I needed to draw a picture in my mind – of my parent's house and what I planned to do with her. Yes, her. She was, when all was said and done, a feminine house, full of a woman's personality – my mother's. Clean and austere, a Craftsman style bungalow that veered to an almost Japanese austerity. She had been overbuilt, even by 20s standards, and that's the 1920s for those too old to remember such things, and she was originally planned and constructed with three small bedrooms and a single, smallish bath. She had a large – for the neighborhood, anyway – backyard – and almost none out front. Due to my parent's reproductive tendencies – and here, rabbits should hop forthrightly to mind – father built – and I mean 'he' built, not some contractor – an addition off the back of the original structure. Their bedroom, as well as a nursery – that would, in time, become PJs bedroom – filled this addition – and left a resolutely useless backyard in its unplanned aftermath.
The house is vaguely L-shaped, kind of fat rectangle near the street – the original structure – and a long extension protruding into the backyard – his addition. There are two concrete slivers of driveway that lead to the one car garage sitting on the back property line, and a rusting four foot tall chain link fencing surrounds three sides of the property. Which is, by and large, flat. Until you get about two feet from the back lot line – where things change. The heavily wooded lot was carved out of a hillside, and the rear takes off into a near vertical climb, the face of this 'hill' a raw wound of exposed white shale streaked with intermittent ground cover.
I say intermittent because everything living in Los Angeles exists at the leisure of, some would say the mercy of mother nature. Drought is the norm in the basin, yet when the arid plain on which the city was built isn't parched it's virtually a flood plain. The scorched earth could handle the rain that typically falls here – but for the mountains that line the north rim of the original city, and when the rains come the waters run down to that flat plain and cause all kinds of fun. Taken as a whole, there's no real good reason for Los Angeles to be where it is, other than it provided a nice place to put the Hollywood sign.
So, the shaded back yard went from small to smaller, and in it's uselessness it became an orphan, a neglected step-child that sat alone, unused. My plan was to turn it into an oasis of multi-level decks – and almost completely covered in viney trellis. When I sat back there dreaming of all the what-ifs and might-bes, maybe drinking my second beer of the evening, I envisioned a hot tub filled with nubile nymphs frolicking in the twilight, waiting for me with open arms. The next morning I would see PJ in the tepid water, begging for a foot rub, and all thoughts of a hot tub vanished in an instant.
The bones of the house were sound, but her guts were rotten. The wiring was ancient, the plumbing prehistoric, and the appliance were already dated by the time Eisenhower took office. The kitchen countertops were a brilliant white formica streaked with pale yellows and blues, accented with truly lovely gold sparkles. Fashionable in 1938, I think.
So, need I say more?
There was one original bath in the original plan, designed by troglodytes for troglodytes, and the new one father added. Father being an aircraft designer, the new bath resembled the toilet compartment in a brand new DC-6, circa 1954. The bathroom vanity and shower stall were constructed out of laboriously shaped and formed stainless steel, the work no doubt knocked off after hours at the old plant in Santa Monica. There was something almost charming about this little cabinet sized bathroom, too. You could sit on the pot in there and close your eyes, almost hear old Pratt & Whitney radials humming away at fourteen thousand feet – which was, I think, the point of the exercise. I had mixed feelings about ripping that room apart, I really did, but in the end I gutted that room too. I did not have the heart to throw that stainless work away, however, and it sits atop rafters out in the garage even now.
When the girls – Becky, Bettina and PJ – and I ripped up the fifty year old carpet, still clean and serviceable, mind you, we found floors of varnished Douglas fir, and in pristine condition. We found mould, too, and this we quickly dispatched with solutions of bleach and then lemon oil. I pulled carpet tack-strips and filled holes with putty, then wet-sanded the whole house in one long day, let her air out the next, then we set on her like locusts and applied a fresh coat of varnish on the third day. And we slept in the back yards under tarps that week, in old Coleman sleeping bags we found rolled up in the garage, while Doris Parker provided refreshments and chow. With an old Coleman lantern sputtering away in the dark, we told ghost stories while we tried to ignore sirens in the distance.
I turned my old bedroom into a new classroom, put posters on the walls of all the things you'd normally find in a flight school classroom. A couple of old tables and four chairs, two newish iMacs and a flat panel to watch instructional videos rounded out the space.
The old kitchen? Gone, in a heartbeat. Ripped apart with pry-bars and a sledge, then hauled away. A cabinet company installed the replacement in a morning, granite countertops went in the next afternoon, new appliances the day after and we were back in business. Judd and Tommy Parker helped me repaint the exterior of the house, and replace a few shaded patches of wood that had succumbed to rot, while the girls painted the inside of the house, and a livable structure emerged within a few weeks, with work on the bathrooms next up.
