Go Anyway
I’d already survived the arc of the large jetliner we took from San Francisco to Minneapolis for the holidays when my father offered to take Matea & me up into the dreamclouds above my hometown in the small propeller plane he pilots for a living. It’s no secret that I hate flying. No, that’s not quite right. I enjoy flying, but I suffer… my brain explodes in cascading thoughts of flimsy air pressure, vast spaces of sky & the complete loss of control. Furthermore, a distaste for cannonballing through the day in a mechanical cigar w/pasted butterfly wings seems utterly rational to me. But! I went anyway. “Go anyway” - that’s my advice on this life.
So while mother earth batted her breath at us some thousand feet above the frozen lakes & forests of Minnesota, my father handed the controls over to Matea (I was stuffed into the backseat, by the way, like a dirty handkerchief in the pocket). Lucky for us, Matea is a natural-born pilot. She has only an expired drivers license back on the ground, but she can push a small plane through a turn while my father (a natural-born professional pilot) points out tree plantations & flood zones. I was shaking in my shoes when taking this photograph.
