’ve bashed him in the head and buried him in the mountain of snow next to my driveway. Nobody would’ve found him until the spring thaw.”

  “Yeah, bash him good!” He belched whisky fumes as he looked at me.

  “Then we got six more inches of the white crap with sleet on top. We haven’t seen the sun since the day we moved here.”

  The old drunk began to snore.

  I nudged him awake. “More snow was on the way. The power went out, and the toilets froze. I decided to keep us from freezing to death with a roaring fire in the fireplace, but the only wood available was from the broken tree branches wet with snow. So I soaked them in lighter fluid. When I lit them, the explosion transformed my eyebrows, eyelashes, and mustache into kinky black curly cues on a bed of angry red skin.”

  “Oooo, hic, flames, hic!” he said, more alert now.

  “Burning twigs were scattered across the room, and my clothes were smoldering. Our Christmas tree erupted into a flaming torch
that lit the curtains on fire. My wife ran screaming into the room and dragged me outside. She rolled me in the snow and called the fire department. Then she pulled me up and shoved me into the car.”

  “Strong woman, hic!”

  “My wife’s frantic attempt to rush me to the hospital ended with our Range Rover sliding across solid ice and crashing through the ER’s entrance. That was the final chapter in the Rover’s short but suspense-filled life.”

  “No more Rover.” He shook his head.

  “So here I sit, waiting for the airport shuttle bus to head back to sunny Palm Beach. Divorce is a small price to pay for paradise.” I elbowed the old man as the bus approached. “You might want to give Florida a try.”

  He straightened. “Thas why I’m waiting for the bussss.”

  The Magic Button

  D.M. Littlefield

  My best friend, Brenda, and I lived in a gated retirement village for people fifty-five and older—friendly and safe for widows.

  Brenda’s next-door neighbor called me early this morning and asked if I knew why an ambulance had taken her away late last night. I didn’t know, so I hurried to the hospital.

  I was shocked to see how pitiful she looked with stitches in a gash on her forehead, her left arm in a sling, a bandage on her nose, and two black eyes.

  “Brenda!” I gasped. “What happened?”

  She looked up at the ceiling and frowned. “Well, Alice, I tried to recall what caused this and wondered if my big boobs did it when I leaned over to take off my shoes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She sighed. “I remember I came home in a high-spirited mood because of all the drinks I had at the dance. To prolong the feeling, I set a stack of long-playing big-band records on the phonograph and hummed along to the music as I undressed and waltzed into the bathroom. Then I sat on the toilet-seat lid, leaned over, and removed my shoes. I remembered to take out my hearing aids before I took a leisurely shower. After I toweled myself dry, I inserted my hearing aids and sang along to the music.”

  “I enjoy singing along to the old songs too,” I said.

  “Wonderful memories.”

  Brenda smiled with a dreamy look. “I remember my youth like it was yesterday. During World War II, men our age were scarce on the home front. My girlfriend and I went to USO dances to meet guys in uniform. Back then I was a pretty twenty-year-old, dancing every dance with our service men on leave. Last night, I was reliving those extraordinary days as I waltzed into my bedroom to the mellow music of Tommy Dorsey with Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers singing ‘Dream.’”

  “That all sounds nice, but how in the world did you get hurt?” I asked.

  “Apparently, my alcohol-fogged brain, combined with my vivid imagination, produced a hallucination of two handsome hunks standing in the hallway by my bedroom door. Mesmerized by the magic moment, I felt like I was twenty again as I twirled around and winked at them.

  “One of the men cleared his throat and softly said, ‘Mrs. Brown, we’re the paramedics you called by activating the emergency call button you’re wearing around your neck.’

  “I blinked, gasped, and gaped down at the call button wedged between the huge, sagging boobs on my naked eighty-year-old body. Mortified, I fainted and fell face-first on the tile floor.”

  “Oh, you poor thing!” I took a moment before I asked, “So, um, just how good looking were those paramedics?”

  My First Solo Flight

  S.L. Menear

  The following story is true and happened exactly as written. Looking back on my life, I’ve noticed a recurring phenomenon I call the First Experience Anomaly. On many occasions when doing something for the first time, I encountered unusual circumstances that never happened again when I repeated the same activity. Thank God!

  On a warm summer morning in 1973, I arrived at the New Tamiami Airport in South Florida, renamed Miami Executive Airport in 2014, shortly after dawn with an excited smile on my face and a knot in my gut. I was ready for my first solo flight in an airplane one week after my first flying lesson in a two-seat Cessna 150 trainer. The weather was calm and sunny with a few puffy white clouds dotting the blue sky—a perfect day to fly. The scents of aviation fuel, engine oil, and wet grass hung in the air.

  I wore old cutoff jeans and my least favorite shirt. Although I was fairly certain I’d survive, I knew the back of my shirt wouldn’t. It would be cut off and pinned to a wall in the flight school.

