More excerpts from David’s Grade 12 journal writing assignment, circa late 1984:

Change

I changed more last summer than I ever have before. I started having all these new ideas and experiences. I got a lifeguard job down in Scranton, and made a whole new set of friends in the neighborhood of the pool where I worked. I never owned a car before this summer, and now I know what a pain that can be. I dieted on and off all summer, and lost 45 pounds. All the changes I went through this summer I’m glad for. I take a lot more responsibility for myself, but I still enjoy myself more than ever.

Knowledge

What can we know? That is, what can we be sure we know, or sure that we know we knew it, if indeed it is at all knowable. Or have we simply forgotten it and are too ashamed to say anything? By “knowable” I mean that which can be said to be known or to possess a knowness (knownness?) or knowability, or at least can be mentioned to a friend. In all seriousness, knowledge is an asset. If that is the case, someone will have to think of another name for small donkeys.

Layers by AviatorDave

There’s a story David told me early on, before we’d actually met, about a turning point in his life. It was after a thunderstorm he experienced while flying to Ohio in 2001, a storm so intense he worried he might not make it through. David told the story to a few people, but I managed to find one instance where he’d written it down, in an e-mail, in June 2004.

I was flying from my home ‘port in the Poconos to Cincinnati, Ohio for a conference. I was going to receive an award I had been given, for education. Two other pilots were going to go with me, but they cancelled the morning of the trip. I decided to go anyway, even though it would mean flying alone in instrument weather, which is a heavier workload. I was flying a Civil Air Patrol Cessna 172, a little four-seat plane about the size and weight of a Volkswagen.

Across Pennsylvania as far as Pittsburgh was all grey clouds and light rain, I never once saw the ground after taking off. As I crossed into Ohio the clouds began to get darker, and the rain fell harder. The Cleveland center controller gave me some headings to steer to keep me out of the worst of the rain and lightning.

Fairly quickly the clouds went to a deep grey, and the rain even more intense. The windscreen was totally obsured by water, like being in a carwash, and the sound of the rain was like sizzling bacon - louder than the engine. The turbulence was so bad that the simple autopilot couldn’t keep me level, so I clicked it off and hand-flew the plane, trying to stay upright. I was thrown up and down hundreds of feet; the engine howled and sighed, as my airspeed went wildly up and down.

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In my unpacking, I found this Polaroid of David from when he was 2 or 3 years old and tried to clean it up a bit. It was too adorable not to share!

Here’s a piece on driving from David’s Grade 12 Journal (part of a writing assignment):

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(I took this photo a year ago, at the back of the house in Pennsylvania.)

Journal 11/8 (1984) - Frost

During the summer, frost is pretty and makes pictures on your windowpane but in winter it’s the nasty stuff you have to scrape off your car windows. I had to scrape some off this morning, because no matter how pretty the pictures are, you have to see out. If there really is some little Jack Frost guy who paints the pictures, he should be locked up for the winter.

The weather here in Toronto has been all over the map. Today and yesterday the windchill factor was beastly, but a couple of days ago it was warm enough to ditch the scarf, and a couple of nights ago we walked home through pouring rain — accompanied by thunder AND lightning! — that turned the snow to slush. Snow that fell only the day before!

Last night I read a very touching comment from Shari. It was the impetus to write about how a person as jaded as Yours Truly would come to extoll the virtues of love.

For a while now, I’d been meaning to write something here that elaborated on what I had said at the memorial — that despite everything that’s happened, I would do it all over again. Meeting David changed my life for the better, and that is something I must never forget. He was a very loving husband and, after many years of adamantly saying I wouldn’t have children, convinced me otherwise. David was the romantic one between us; he softened my hard edges, reaching past my cynicism and willfully poor attitude about marriage to build a level of trust that no one else had achieved before. How could I not marry this man?

At the memorial, I told a condensed version of how David and I met. It was in an online forum, a crazy community of folk ranging from quiet observers to the most outspoken netizens. David and I were somewhere in-between.

David and I officially met — in “meatspace” as some call it — at JFK Airport on October 1, 2004. I arranged it. David said later it would’ve taken him 10 years to work up the courage to meet me in Vancouver, so it’s a good thing I didn’t have the patience to wait that long. After reading his words for months, I had a sense of what kind of person he was and wanted to meet him.

