So there I was, flying to Boston to hear my friend Zoe Tall Weiss and her baroque opera company. Our plane (a turbo prop Dash 80) took off from Syracuse in a driving rain. When the plane was about 7 minutes in the air the pilot came on the intercom and told us the electrical system was failing and he was turning back. We bobbed like a cork and quite literally dove for the runway. I was talking with a woman across the aisle about dogs and disability and my lovely Miss Nira kept her usual demeanor of poise mixed with quiet happiness. You could feel the collective tension of the passengers. The plane was dropping fast. I thought about all the dirty jokes I’ve told in my life and I decided that they had no relevance to what might be in store after death. It was a clarifying sense that the guilt of Christianity is blather and hog wash and I felt this without any panegyrics. Then we were on the ground. And then, as they say, it was over. And US Air had no way to get me to Boston because they said LaGuardia is 6 hours delayed owing to the rain. And so we went home. I’m still in the elastic gratitude tunnel of affirmations. Isn’t it lucky to be here? Isn’t it amazing to be able to make a turkey sandwich, drink a glass of water, admire the way winter light on a dark day is still so sustaining? It is dark and gorgeous in Syracuse and we have a little more time to know it.
Planet of the Blind 
Having now lived longer than both my parents and a handful of other first-degree relatives I feel that way a lot, and that’s long before take off.
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Must you relay these horror stories when I am just due to head skyward within the week on my way to SF? Actually, I’ve always thought that, if we all must die (but it really seems as if there must be someone out there who has managed to escape this at one point or another) then a few seconds of terror prior to blackout might not be the worst death imaginable. And, as I once expressed to my flight-phobic dad, I always take some measure of comfort knowing that no one, including myself, would hold me personally responsible for my demise. I always worry that, at my memorial service, some mean-spirited someone will be clucking sadly, and remarking, “If only she’d taken the time to tie her shoes…”
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