I'm going to die and he's asking me about cake? Of all rescuers I get a crazy-man?
It was Maria Ochoa, she who took coincidence to save her life and touch mine, showed me how the world of spacetime works. Hypnotizing Maria was not some twenty-minute help I gave her, it was a gift she gave, to change me forever.
Dear Maria, he thought, wherever you may be right now, I shall pass your gift along.
Once in a while he'd get a letter, a call, an e-mail from a student, “So when the engine
stopped—well, while the engine was blowing up—I got the fuel off, the mixture off, prop full decrease, I heard your voice right beside me: Give me your best full-stop landing to your cowpasture, Mister Blaine. There was oil all over the windshield, Mr. Forbes, but I stood on the rudder, slipped the turn to final so I could see out the quarter-window all the way to flare. Not a scratch! Smoothest landing I ever made! Thank you!”
He kept the letters.
I am deeply grateful, on my journey, for the parenting and guidance of my highest self.
It was a grey morning, ceiling zero visibility zero in fog. He was sitting at his computer, writing a check for the hangar rent (I shall not lack for whatever I need to become the person I choose to be) when the telephone rang.
“Hi,” he said.
A woman's voice, a little nervous, on the phone. “I . . . I'm calling for Jamie Forbes.”
“And you have found him.”
“Are you the flight instructor?”
“I'm a flight instructor. I don't advertise, though. You called an unlisted number.”
“I want to learn to fly. Can you teach me?”
“I'm sorry, ma'am,” he said, “I'm not that kind of teacher. How'd you find this number?”
“On the back of a flying magazine. Somebody with a marker pen wrote your name and the number and ‘Good instructor.’”
“That's nice to hear. I teach the sort of things you want to know after you've got your license, though. Seaplanes, tailwheel aircraft, advanced flying. There's plenty of flight schools around, and if you want some extra training, later on, give me a call and we'll talk about it.”
“Don't hang up!”
“I was planning to wait,” he said, “till you said good bye.”
“I'm a good student. I've been studying.”
“That makes a difference,” he said. “What's a sideslip?”
“It's a maneuver . . . that seems odd, at first,” she answered, glad for the test. “You bank the airplane in one direction, but yaw it in the other. A sideslip keeps you from drifting in the wind when you're landing, it's the only way to go straight in a wind that would blow you off the runway.”
“Nice definition.” He had expected the textbook: “a way of losing altitude without gaining airspeed,” which is only partly true.
“I've always wanted to fly. So did my mother. We were going to learn together, but she died before . . . before we did.”
“I'm sorry to hear that.” It would have been fun for them, he thought, learning together.
“I talked to . . . I dreamed about my mom, last night.
She said I can learn for us both, she'll be flying with me.
Then this morning I found this magazine in a grocery cart with your number on it. It's as if . . . I know you teach some first-time students, don't you? Almost never? Careful interview? Those who have to learn for two, they study twice as hard?”
He smiled, at that. It wouldn't be the end of the world, he thought. She's got the right attitude, for sure. Attitude, choice, desire to make it true.
They talked for a minute, set a time to meet.