The Rapture Comes on a Sunday

I wrote this story years ago and included it in the book I co-authored with my dear friend, Elizabeth Taylor (the Canadian YA author, not the movie star). We wrote the book Half Past Perfect to help people—even those who wouldn’t normally consider themselves writers—get a foothold in recording their life stories. We included sample short stories (just 2 to 3 pages) at the end of every chapter to illustrate that a story doesn’t have to be long to be meaningful. This story is a retelling of one of my most enduring memories from childhood. I was thinking about it this week and decided to share it.

Enjoy!

The Rapture Comes on a Sunday

by Barbara Allen Burke

“Hey, Barbie!”

I heard my mother’s stern Sunday voice calling.  I ignored it and continued to rummage through the refrigerator.

“Barbara JoAnna Allen!”

Ooh.  Now I was in trouble. I looked over the refrigerator door.  My mother glared at me from the kitchen sink.  I watched soap suds slide off her fingers into murky dishwater.  “You get out of that refrigerator and get your chores done. Now move.” She started scrubbing a pan. “I don’t want to be late for the service.”

My sister Karla stood beside her on a stool next to the drain board.  She was still wearing her church clothes from the morning service and had a dishtowel wrapped around her waist.  She looked over her shoulder and made a face at me.

I walked behind them on my way out of the kitchen and yanked the towel to the ground as I left.

I hung over the top of the corral fence, chin resting on crossed arms.  Sunlight glinted off the horses’ water trough. A breeze ruffled waist-high grass.  It was one of the first really warm days of the spring season. After four hours of choir practice, Sunday school, and the Morning Worship Service, it felt good to be outside. Usually, the prospect of another two to three hours of church in the evening didn’t bother me.  I’d never really known anything else.

Not today.  Today the sunshine called.  Today I was tempted to run barefoot through the field and tramp down a swath of grass to make a nest for myself.  There I would lie on my back and watch clouds.

I climbed down from the fence and started back toward the house.  Unaccustomed to my rebellious feelings, I slid deeper into them.  I deliberately scuffed my shoes in the dirt.  I stooped to gather a handful of stones from the gravel at my feet.

“I hate church,” I thought to myself. I threw a rock at the corral fence.  It hit the wood railing with a thud.  Anger had made me accurate.

I went in the back door, bracing for my parents to tell me to hurry.  I was surprised by silence.  I walked through the family room into the empty kitchen. Soap suds filled the sink. My sister’s dishtowel lay on the stool by the drain board.

“Mom?  Dad?”  Where was everybody?

I hurried through to the dining room – empty – and into the living room– also empty.  My father’s Car and Driver magazine spilled onto the floor.  My youngest sister’s blocks sat in a messy pile in the corner.

And then I knew with blinding clarity what had happened:  The Rapture.  The Lord had returned to call his faithful servants unto himself and I, Barbara JoAnna Allen, had been left behind.  I could just picture it.  While I was moping in the yard, my more righteous mother, father and sisters had been transformed into ghostly, light-filled figures and lifted straight to heaven.

I brushed away tears and trotted through the house, afraid to confirm what I already knew.  The bedrooms were empty, the beds rumpled, closet doors open.  I ran into my own bedroom and there, lying on the bed, were my Sunday clothes, set out by my mother.  They accused me of my mean-mindedness and sloth. And now the Only Train Bound for Glory had come and I had missed it.   How stupid could I be?

I walked more slowly, trying to remember all the sermons I had heard about the years of Tribulation that would follow the Rapture. I had to find a way to face it.

I headed toward the barn. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. The family station wagon sat in its usual place.  I stared.  There in the car sat my parents in the front seat, facing each other, talking.   My sisters leaned out of the windows.

“There she is,” called my sister, Karla.  “Are you coming or what?  We’re waiting, and the car’s getting hot.”

I didn’t know what to do.  I wanted to run and kiss my sisters’ faces, curl up on my mother’s lap and let her stroke my hair.  I wanted to hug my dad and feel him hug me back.  I wanted to laugh out loud.  I wanted to apologize to God.

What I did was get in the car.  It was time to go to church.

Glinda the Good Witch

I have very mixed feelings about this photograph. On the one hand, it’s a lovely record of a family holiday, and the first Halloween we were able to spend with all four of our children. On the other hand, it is a vivid reminder of an evening I spent feeling intensely embarrassed, humiliated, and out of place. Like I said, mixed. I’m smiling in the photo, but only because it was taken before everything turned horrible.

As many of you may know, ours is a blended family. When Doug and I married, I brought to the family my six-year-old daughter, Katherine, and Doug brought Sam, 4 and Kate, 2. Together we had baby Sarah. While Katherine lived mostly with us, Sam and Kate spent the school year with their mom who lived at that time in Arizona. Although they spent summers and vacations with us, there were a number of events that were not a regular part of our family experience. Things like Halloween.

