Painful Summer

The painful summer notes appear too consistently.

I am patiently progressing through a period of introspection,

- sitting at lunch with a pilot that lost consciousness and woke up with his plane protectively crushed around him, suffering no accepted debilitation;

- wondering if a light and a couple of wires back through the firewall could have provided an early cowl fire warning

- mentally flying with Dan Patch through his last few seconds and easily superimposing my own moment of breathless hope, inexplicitly rewarded;

- counting the cost, but envisioning friends and loved ones that crossed over too early even though their flavor of conveyance was different, or to an unchosen ailment;

- finally loosing the closer-than-brother world's-greatest-pilot that once pulled me into a dream job, a few days ago saying to the doctor unblinkingly, "I'm ready, make that constant defibrillator alarm noise go away".

I'm not impatient for an answer yet. But rather than just gleaning the meaning of the universe, maybe the maker of the molecules allows us who linger behind to be drawn along with a reverent appreciation of the wonder of those things that pull us along toward where our friends and loved ones are.

I hope that you are well, and that you're accumulating bug guts, if not now, soon.

Bill James