First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Free-Fall?

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I’ll have you know, for the record, I’m normally super chill about flying. Turbulence can be exciting. The plane catching fire right before takeoff makes a good story, and the TSA agent thinking I was travelling with bomb fragments in my clothes was slightly entertaining (albeit very rude).

So we’re about to take off. And suddenly the pilot says the plane was just recalled from service. (Actually, at this point, I still thought he was joking. Until about two hundred people get returned to the airport.)

Fine. Didn’t like these seats anyway.

That didn’t amount to much more than a long delay, coffee with a friend, and a fair amount of gratitude that they caught that tremor while we were still, you know, on the ground.

Take two.

I don’t know if any of you have ever flown into La Guardia, so I’ll tell you that the runway basically merges with this nice body of water known as the Atlantic Ocean. (And if any of you have friends planning this trip, it would be most considerate to share this piece of knowledge with them before they fly.)

So we’re flying in, it’s dark, and suddenly the plane starts making some sounds that maybe planes aren’t supposed to make.

Me: Sure, they recall the first plane only to have this one break.

Note: This was chill sarcasm.

I did feel better, though, one I noticed that we were flying over water. You know, in case something was wrong. Because we now had a place to make a nice, safe water landing. (In truth, I don’t know if a nice safe water landing is actually safer than any other kind. But at the time I felt so.)

And suddenly we’re nose-diving straight into the ocean.

Wait! I take it back! I didn’t really mean it!

Guy Next to Me: Are we speeding up?!

Well heck yes, we’re speeding up! We’re landing on the water! Wait, the water’s cold. Oh, who cares, just swim fast. Life vest under the seat, I swim pretty well, emergency door two rows up. What if the nose tips and we go under the water? I don’t want to sink. (I have images of all those spy movies, where the protagonist must swim up from some water-filled vehicle. Does it work that way in real life?) We’re still getting lower—

And the runway, out of nowhere. Guy Next to Me stops praying now.

Oh…

At this point, you may notice what a truly nice courtesy I did by informing you of this runway situation. So the next time you fly into La Guardia, you aren’t terrified by the rather frightful landing.

So I went out with my friend for sushi and moved on with life.

You know, until the flight home.

I’m not sure what was wrong. The first bump had me scared that we would plummet from the sky, and three hours of turbulence made me realize—for the first time—that I’m terrified of flying.

Must be because I’d never actually thought I would die on board a plane before.


The first moral of this story is that you should probably avoid flying with me. (There were actually people I know on both of those flights, so they can attest if you’d really like them to.) The second moral is to be infinitely grateful for the chance to continue living. The big things are obvious, but the rest is often overlooked. Sometimes, especially after a trip, one’s normal routine just seems boring and plain. But I was suddenly so grateful for all those little aspects I don’t normally think of. I get hot coffee in the morning. I can call a friend, have dinner with my family and wear slippers to bed. Can’t do that from a plane that drops out of the sky, but it shouldn’t take the (albeit unwarranted) conviction that one is about to die to appreciate these things. Look around you all the time.

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