A Little Birthday Daydream
Birthdays come, birthdays go. Parties happen, parties don’t. Cards are sent, nothing’s said. After all it’s pretty busy out there, but there is one experience that my birthday brings to me lately.
I daydream. I relive victories and a few defeats. I check the odometer to verify the distance I’ve traveled and I take a short inventory to see if anything was lost along the way. I’m beginning to look forward to my annual daydream. In the dream it’s as though I report on my birthday every year to a dusty back office at an airport.
I walk in wearing a short sleeve shirt, slacks and deck shoes. I have a clipboard with papers and another box with more papers. It’s not even much of an office and it never changes year to year. Actually, the whole office is a temporary building like those we used to use in high school. The office usually isn’t very busy but there’s always some people ahead of me in line.
Behind the counter, the windows open up towards the airfield so I can watch the planes taxi to a runway. There’s a buzzing metal fan oscillating back and forth and the calendar on the wall always brings a chuckle.
I’m at this office to check in my airplane that I used last year and to pick up a new one for the upcoming year. The whole process takes several hours what with checking last year’s airplane for any damage, wear and tear or any unauthorized modifications. In the meantime, I watch the others receive their new year’s airplanes or roam around the equipment outside.
It’s always fun to watch the other people’s reaction when the clerk finally calls their names, hands them the papers and points them towards the airplane they will be using for the whole year. It’s truly amazing how excited people can get, especially those who get the upgrade. They just can’t believe it.
But this is a tricky office. You can’t judge the airplane or the upcoming year by how it looks from the outside, You need to walk around the whole machine, get inside, sit in the cockpit, play with the buttons and takeoff before you really have any idea on how everything will respond.
When I walk outside around all the different airplanes I get lost imagining flying each and everyone, I imagine flying each year differently – the fast ones, the smooth ones, the ones that coast more than fly.
I’ll move under a wing or fuselage and run my hand against the metal as I walk along. Sometimes, I can feel rivets or welds as my hand follows the curves of a wing. Sometimes, I feel nothing but smoothness. My fingers never once pop up to slide into a grove.
I’m never allowed to enter any airplane that hasn’t been assigned to me so I have to imagine what its like.
Back in the office arguments can occur when some people see what they are expected to fly all year. Some refuse to sign anything. Eventually, these people are taken away and I never see them again so I don’t know what really happens.
When I’m back in the office my financial paperwork tends to create a few extra phone calls and extra delay. I probably don’t mind as much as I should because it gives me a little more time to look around.
“What am I going to fly this time,” I say to myself.
Birthdays are funny things.
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