Dead Bird

If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing.

-Chuck Yeager

It is a sign of our healthy relationship this Valentine's Day that I can quote Peg's heartthrob to open this post. You see, Chuck is, well was, Peg's ideal of the manly man, the perfect catch. And although we both flew fighters, I'm no Chuck Yeager, not by a longshot.

But then again, he's no Donk Dickey. Fancy flying there, Chuck. Now come with me and argue a complicated legal issue in the federal court of appeals. What? Cat got your tongue?

I digress, without even really getting started this morning. A sign of adult onset ADD, I guess.

These posts have gotten spotty lately, between work and not wanting to get out of bed with P there on the next pillow. I foot-drag my way through the morning, wanting to spend every minute I can with her, then bumble into the office as late as I think I can reasonably pull off. Steph never comments, the mark of a good paralegal.

I have my third call of the morning in a few minutes, reviewing trial exhibits with another lawyer who is an unenthused about trying this case as I am. Lots of client stubbornness on both sides, which is how cases get tried and lawyers get wealthy, I guess. But it means I don't have enough time for a lengthy, witty travelogue after returning from a whirlwind trip to Corning, winding up stuck in Gallatin, Tennessee on Sunday.

The goal of our trip was to bring the Columbia home, and for P to fill Tara with old friends and the smell of Louisiana fare in honor of Mardi Gras on Saturday night. She cooked for a Yankee palate, toning down the spice level to "insipid". It was still quite good, and we enjoyed having that beautiful space filled with laughter and life again.

The next morning, Super Bowl Sunday, we loaded up the Mighty Columbia on a brilliant, bright day in the Southern Tier, and took off for Music City Executive Airport, just outside of Nashville. Our route of flight took us well west of the norm, because of a walloping winter storm over the Carolinas. That same cyclone gave us the rarest of advantages on trips south--a robust tailwind--and in a little over three hours we'd traversed western Pennsylvania, flying directly over Pittsburgh, past Wheeling and Lexington and then finally greased on a nice landing at MCEA.

After a bathroom break and quick refuel, we were strapped in and ready for a 1 plus 45 flight to Panama City.

That is, until I performed a run-up check at the end of the runway, and as soon as I switched off the right magneto the RPMs fell through the floor. Not good, not good at all. The plane will fly on one magneto, but if it quits in-flight we're driving a big, heavy glider and I'm no longer a pilot once the FAA figures out I took off with a known safety of flight issue. Not even Chuck Yeager would risk such a thing.

So we sulked back to the FBO, where we were told the mechanic couldn't get to the plane today. Didn't we know it was Super Bowl Sunday? So there she sat, the Mighty Columbia, dead as a doornail on the tarmac.

The nice young men at the FBO, one of whom was studying systems management judging from the college textbook on the counter by the cash register, loaned us their Honda Civic courtesy car for the day, and we ended up back at the Germantown Inn, one of our favorite lodgings in the Music City and a place redolent of moments in our relationship that make me smile as I write this.

We pondered whether to find a sports bar in Germantown to watch the game, but decided instead to eschew the crowd and enjoy the festivities from the comfort of our room, sipping very good cabernet and eating Publix chicken wings. We ended the evening with P curled up next to me in bed, sound asleep, as my Chiefs managed an amazing comeback to win the game. All good.

Well, except for P losing half a crown during the chicken wing fiesta, leaving a dangling nerve that became an issue as the night wore on. First thing Monday we found her a dentist at a place called the "Dental Haus" (it's Germantown--get it?), while I rode back to Gallatin to whine at the mechanic when he told me he wouldn't be able to get to the job for a week or two, and then swap the loaner for a rental car. All this took most of the day, once I rejoined P at a bar called Mother's Anguish, a couple blocks from the dentist's office, for a cocktail and some queso dip while her lidocaine wore off, and all we had time to do after that diversion was drive out to the Hermitage and walk the grounds as they were closing. On the back porch was a young man named Finn dressed as a Jacksonian of some sort, there as a historical interpreter. Peg asked him if it made his job difficult that Old Hickory turned out to be such an a**hole. Finn obviously got this one a lot, and said something about Jackson's complicated legacy.

Worrying about my own boy, recently escaped from Turkey to Montenegro for some reason, I found myself delivering unwanted parental advice about moving on from this dead-end job dressing like a cast reject from a Dickens movie, and making some real money as a lawyer. I even have my own airplane! Kinda like Chuck Yeager! He didn't seem interested. This generation's disinterest in filthy lucre confounds me.

After a forgettable steak at Outback Steakhouse, we found a dumpster to throw out all the frozen gumbo and red beans we had planned to bring home for Tom and Linda, figuring TSA would take them away from us later in any event, then made our way to BNA so Southwest Airlines could fly us home. We waited for our flight in a little airport diner with a rap music theme, which irritated us almost as much as flying on that awful cattle car of an airline back to ECP. Peg mercifully slept, while I read and groused about being seated against the bathroom bulkhead. Oh, how the mighty had fallen, from flying ourselves halfway across the country to sitting in the back of a busload of the Great Unwashed.

Damn, this sort of ran long after all. Time to get to work. I promised to take P to lunch a little later. Can't get enough time with her these days. We don't have forever, you know.