Flying in Circles

Circles...

The plane banks to the left. The horizon wavers. I must have quit talking to myself for a moment, I feel suspended inside, stilled. Outside everything I see is rocking, breathing, a movie with the sound turned up, inside and outside fused. I don't try to stop the indescribable scramble as my earth bound senses grope wildly for any familiar reality. There is none.

I laugh uncontrollably. No chance to turn back now, I can't chicken out. I am definitely here, flying for the first time.

What was it about this pilot that made me trust him? He is just a guy with an every-man face. I would like to get underneath his seersucker cap for just a moment. Maybe there is no seething there behind his taciturn, impish grin. I can't read this man. He reminds me that I may never know what he has to offer.

My motives are honorable. I just want to find the most intense experience that I can have or share. I know how to get them from others. I have learned the meanings of passing mannerisms, subtle gestures, rhythms in talking and what is behind someone's changing subject. Most of the time, I guess well enough. Some call it empathy, but it is just practice. I used to think that doing it was selfish in its own warped way. I knew why I had to, as if that mattered. Knowing why didn't change anything.

Where did it come from? I don't really know. I've always done it. My mother knew I did it. She caught me using my friends to change myself. She tried to tell me I was wasting my time. She had thought people's complaints only cried in beer glasses, that trouble-telling had no positive effect on any circumstance. Then she realized I knew something that she didn't. I wasn't just telling troubles, and I was never going to drink beer in bars.

The tables turned on our relationship. She adopted my friends because she thought suddenly, I had something to offer her. I felt like I had crossed a rite of passage, the one where your parent becomes a person; a friend of yours now instead of the authority to fight or to please.

Unfortunately, my whole new view of my mother had to be packed into the next two months. Two months later, I got to watch her die of a heart attack. Maybe she felt it was time to go because I'd grown up. I was sixteen. Now I was without anyone to rebel against.

My dad originally had taught me to do it. Not exactly like school, or by example, but indirectly because he had an odd idea that Americans had no manners. He seemed unconcerned about teaching me to be mannerly; maybe he figured he was going to get be to behave correctly when I got older. I think now that he left out the manners training on purpose. He knew that I could read what people wanted me to do; it almost passed for knowing how to be mannerly. In some ways it was much better; I learned to follow my hunches second-guessing what people wanted me to do, even if it the signals were unnoticeable.

He died while I was waiting for him to show up for a date we had. I was eleven. I was lying on my bed, being mad at him for being late because he was taking me to visit an air-bor station. Being dead is a pretty airtight excuse for not showing up.