Hope

Restless night last night, awake every forty-five minutes or so, sleep cycles punctuated by nightmares that left me wanting to avoid returning to those dark places by falling back asleep. On top of that, the ulnar nerves in my elbows are constantly irritated these days whenever I'm in bed, and I awaken to numb hands, over and over.

What's going on here? Maybe just the fact that we ran out of melatonin, a bedtime supplement that seems to aid with sleep.

It's certainly not the verdict sweeping the news over the last few hours. Although this seems like the right outcome to me, I am more than a little off-put by comments from our chief executive while the jury was deliberating, to the effect that he's "praying for a guilty verdict."

Come on, Joe. You're a lawyer for Pete's sake. I would expect that sort of thing from Maxine Waters, who's been a corrupt, race-baitng lunkhead for pretty much her entire political life, but you know better than that. Having a President comment in advance that he's rooting for an outcome in a case undermines the rule of law, the importance of which transcends the particulars of this or any adjudication. People need to have faith in the process and its fairness, and we start looking like a banana republic when another branch of government weighs in as a nonparty regarding the desired result of a trial. We already hear too much about the politicization of the courts. Don't make it worse.

Maybe my restless night was the result of my hours of study over the last few days to get ready for my checkout in a new cockpit this weekend in Texas.

Here's the instrument panel of a Cessna 177RG, our sled for the last year.

Round dial heaven, baby. The same presentation I've been flying since the '80s.

Here's the G1000 array in the new plane:

I know what you're thinking--that actually looks a hell of a lot simpler, Donk. And is that an air conditioner at the bottom of the center cluster? (Why yes, yes it is. Pretty cool, huh?).

The point here is that there is a lot going on with all those buttons and displays that must be navigated while hurtling along at 200 knots. A video game, and I don't play video games. And although the point of all this technology is to reduce aircrew workload, the process of learning it at the front-end is about like trying to learn how to fly the Space Shuttle if, like me, you learned to aviate in the days when dinosaurs roamed the flight line.

But I don't think the G1000 was the reason for last night's restlessness, either.

Rather, yesterday's stroll through a reminder of our own mortality, and the frailty of this moment, left me wrestling with worries that have cooked just below the surface lately.

After work, Peg and I decided on a long walk as a cure for my stagnant hypoxia from sitting in a chair all day typing and talking on the phone. I filled a tumbler with some ice and a nice limited edition bourbon, donned a light jacket, and departed our porch to the northeast, hand-in-hand with P.

We kept commenting on the amazing grass here; so green, so lush, and apparently without the benefit of the chemical soup required in Florida to keep the stuff alive. And the blades are so fine, the locals run a mower over their lawns over and over, more brushing the grass aside than actually cutting it.

We hadn't walked this way in a while, and noted the houses once for sale in the heady early days when we thought we might just stay forever, now all sold except some poor, ugly thing built in the '90s and clad with custard vinyl siding. That one may sit for a while.

As we made our way down what is probably my favorite street on Southside Hill, I noticed a few headstones peeking from behind one of the houses. Soon we realized there was a rather large cemetery up there, complete with family vaults and crooked old gravestones that had stood vigil for decades.

We found a gravel path between the houses and a sign at the entrance informing us this was Hope Cemetery, and listing among its prohibitions the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Even in death these people are stodgy. I figured the dead wouldn't mind the smell of a very good bourbon (Bulleit limited edition, if you were wondering), and we ventured into the hillside necropolis.

As cemeteries go, this was a peaceful, lonely one. No church nearby, a quiet residential street shielding it from the city below, flanked on two sides by mature woods. Judging from the headstones, the earliest residents here arrived around the turn of the last century, with a number of vaults bearing only a date of birth, awaiting their eternal tenants.

An obelisk drew my eye, a rarity in a graveyard of this vintage. On one side it bore the name of a woman who was born around 1870 and died in 1943, with the caption "Peace at Last".

"That's a weird thing to put on a headstone. Maybe she was sick."

Then we saw on the adjoining surface of the monument the dates of birth and death of a young man who entered the world in the early 1890s, and died in July of 1918 at Soissons on the Western Front. The inscription states that his body was never recovered.

That poor woman was his mom, who endured the death of a child literally obliterated by war, then lived another quarter century. I can't imagine the pain, don't want to imagine--with four sons now and a fifth who might as well be, it's all too close to home. Peace at last indeed. She just wanted the agony of memory and the shadows of what might have been to stop.

A little further up the hill we found a family plot arrayed in a pair of neat columns of horizontal slabs with a path between them.

My curiosity got the best of me, and I ambled between the graves to discover that here were the Houghtons, the founders of what became Corning, Inc.

The son of the first Amory of the tribe, the one who brought his glassmaking operation first from Stockbridge to Brooklyn, then from Brooklyn to here, lies next to his wife.

Next to them lies their grandson. I've written of him before, just a couple days ago in fact. Ambassador to France. Chairman of Corning Glass. Owner of Bagley the alcoholic hound. The guy who used to drive his Bentley up Pine Street, kids on the running boards, and eat his lunch with his line workers in the company cafeteria.

That was all a flash in time viewed in the context of eternity. What's left of him will spend much longer on this hill than all of his moments above the sod. Over before he knew it, I bet, even with a full, long life.

I was a little lost in my own head walking down the hill to the house in the fading late afternoon light after that. Not to fall into an "alas poor Yorick" moment, but one can't walk the spaces Amory Houghton walked here in this late season of our life in Corning, of life together, and not feel a rather melancholy reminder of how it all ends. I never worried about, or even gave much thought to, these matters of mortality in the past. I used to drive Peg crazy when I'd observe that "you can't kill the Irish," or make some other glib comment about my physical invincibility. An old fighter pilot, employing the young fighter pilot defense mechanism of assuming my own immortality, that it's always going to be someone else.

It really is later than we think, however, and with every health challenge we two face these days a sense of dread grips me that maybe, this time, we really are nearing the end. None of that ever bothered me before P came along. Now it hangs like a pall over everything.

Hope Cemetery is a beautiful place, but I also found myself pondering this reality that burial means spending eternity in one spot. I know we're not there anymore, not unless Thornton Wilder's cemetery full of regret in "Our Town" is taken as a documentary of the hereafter. But where would I want to spend such a long, long time? It's not simply a consideration of the physical beauty of the place, although I guess that matters at some level. Rather, I'd want to find myself somewhere that captured my heart, that gave meaning to life for a time, a place where the karma of a string of happy days filled with love hangs like a mist, forever.

The only place that comes to mind is Wyldswood. And then only if P is there with me. Maybe the chickens will be there, and those poor, stupid guineas. An eternal, peaceable kingdom.

Enough of this ridiculousness. Time to go turn another day of my life into money.