Claudia and I took six or seven years to decide whether to bring children into this crazy world. It meant a couple strong hints from my parents with baby booties in Christmas socks. When it happened Claudia’s Mother who had experienced the glass ceiling was a little distraught for her daughter thinking she had given up the possibility of being anything other than a wife and mother.
Babies can make everything OK. When our daughter was born we made plans for her baptism at our church, Glen Avon. My Grandmother had sent me the Christening dress she had been baptized in back in 1900. That in turn had been sewn by her great grandmother who was born about the same time as Abe Lincoln and the War of 1812. I loved the thought of putting our daughter in it for the next baptizing. (Ah, Pandora is playing the theme to the movie To Kill a Mockingbird)
My parents weren’t particularly fussy about religious stuff and a baptism was not a draw for them. Neeither was Claudia’s Mom all that churchy but she wanted to fly up on Saturday before hand so she could be there with us. Her new husband Charlie was a pilot. He would fly them up as well as his grade school daughter. Saturday was gray and drizzly and we got the word that if the weather was bad (Charlie wasn’t rated to fly instruments) they might end up somewhere else until the sky cleared.
Claudia and I along with our new baby went up to Butler’s Air Terminal (If I’m recalling the name correctly) to wait for their arrival. After an hour beyond their scheduled arrival time we were getting worried. I’ll cut to the chase here. Charlie got them all killed. We didn’t know this for some time and the next 24 hours were seared in my brain for months to come. Every minute by minute detail, was lodged in my head and seemed dreadfully important. I thought I ought to write them all down for, I don’t know, posterity I guess. As the months slipped by the details blinked out but I could, even now, tell you a lot of details about the Civil Air Patrol, A funeral service filled with all the kids in Christie’s fifth grade class and one body not so badly disfigured that an open casket for one of the three deceased was possible, bears covering the bodies they found at the crash site with leaves, Neighbors bringing us casseroles, Months of clearing out Shirley’s home and settling her estate.
My grandmother’s christening dress still hangs in one of our closets never used by us. Even so, it brings back memories. It took me ten years to start writing and that required an Apple Computer and software that allowed me to correct my copious keyboarding mistakes. Those are still plentiful as are poor story telling which requires some serious proof reading. There are no spell checks for sloppy prose.
There are a lot of epigrams about how writers can’t be trusted. I can’t recall the one I had in mind by a quick google search found, “A writer is always selling someone out.” That’ll do. I still apparently want to write pretty desperately. I get withdrawal symptoms when I don’t blog for a while. I also get anxious because of how far behind I feel.
My Mother-in-law would have been a very cool Grandmother. Damn Charlie. He wasn’t rated for instruments.
