Have I ever told you that I hate to fly? No? Well let me tell you now, I hate to fly.
"Flying is the safest form of transportation!" my husband Mike tells me.
"Yeah? Well if my car wrecks, my chances of survival are much greater," I counter. I consider ships to be in the same category with airplanes. I can’t swim very well, so I have no desire to be on the water and I can’t fly at all!
With the recent turn of events, I had little choice but to fly. Not the way I wanted the story to unfold, but I put on my big girl pants and flew anyway.
"Peg! What are you going on about!" you exclaim with exasperation.
Let me start at the beginning, which is always a good place to start when you are telling a story, don’t you think?
My beautiful mother is getting a little long in the tooth, if you know what I mean, and requires more care than she used to. We have all seen and heard nursing home horror stories, some of us have even witnessed these things first hand, and my mother had thus extracted a promise from my oldest and much adored sister Patti, that she will NEVER-EVER-EVER! have to go to a nursing home.
I too have extracted the same promise form my children after watching a 60 Minutes exposé on nursing homes.
“Don’t you EVER put me in a nursing home!” I said more sternly than I intended but I was still seething with anger laced, profound sadness, at the treatment of a segment of our populace that we should be revering -not abusing.
“Don’t worry Mom,” my quick-witted teenage son responded with hardly a pause, “I’ll shoot you first.”
That broke the tension and I laughed. But if you think about it, a bullet to the head would be fast and relatively painless and would be preferable to many other ways that one could die, however, I would not want my son to go to jail over ending an old woman’s misery and suffering and I told him so.
“I swear officer, I don’t know how she got out in the middle of the road in her wheelchair,” he quipped and again I laughed.
When the time comes, I don’t know if my children will remember their promise to me, but my beautiful sister certainly remembered her promise to our mother.
The plan to move Momma from Pennsylvania, where she lives, to Arizona to live with Patti and her handsome cowboy husband Lee evolved over time. Truck, trailer and the hassle of motel rooms was traded in for movers and a three week RV good-bye tour.
“Lori, my longtime girlfriend, has agreed to go with me on this trip,” Patti told me on the phone. “We’ll rent an RV, drive to PA, then on the return trip to Arizona we will stop and visit with family that Mom may never get to see again.” As much as our mother loves to travel, being on oxygen full time and with limited mobility, her traveling days would most likely be over. Some family members were simply on route and it was easy to plan a stop to visit them, others are of limited means and would most likely not be able to afford to travel to Arizona, at least not in the foreseeable future anyway.
Momma, who has lived in the same tiny little apartment for twenty years, the longest time she has ever lived in any one place, was apprehensive about the move. Yes, she needed more help these days - no, she did not want to go to a nursing home - yes, she was comfortable where she was - yes, Pennsylvania winters were hard on her - yes, the warmth and sunshine of Arizona appealed to her - yes, she would miss her friends and family -yes, she loves to travel and see the countryside - yes, she has spent several years wintering with Patti in Arizona and finally - yes, she gets along with Patti very well.
Patti, as the oldest, holds a very special place in Momma’s heart. And that is not to diminish the place any of us have in her heart. She wanted each and every one of us, prayed for us in fact, and had room in her heart for many more children, if God had so chosen to give her more. Eleven was all she was given.
I am the middle child. There are five older than me and five younger than me. Patti, first born and oldest, is eight years older than me and John, last born and youngest is eight years younger than me. I am the middle child both in number and age too! But let me tell you something about being a middle child. If there are more than three kids in the family, you are not allowed to have Middle Child Syndrome and that’s because nine of us are middle children. Nonetheless, furthermore and be that as it may, each of us have our own place in Momma’s heart, she loves us all and this I know to be true.
I have been making phone calls to Momma on an almost daily basis for more than fifteen years now. I won’t say I have called her EVERY day, because I have missed a day here and a day there but by the same token there have been days when I’ve called her two or three times in the same day!
“Would you come early and help sort some of this stuff out?” Momma asked on the phone one night after plans were made to move her.
“Sure,” I said. I’m in Missouri most of the time, right smack in the middle of the country, right smack in the middle of the state because that’s where our business is but my heart belongs among the mountains and streams of Pennsylvania where I was born and Mike and I have a summer home just eleven miles from where Momma lives.
“Good. I don’t want to take everything with me.”
It was all planned. I would leave here in the middle of April, take the Jeep, our pets - two Yorkies and two domestic shorthair cats, and make the seventeen hour drive to our Mountain Home. I’d open the mill, which we are currently renovating into a home, and stay three weeks, spending time with my mother and helping her prepare for her move. Mike would stay in Missouri and run the business, possibly joining me later.
Then it came.
A call.