  My flight instructor, Joe Gleason, tried to look serious, but I saw the smile in his eyes. Only twenty-one, he’d been flying since he was fourteen. A blond, blue-eyed Steve McQueen look-alike, he was the son of an airline pilot and an excellent flight instructor. I was a young Pan American World Airways stewardess. Working with a handsome instructor was fine by me.

  Joe explained he’d accompany me on a few circuits around the traffic pattern. If I flew as well as I had on the previous lesson, I’d stop to let him out and return to the air alone. Time seemed set on fast-forward as I completed several touch-and-go landings.

  Joe exited the airplane.

  As I taxied to the runway, I noticed a crowd had gathered—my boyfriend with his Nikon camera and telephoto lens, all my pilot friends, and lots of airport people I barely knew. Everyone wanted to see the girl fly solo.

  After being cleared for takeoff, I pulled onto the runway and selected full throttle. My little Cessna was aloft in a few seconds. As if he were still beside me, I imagined Joe’s voice: “Right rudder. Keep it straight.”

  Adrenaline pumped through my veins as I flew around the traffic pattern. The fear every pilot feels while being scrutinized by his peers churned my stomach. I didn’t fear dying in a fiery crash; I feared messing up in front of the pilots—a fate far worse than death for any self-respecting flyer.

  I was paralleling the runway in the traffic pattern on the downwind leg when the controller asked me to extend that leg to accommodate two aircraft waiting to takeoff. I glanced down at the runway to my right and then looked up into the frightened yellow eyes of a great horned owl.

  Giant owls weren’t included in my solo briefing.

  I managed to avoid a collision, which could’ve made a nasty dent in the leading edge of the wing or a hole in the windshield followed by a bloody feather facial.

  My heart was pounding like the drum solo in “Wipeout” when the controller cleared me to land.

  As I lined up for the first solo landing, my hands were sweaty, my mouth dry. My brain barely registered the sensation of wheels touching down as I gently braked and took the first turnoff to taxi back for another takeoff.

  One full-stop landing down. Two to go.

  My heart rate was in sprinting mode as I barreled down the runway for takeoff number two. When I turned downwind, I noticed dark clouds towering in the distance.

  The controller informed me I was number seventeen for landing. Did I mention there were ten flight schools on the field? I was instructed to extend my downwind leg ten miles to allow space for the landing traffic.

  As I neared the threatening clouds, the controller warned, “Caution all aircraft in the pattern. A tornado has been reported on the extended downwind.”

  Tornadoes weren’t covered in my solo briefing.

  I flew through green air, spotted the tornado, and opted to leave the area until the twister disappeared. Joe must’ve been chewing on Rolaids, wondering where I was.

  Twenty minutes later, I worked my way back into the landing pattern. Soon, I completed heart-pounding landing number two.

  One more.

  Worried Joe might try to stop me, I didn’t even look at him as I hurried back for my last takeoff. I needed three takeoffs and landings together to get the solo signed off in my student logbook. I think my hands might’ve been trembling on that last takeoff, mostly fearing Joe’s wrath rather than more terrors aloft.

  I was lined up for my final landing when a frazzled flight instructor allowed his student to leave the downwind leg w
ithout a landing clearance. They turned and cut me off. I banked and climbed to avoid a midair collision as the controller yelled for me to go around.

  Pilots’ stupidity wasn’t covered in my solo briefing.

  After another nerve-racking circuit around the airport, I landed and taxied to the ramp. Joe waited with crossed arms. Everyone else smiled.

  “Not bad for a girl,” Joe said. “Now turn around.”

  I lifted my long blond hair and felt the back of my shirt pull away from my skin as he cut away the fabric.

  “Time to christen the new pilot!” the men yelled.

  They carried me to the infield pond and tossed me in. I grinned as I waded out drenched in slimy water.

  Everyone cheered.

  After fifteen thousand hours of flying and twenty years as a jet airline pilot, I’ve forgotten many flights, but I’ll never forget my first solo.

  Secrets

  D.M. Littlefield

  Howard and Joyce sat at the breakfast table in the kitchen as she rambled on about him not socializing enough in the four months since they had moved to a huge retirement community in Central Florida called The Villages.

  “I don’t know why you don’t want to play golf or tennis or do any of the numerous activities with the men. I’ve met very interesting people here, and I’m enjoying the lifestyle. Today I’m having lunch with the girls, playing cards afterward, and attending a play later. I’ll be home around nine. If you get hungry, heat up a frozen dinner from the freezer. Don’t look at me like that! You knew I didn’t cook when you married me, and I don’t intend to start now.”

  He nodded and sighed as he poured more milk on his cold cereal. A retired English professor, he kept busy doing research on the book he was writing. He spent most of his time at the community library and taking long walks.