We’d had a few phone conversations, but the three-hour time difference made phone calls generally inconvenient. The first was out of the blue, in late June, shortly after my birthday. David told me later that he’d had a couple of beers first. Not quite drunk dialling, but later he divulged that he was in need of some “liquid courage”. That random phone call took me by surprise, and at first I found him sort of… gruff. Friendly, but a little tentative. But in short order we were laughing raucously over the silliest things, like me opening up a “Raconteurism Centre”, where people could wander in and tell stories. Then we were giggling breathlessly over “faxing Chinese people” and — well, you had to be there.

David virtually disappeared for part of the summer, swamped with work and Civil Air Patrol activities. After the summer was over, I proposed the idea of meeting. I wanted to indulge my curiosity. I sent David a message on Multiply.

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Before I retired David’s Civil Air Patrol jacket last week, I took a photo. I noticed it had been a year (today) since David last wore the jacket, because it still has the hang tag from when we went snowtubing at Montage Mountain: more…

A perfect post for Monday, methinks. Ah, the ennui of high school. It cracks me up. (Now, that is.)

Journal 10/15 (1984)

Happy Monday to you…

My image of Mr. Steele has just been shattered – he doesn’t seem to care what’s going on in the rest of the school. Apathy is a terrible thing. Someday someone will do something about all the apathy in the world. But not me. Just now on the announcements they said what Mr. Steele didn’t know – that Mr. Sheridan’s class is going to the courthouse. Hassan just said that “this is the silliest thing I’ve ever written”. I wonder why. I’m starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel for these journals. I ought to do something interesting so I could write about it. That could never happen in school.

Journal 10/23

I’m all dressed up today because they’re going to take my picture. Ask me if this delights me. Because it don’t. The color in my face won’t come out good on film, because the collar of my shirt is choking me.

For all the thirtysomethings out there: don’t you just love the 80’s high school portraiture? The backlighting and soft focus, oh dear. Mine are no better — my hair is so big it’s outside the frame. (Those photos are still in Vancouver.)

[This entry sat in draft mode for a few hours -- I had an unexpected visitor!]

During my recent excavations, I made a small discovery: it appears to be a writing assignment for David’s last year of high school. It’s a bunch of writing on looseleaf paper with no headers or full dates. David’s handwriting looked the same to me, so at first I didn’t know how old it could be. After a bit of reading it became clear it was David at 17 years old, and it was an assignment… hence all the complaining. It may not be complete — all the papers in these boxes are loose — but I assembled the batches and tried to discern an order among the multiple numbering systems (this is David, after all).

I took the sheaf of papers to bed along with my books last night and read them all the way through, laughing at sections. Getting to know my husband 20 years before I met him is a bit of a revelation; it’s a glimpse into the mind of a 17-year old boy. (It’s been so long since I knew any!) It’s not a personal journal, after all, so I can’t report anything particularly scintillating or revealing, but its very mundaneness is amusing in itself. Casting my mind back to my own teenage years in comparison, I’m sure the juicy bits were few and far between, too. (I’ll have to ask Kimberly, we’d been pen pals for 7 years by then.)

David briefly mentioned a journal, but I didn’t think to try and dig it up in the days when he was too sick to read. I would’ve read it out loud to him, for laughs. I’ll include some entries here, now and again.

I like this one, for example: more…

Came across this photo of David from a year ago that neither of us uploaded… I don’t know why, it may have been before I started fooling around with Photoshop and learned how to lighten shadows.

I took it just before we flew for the first time through the VFR corridor:

Photo album: Flying Over Manhattan - February 6, 2005

Dave’s Logbook: Gail and Dave Take Manhattan (Again) (From the Air)

I also found this old photo from when David was working for a local ad agency:

I think it’s about a decade old now, this mugshot. I asked David why he wore a mustache and beard — if it was for convenience — but he says it was because he didn’t like his face or chin. Pftttt! I said…

Yesterday I went to Skyhaven Airport in Tunkhannock (north of here) with a pilot friend to discuss specs on the Tri-Pacer with a mechanic who’s very familiar with them. It’s a restored model from 1954, and FAA regulations require detailed logs on everything: engine, airframe, and pilot. Not being a pilot, I needed assistance in deciphering the many industry acronyms. We also needed more information about characteristics specific to this model of Tri-Pacer for the purpose of maintenance and fielding questions from prospective buyers.

If you’re at all interested in history, it’s quite fascinating to flip through the pages of the logbooks and read the story of an airplane over 50 years. The aviation industry is highly regulated, and numbers are tracked meticulously. Unlike auto mechanics, airplane mechanics must sign off on all of their work and are thus held accountable (wish it were like that for cars, too!).

Back in February, David wrote a post about 02P’s history: more…