I got a call from Patti one day in early April. “Lee is not doing well,” she said of her husband. “I’m not going to be able to make the trip. Lori has offered to make the trip without me and as good of a friend as she is, it’s too much to ask of her. Would you consider making the trip with her?”
I didn’t know Lori, but I know Patti. She wouldn’t have asked if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. She needed me and how could I say no?
“I want to drive to Arizona,” I told Mike later.
“Peg, it takes two days to drive to Arizona from here,” Mike says, “and only two and a half hours by airplane.”
“I know,” I said not giving voice to my fears, but he knew, and we went around one more time ending with me saying, “…and I can’t fly either!”
Sigh.
In the end I flew.
Arriving at the airport early for my flight, I settled into a secluded spot and prepared for my wait. I pulled out my Nook and drifted between the post-apocalyptic world of a story called After The End and watching the seats around me fill with people. A young man with a backpack takes a seat in my row, three seats to my left. I watch surreptitiously as he digs in his bag for a minute and pulls out his head phones. Plugging into his newfangled phone he settles down into his own world. I watch the people around me wondering if they are concealing anything. An explosive device- like a bomb maybe?
Stop thinking like that! I tell myself.
My course has been set, my destiny has been sealed. Explosive devices or not. Guns or not. Fears, real or unfounded. I will be boarding my flight.
My thoughts drift to the passengers of the fateful flight on September 11, 2001. The courage it took to sacrifice their lives to save others. Could I be that courageous? I doubted it.
I watched the people coming and going from the terminal. Flight attendants, both male and female, coming and going from their respective flights. Pilots and co-pilots with their attaché cases full of secret papers. Would my pilot or co-pilot have a death wish? I was making myself crazy reviewing the latest tragedy in my mind and I had to wonder. If I had been one of the passengers on that flight, on the flight where the co-pilot slammed the airplane into the side of a French mountain as the pilot beat on the cockpit door, would my life have mattered? Would I have left a mark on this world?
I was contemplating this when I was distracted by a couple who sat down right across from me. She pulled out her newfangled cell phone and after a few swipes with her finger, she was soon busy poking buttons. Jeepers! Does everybody but me have one of those newfangled cell phones that do everything a computer can do? She tried to show him something - the weather report, I thought, but he seemed disinterested as he reached down into his carry-on bag and pulled out a plastic wrapped magazine. Did he just get it or had he been saving it for the trip, I wondered. He unwrapped it and stuffed the plastic and a paper - the mailing label? An ad maybe? - back into his bag. He settled back and flipped it open. I was somewhat surprised and shocked to see it was an issue of Playboy.
“I’m sure he’s just interested in the articles,” you spring to his defense.
Yeah. In my mind’s eye I imagine him flipping through the pages until he gets to the centerfold and turns the whole thing sideways, flipping down the fold to view Miss May in all three pages of her glory. Do they still do centerfolds that way? But he didn’t. After turning a few pages he appeared to be reading.
Who does that? Who unabashedly reads Playboy in public? What if someone walks past and sees over his shoulder what he’s looking at? Will they be offended? Will they say something to him or look the other way? After a while the woman gets up and wanders away. I kept expecting the man to put the magazine away at any moment but he didn’t.
You guys aren’t going to believe this when I tell you about it, I thought. Then I remembered I had Andrew’s camera with me.
I call my small Canon Andrew’s camera because it is the camera I let my grandson use when he comes to see me. Since the day of his birth, two and a half years ago now, I have been taking pictures of him. I joke that he wouldn’t recognize me if I didn’t have a camera stuck in front of my face. A couple of months ago Andrew started to take an interest in my camera and I let him use it but it was much too big for him to handle. I dug out a small Canon that I seldom used, charged the battery and the next time Andrew came to see me, I gave him the camera and asked if he would like to go out and take some pictures. As a child of the technology age, he is adept at anything with buttons and he readily and eagerly agreed.
This camera has no view finder, you simply look at the screen and push the button when your shot is framed. Andrew didn’t really understand that but because he’s always seen me hold my camera to my eye, that is the way he does it.
Andrew got some amazing shots that day.
I reach for my bag where it sat on the floor by my feet and furtively slip Andrew’s camera from the side pocket. I sit back in my seat glancing at the man to see if my movement had caught his attention but he never looked up. I kept my hand over the camera as I turned it on (to mute the sound it makes when it powers up). Would he know what I was up to? I wondered. I didn’t want to draw his attention but if I did, I planned to keep the camera out of sight and look totally innocent. Luckily the sound either didn’t carry to where he sat, he didn’t recognize what the sound was, or he was really engrossed in his article because again he never looked up.
Keeping the camera low in my lap I pointed it in his direction and pushed the shutter release button. One picture. That’s all I took. That’s all I needed.
Who knew a two-and-a-half year old could teach me something about taking pictures?
Until next time,
Let's call this one done!
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