Fly In

No, I have not yet found a reason to live, but I finally decided that if I need a reason to live before I resume blogging, I will never blog again, and then I wouldn't be able to share my most recent family bonding experience with all you lovely people. (Who are you people, anyway? I look at my counter stats occassionally, and there are days when I get upwards of two dozen unique visitors. I have very few regular readers, so I'm dying to know who else bothers with the shite I write. I'll have to think of some way to add a guest book. I'm just so curious.)

Right, so bonding. Every year on Memorial day weekend my dad's local EAA holds a fly-in pancake breakfast. Dad burns the sausages. Dad burns the best sausages in the western world.

We get up at the ass-crack of dawn and drive straight down to the hanger to get cookin', because the hard-core recreational pilots are already in the air, and when they come down, they're gonna want their fucking pancakes. The previous day the aerocoup and cesna were moved out of the hanger to make room for the dozens of table and hundreds of chairs. Everything is set up and ready: plastic tablecloths (taped to the tables), industrial size diner-style OJ maker, and a coffee pot that could fill an olympic swimming pool with bitter black sludge in 23 minutes flat. The best piece of equipment is the pancake grill. It's a totally homemade job. (These guys build airplanes for kicks, they weren't about to purchase something as simple as a garage-sized griddle.) The griddle is 5 feet across and 10 feet long. There is a 5 gallon tank on top of it that sits on rollers and dispenses batter through 4 spouts. With each new batch of pancakes, the tank is rolled down the griddle, plopping nice even pools of batter at regular intervals. There are 6 people with spatulas to do the flipping, and the griddle keeps them busy. It's really an ingenious contraption, a product of what happens when smart people have too much spare time and their own machine shop.

Let me impress upon you the size of this operation. To keep everything running smoothly you need:
1 person to sell tickets at the door
1 person to serve pancakes
1 person to serve sausage
1 person to serve OJ
1 person to serve coffee
1 person to make sure that the butter, syrup, sugar, creamer, plates, napkins, and untensils are kept full
2 people to make pancake batter (5 gallons at a time)
1 person to operate the griddle
6 people to flip pancakes
and way at the back of the operation, 3 people to burn sausages

we served over 200 pounds of burnt sausage on sunday morning. we just kept dumping it on the our grill 10 pounds at a time. as soon as we could see the grease boiling and bubbling inside the skins, time to shovel it off (literally - we use a copper dust pan) and start over. Dad and I were grilling with Bill. Bill is a great, loud-mouthed grandfather who is a retired nuclear engineer, thinks he knows everything about everthing, and loves to tell 6th-grade sex jokes ("Look down your shirt and spell 'attic.' Ha, ha!") We had a great time. Dad's been doing this my whole life, and I have always come down to eat pancakes and look at the dozens different airplanes, but this was my first year working behind the scenes. I scampered around in a purple tie-dyed bandana and rolled up jeans, and endeared myself to the sarcastic old flyboys. They watched me with amusemtent, and when they saw that I was actually working and not just getting in the way, they smacked me on the back and made friendly, disparaging cracks about my parentage.

Dad enjoyed it, too. I think he was pleased that I was making an effort to take an interest in his club and his friends, instead of the other way round, as it's been my whole life. As he turned sausages he told me stories about his training for Vietnam, the first time he had to make a solo landing, the most godawful drill sargent humanity ever created, the difference in flying different types of planes and helicopters, and the raucous parties he and his buddies had. Other old pilots would stop for a chat, and he would introduce me and tell me that S0-and-so's younger brother's friend was in this-and-that division or platoon and how they used to date the same girl and whatever became of him? Dead, huh? Heart attack you say? We're gettin old now. Same happened about six months ago to...

It was strange, this new insight into my dad's life as a young man. He doesn't talk about the war. (Unlike WWII veterans, Vietnam vets rarely do.) The most you'll ever get out him might be a crack about the food in the army while watching a M*A*S*H rerun. But the need is still there; the need just to be in the presence of other people who know and understand, people who get it, who saw it, who lived it.

So for one morning every year this motly collection of ex aces and top guns and ground mechanics, some of them artificially jocular, some openly bitter, fly in from all over the midwest to eat pancakes and burnt sausage, and show all the brightly-painted airplanes to their grandkids (who are more interested in extra maple syrup), and tell war stories and swap news about old buddies. For a few hours of smoky labor I got to listen and look at a bit of my dad's life that I had never seen before.

Our sunday-morning sausage burning adventure reminded me of the compliment dad gave me after I graduated college and i was considering a career in the military. It was, and will probably always be, the best compliment I have ever been given in my life. He told me that he wished he had had a CO like me. Listening to the combat tales and the near misses and the descriptions of idiot generals, that statement returned to the fore of my brain with intensified impact. Everyone says I take after my mother, but I hope I take after my dad, too.