In 1996, we decided to fly down and spend the holiday in Arizona, take the kids trick-or-treating, and attend the Halloween carnival being held at their elementary school. Perhaps I was overcompensating just a little bit, but I decided to make costumes for all of us, strange given the fact that I don’t really sew. I even decided on a theme for all of our costumes. At that time, Kate, who was in kindergarten, was  entranced with Toto, the little dog from Wizard of Oz. She’d often crawl around the house on all fours, barking. She refused to answer unless I  called her Toto. She of course wanted to be Toto for Halloween. Fine, I thought. I can pick out characters for each of us and pull together the appropriate costumes. I found a pattern for a dog costume to fashion Kate’s makeover into Toto. I modified the pattern to make a Cowardly Lion suit for Sam. Katherine wanted to be Dorothy, so I sewed a blue gingham dress for her, using her red, high-top Converse shoes for ruby slippers. Doug made a perfect Scarecrow when I stuffed a sweatshirt and jeans with straw. Sarah didn’t get much say and became the Tin Man in a grey sweatshirt and a tinfoil-covered funnel that fit her round little head. I wasn’t sure which part to pick for myself. There weren’t many female roles left. I was already heading to Arizona as “The Stepmother” so I certainly didn’t want to be the Wicked Witch of the West. That pretty much left me with Glinda the Good Witch. I somehow created a dress out of white and gold tulle, accented by a  magic wand and a tiara from the kids’ dress-up box. There I am in the photo, tiara and all, blissfully unaware of the embarrassment to come.

We showed up in Arizona the day before Halloween, swimming in the hotel swimming pool, and hand-crafting  Halloween candy bags. Okay, maybe I was overcompensating a lot.

We went trick-or-treating in Sam and Kate’s neighborhood. The weather was lovely, and the kids hauled in lots of great candy for Halloween, even agreeing to share some of their Snickers Bars with me.

Then came the school carnival. It was a big event, widely advertised in posters around the school. Everyone was supposed to come in costume, including parents. There would be games and music and food and prizes. We all dressed up in our Wizard of Oz finery and walked into the school as a group. The kids dashed off, eager to play the games. I, meanwhile, looked around with an increasingly sick feeling in my stomach. In a huge gymnasium filled with people, Doug and I were the only adults dressed in costume. I looked at all the other parents, members of a fairly well-to-do suburb of Phoenix. There were the all other moms, all of whom seemed to have expensive haircuts, size 2 designer jeans and excellent manicures. They were all beautiful and tanned and relaxed. And there I was, with my fish-belly white Oregon skin, craft glue under my fingernails, holding a wand, of all things. I was sure everyone was looking at me, judging me, incredulous that I could be so eager, so earnest, so . . . so stupid. Doug at least was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. I, on the other hand, was wearing a tiara.

I  wanted to drop through the floor and disappear. I wanted to ditch Glinda the Good Witch and revert to Barbara the awkward stepmother visiting from out of town. When that didn’t appear to be an option, I wanted to gather all the kids together and leave immediately. The problem was, they were all having a great time throwing bean bags and fishing for little plastic prizes and eating hot dogs and cake. They were in their element. I was the one completely out of place. I felt like I didn’t belong—in the gym, in Arizona, or in the world of happy, intact families. I felt, in short, like a failure.

I stuffed the tiara and wand in one of the kids’ bags and mostly hid behind Doug. I tried to chat with some of the other adults, parents of Sam and Kate’s friends, but I’m sure I didn’t make much of an impression, or at least not a good one. Would you want to talk to a silent, cringing woman in a white fairy dress? It was one of the longest nights of my life, and one of the hardest in my career as a parent. That was over fifteen years ago, and although I’ve shared the story a few times with friends, I’ve never written about it.

Until now.

Why now?

My daughter reminded me of the story earlier in the week, and I began to ask myself this question. Why, when I am willing to write about most things—my childhood, my relationships, my mistakes or my lessons—do I stop at recording memories like this one. It’s not that I resist talking about times when I’ve made a fool of myself, because I’m actually fine with that (see my story “Denver“). What stops me is that it is part of my history of raising a blended family, which carries the distinction of being both the thing I am most proud of, and also the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Twenty years into the process, I am humbled by all that we learned, and so grateful for the relationships I now have with everyone involved. It is perhaps one of the most significant experiences of my life.

So why wait so long to write about it? Because it probably took the distance of all those years to figure out what it means. What did I gain from that night standing in a crowded gymnasium, feeling out of place and humiliated? Here’s a beginning:

That I can’t control my experiences. I can do my best to plan, make beautiful, thematically-correct costumes, cover all the bases, and still have it fall apart.

That I survived the evening. It wasn’t pretty. I wasn’t happy. But my kids had a great time. They loved their costumes. In the end, it was just one night in a series of thousands.