And during all this time, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, class was in session. Real, formal class. The kids wanted to talk airplanes all the time, and we did, but that wasn't classroom time. My classroom was a Navy classroom. All business, no jokes, no war stories, and it took a few days but I turned those two kids into studying machines. Not coincidentally, their grades in school began to improve as they applied these new study skills to all their other assignments. Yeah, I'm bragging. I taught this stuff in the Navy for two years, so let's just say I know how to teach.
We would do three weeks of classroom before our first flight together, and I wanted to stretch that time out a little to take a measure of the girls' resolve, their interest and dedication, and I wanted the week we finished up the house to be capped off by their first flight with me – not to mention Rosalinda's first of twelve Sunday afternoon fiestas. All in all, I was looking forward to Rosalinda's after-church blow out almost as much as I was taking the girls up.
I've also avoided talking about the Second Coming of PJ and Judd. Deliberately, I might add.
It had been decades since I'd been around teenaged groping and non-stop necking – and, frankly, it was odd to see two old farts sneaking away in the middle of the day to fuck their brains out for a while, then hastily reappear with paint brushes in hand, trying not to look too smug, or too guilty. Personally, I think it was hardest on old Tom and Doris, because Judd invariably snuck into his old bedroom to hammer PJ, and despite their age they did their level best to ignore all this newfound nonsense – but I did see Tom's smile when I obliquely referenced these goings on.
And one other funny thing happened during this time.
When the kitchen was disestablished as the center of our little universe, Rosalinda came down and invited PJ and I to dinner, at her house. We looked at one another, then at Rosalinda, and shrugged "Sure, why not..." Roughly translated, that comes out as: "Si, como no?"
As in: "I'm making empanadas tonight. Would you like to join us?"
"Si, como no?"
Or: "PJ? I'm going down to the Farmer's Market. Want to come along?"
"Si, como no?"
Remember that old 74 Porsche 911 I bought when PJ fell in love with it? I never sold it, and now here it sat, covered under multiple layers of car covers. As I had supplemented this with various old beaters over the years, she still had less than fifty thousand on her odometer and I still used her sparingly. For everyday use I had a thirty year old Datsun pickup in the driveway, complete with lumber rack, for hardware store duties and Tommy's runs, but when I wanted to go out and have some fun, the covers came off and I fired up the old six and popped the top.
And one night, after Rosalinda's latest "Si, como no?" I asked her to go out on a little drive with me. I helped her into the old beast and off we went, into the valley.
"Ever been flying?" I asked, and she shook her head. "Never? Not in an airliner?"
"No, not ever."
"Nice night out, isn't it?"
She was looking up at the milky murk that passes for a night sky in Los Angeles and she seemed lost in memory, some place far away, and I let her come to terms with the moment, come back to me on her own. I made my way to the northwest corner of Van Nuys airport and parked, then walked with her over to the Cessna, showed her the key things about an airplane while I checked on a few odds and ends. Then I opened the passenger door.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Taking you up," he said.
"Is this yours?"
"Yup."
She looked at me and shook her head a little, then stepped up on the strut and into the cabin. I belted her in and closed her door, walked around to my side and climbed in. I talked her through the checklist, explaining everything I was doing, then yelled "Clear!" out the open window and started the engine.
She grabbed the armrest on the door – and my arm – when the entire structure started shaking and vibrating. "Why is it moving so much?" she shouted over the engine noise, and I shook my head, handed her a headset.
"No need to shout now. Sorry," I said.
"So, why is this thing moving so much?"
"Prop-wash," I explained. "The propellor is pushing air back over the airframe and the wings."
She watched as I made little adjustments to knobs and levers, listened as I talked on the radio, then she heard: "Cessna 6-8 Romeo, altimeter two niner niner three, winds light and variable, ceiling and visibility unlimited, clear to taxi runway one six right" – and then we were moving. I was talking about things like 'departure controls' and 'terminal control zones' and I knew none of it made sense to her, but she seemed to relax, figured I knew what I was doing. She just nodded her head and looked out the window when we started our charge down the runway.
I talked on the radio almost all the time after that, but told her we were flying out towards Thousand Oaks, and there they would turn and fly over the mountains to Santa Monica, and from there to downtown. She would see things from up here she'd never imagined before, I told her, and she told me she felt like a bird more than once, especially when he made steep banking turns, and then she saw a black thing in the air ahead, and that we were going straight for it...
And in an instant they were inside the thing. The air grew cool and the ride very rough...
"What is this?" she cried.
"A cloud," I told her.
"We are inside a cloud?"
"We are. Yes." And when I looked at her she was smiling, her eyes full of wonder.
