SIGNS OF ADDICTION

THAT SIGNIFICANT OTHER

by Steve Messman

My wife is a truly wonderful human being. I can’t begin to fathom the amount of my crap she has put up with. And bless her heart, she continues to do it.

I first started flying hang gliders back in the late 70’s in Germany. I still can’t believe she let me get on those “death traps” way back then. That is her term for the training gliders we used, by the way. I lived long enough to buy my own glider when I returned to the states. It was named the “Dove”, and was very gentle and stable. When I landed it in the trees at the top of a ridge one day far too windy for the docile Dove, my wife was right there with both kids, helping me extract the wing, put it on the car and take it to a local shop for repair. As this was long before the internet and prodigious amounts of weather information from anywhere in the country, I used to drive for three and a half hours one way to a great flying site (The Pulpit) in Pennsylvania to fly. As often as not, I would have to turn around and drive back without taking the wing off my Subaru. She and both kids were with me every time. When I got tired of driving and not flying I decided to build a motorized Mitchell Wing. As I didn’t have a garage at the time, this wing got built in my living room and an upstairs bedroom. If you know the Mitchell Wing at all, you know that it was a fixed wing, spruce frame, stretched-and-doped-fabric airplane. That thing CONSUMED my living room for a year while I was building it. The center section was eighteen feet long and had a cord if I remember correctly of six feet or so. It had two detachable wing tips, each eight feet long, not to mention the little winglets, the frame, motor, propeller, etc. Since I didn’t have a garage (remember?) guess where the airplane got stored. If you can believe it, the center section hung from my living room ceiling. At the absolute minimum, you could say that it was a very good conversation piece. The pilot’s frame sat in the living room and made a great chair to watch television from. And yes, my wife is still with me. Having gotten through the flying, motorcycles, scuba diving, and now back to flying phases of my life, she still goes with me on occasion to watch me fly. The kids luckily, are grown and on their own. Otherwise, we would still be dragging them along too. I was and still am the only one to fly, but it was always a family affair.

All those thoughts poured through my mind today, the second of a three-day trip she has given me. I have been following the sun for two days as I write this. She on the other hand, stayed home. Can you blame her? For me it has been a wonderful trip. I got to hike. I got to fly. I saw some things I have never seen before. Today I saw some spring flowers that were remarkably beautiful. When I saw them, my thoughts went immediately to my wife. She is, after all, why I am here. I wanted to pick a handful of the yellow daisies, and throw in a few of those flowers that looked like daisies, but were lavender. The many color variations and possible combinations were striking. Of course picking those flowers would have been stupid, so I thought of my camera, which of course was in the car. It would have been cool to PIC-ture some of them for her.

So, my beautiful, tolerant wife of 30 plus years gave me the gift of a free weekend. In return I gave her thoughts of pictures of flowers. Can you believe it? She’s still with me after all these years.