That I belonged in that gymnasium, whether or not I felt like it at the time.

Ultimately, I decided to write it in hopes that perhaps I will be able to connect to someone else who has felt foolish or out of place—you, maybe—and be able to say that even in the middle of sinking humiliation, you have company. With time and distance, it will make more sense. You will survive. You already belong.

The Things We Carry

Maybe it’s just me, but when I was little I was fascinated by air travel. It seemed like such a romantic pursuit to me. People actually dressed up to fly—men in suits, women in Jackie Kennedy dresses and matching sets of luggage.

I was in college when I took my first solo trip by plane, coming home for Thanksgiving after my first term away. I flew from Portland to Denver in the middle of one of the worst blizzards ever. We were in a holding pattern over Denver for three hours. It was not a romantic trip. My second flight was the next year when I flew from Denver to England, meeting up with my study abroad group in London. My flight was cancelled at the last minute (a very harrowing experience for both my mother and me) and I was rerouted through Chicago. I didn’t know how to read my boarding pass when we changed planes and I decided that my best resource was a very chic young woman sitting in the waiting area. She was stunning, wearing a wool dress with matching jacket and pumps. She was also kind, helping me figure out my boarding pass and chatting with me while we waited. She told me she was flying to London to meet her fiance who was a banker or something. I suspected she’d materialized from the pages of a novel. My suspicions were confirmed when she opened her toiletries case, a very smart hard-sided leather box that, looking back, was probably Louis Vuitton. There was a mirror attached to the hinged lid which she used to reapply her lipstick.

I was entranced. I figured that someday, when I was a real grown-up, I would fly to London to visit my hypothetical fiance, and I would carry a beautiful travel case in which my jewelry and makeup would be carefully arranged.

I did make it back to London many years later. I actually got engaged on the trip. Somehow, the beautiful travel case didn’t materialize, but the allure of owning one never went away. Little did I know that it would take a painting assignment and a trip to the Goodwill Outlet store to make my dream come true.

Our final assignment for my class was to do a painting on a 3-D object. It could be anything, as long as the meaning of the object was reflected in the painting. Feeling stumped, I visited the Goodwill Outlet store in town, a huge warehouse with giant, rolling bins crammed with assorted cast-offs: clothes, tools, appliances, toys. I wandered the aisles until I came across a Samsonite toiletries case. It was burgundy, hard-sided, and the latches still worked. The lining was clean and intact, and it even had a little mirror attached to the lid. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t Louis Vuitton. But after handing over three dollars, it was mine.

The idea for the painting came quickly. I was intrigued by the idea of the things we carry through life, the things we choose to take with us on our journeys. Then I thought about the project I had done recently, writing the biography of my client, Jack Jouett. For three years, while working with Jack to record his story, sort through photos and memorabilia, and research his history, I felt I had taken a journey through his life. I would paint the case to reflect my travels.

First, I removed the handle and the mirror and taped off the hardware. Then I painted the case itself, covering the surface with gesso and several thin layers of paint in crimson, turquoise, buff white and a fun paint made with stainless steel. The surface was hazy and atmospheric.

Next, I wanted to add some images. Jack has great photographs, including some taken in the 1940′s when he was a young man living in the Virgin Islands. He’d gone on a sailing trip with some friends through the Caribbean, and the photos from that trip are some of my favorites. I copied the pictures onto photo transfer paper in my laser printer, cut out the photos I wanted, and layered them on the surface of the case.

One of the themes that continually emerged while working on Jack’s story was the idea that he kept circling back to places he’d lived before. Not only had he circled the globe, the events of his life continually carried him back to favorite places:  New Orleans, Washington, DC, China, the Virgin Islands. I decided to stencil a number of different circle designs on the case itself. In many places, the stencils obscured the photographs, hiding them behind paint. I decided this was fitting. Most of the details of Jack’s life were buried by time, as they are for any of us, and working with him was a process of searching for the images that made up his life story. Finally, I covered the surface with a thinned down glaze of burgundy paint, further obscuring the details, but softening any remaining hard edges.

Here’s how the project turned out.

The photographs are visible if you look closely.

And another detail . . .

We had our final critique this week, and my class was intrigued by my project. Not surprisingly, they were even more intrigued by Jack. Of course, I was happy to talk about him and the things I learned circling through his life.

And my travel case? I’m definitely keeping it. It is perhaps the most practical art project I’ve ever done. I could use it to hold my art supplies. It would be a great storage bin for photos or keepsakes. I might even load it up with my makeup and jewelry when I take a trip. Whatever I do, it will remind me to pay attention to the things I carry with me.

If I Wait and Watch

I love crossword puzzles. There is something so satisfying about a quiet hour spent with a cup of coffee, a crisp new crossword puzzle, and a sharpened pencil. I try to finish a  puzzle almost every day and have done so for years. As a result, I’ve developed a bit of a reputation for being good at crossword puzzles.

My husband, Doug, thinks I’m a crossword puzzle expert. He credits my ability to a well-known love of words and an entrenched habit of reading. He assumes that a person who works a puzzle quickly is someone who knows the answers to the clues before they begin. The execution of the puzzle is basically writing down what you already know.

As tempting as it is to let him believe that I am just unusually smart, I felt compelled to tell him the truth, which is something that those of you who regularly work the puzzles already know: crossword puzzle solutions are a result of a very specific set of skills which can be learned and practiced. While it helps to be fairly literate and to have a broad scope of interests, you will seldom know the answer to all of the clues. At least I don’t. I’m rocky on my geography and bad at Latin terms. I rarely know the names of famous sports figures or heroes of Norse mythology. The point is, it’s doesn’t really matter. You approach a puzzle without having all the clues, because there are other ways of knowing. And that’s what I love about crossword puzzles, and what keeps me coming back to them day after day. I get regular evidence that I know more than I thought I could know.

Doug asked me recently if I could teach him. For the past couple of months, we’ve sat down with the daily puzzle together. Slowly I’ve shared with him all the “tricks” I know. There are many other techniques, I’m sure, but here are a few for starters:

1. Some words are frequently used. They’re words like jai alai, oboe, sro (short for “standing room only” in a theater), or err. If you work puzzles long enough, you will start to recognize these regulars as old friends.
2. Just because you don’t know the answer to a clue, doesn’t mean you have to. You can also learn the answer by working all the crossed words. That’s why they call is a crossword puzzle! Don’t know the name of the largest lake in Australia? Filling in the perpendicular clues may tell you that it’s Lake “Eyre.” In this way, I’ve learned many wonderful, esoteric facts, like an etui is an ornamental needle case, or that the Hawaiian state bird is called a nene.
3. Understand that sometimes, the clue and the answer will be–how can I put this nicely–just really lame. I once struggled with the clue “a bit of foamy soap” only to learn that the answer was “sud.” Seriously. Never in my life have I encountered a singular sud. But there it is. Crossword puzzle writers have down days, too.
4. There is usually a theme to the puzzle–often a quotation, or a common structure, or a witty play on words. Figure out those, and you’ll make a lot of progress.

All of these are just tricks, however. The most important thing I’ve learned is not to spend too much time on any one clue. Trust that if you look away and work on something else your brain is still trying to come up with the answer.  Trust your marvelous mind to work on the problem without you consciously directing it. Let it show you what it knows.

This last lesson is the most exciting to me, because it has huge implications, not just for crossword puzzles but for other creative ventures in general. When approaching a creative problem, I’ve learned that there are two basic steps. They are:

One:  Show up for the work.

If I don’t pull out the crossword puzzle every day, I won’t learn anything and I won’t get any better. So do a crossword puzzle every day. Write a blog post every Friday. Paint one picture a week.

Two: Wait and watch for the answers.

You don’t have to have all the answers before you approach a creative project. In fact, it’s probably better not to have all the answers. Whether I’m writing a short story about my childhood, sketching a landscape, or figuring out how to arrange furniture in my living room. I will get further if I can find a way to be quiet and listen, and will often observe that my brain knows more than I can rationally explain.

This point was brought home to me this week. I was flipping through an old art journal from 2007, and on a page sandwiched  between a smudgy pastel design  and a watercolor sketch of a pineapple, I found that I had copied out a passage from a book, taken from a novel by Peter Pouncy, Rules for Old Men Waiting. I remembered the book fondly. It is a lovely story about an aging historian who, struggling with his wife’s recent death, decides to create a set of rules by which to live out the rest of his days, the most important of which is to “tell a story to its end.”

The passage which struck me, both in 2007 and this week, was his description of  how to tell his story. It’s all about listening, and it gives as good an explanation as I’ve ever seen for how to solve a problem, finish a crossword puzzle, or record the story of a life. Although written in prose, it is so lyrical, so dense, I’ve copied it out here as a poem.

I said to my soul, be still,

and watch the small trickling beginnings ease towards flood.

Let the story declare itself,

and the characters and events take me down among them

and draw the words out of me.

I have tried to possess myself in patience,

I have gathered all the hungers of my past in readiness,

to spell out the missing syllables of my life.

In the morning watch I shall wait,

and the quick, brown, wordy fox will come out of his hole,

sniff the air, and begin his narration.

It is only natural.

Sooner or later, if I watch, it is bound to happen.

Then I shall fill my book with profitable wonders.

I don’t know about you, but I find great comfort in these words. They remind me that I don’t have to be the smartest person, know the most facts, or master Latin conjugations. I just have to be still, to be patient and watch for the wonders that will reveal themselves to me.

Gravity, Burma Bridge Busters, and Uncle David

If there is one thing I now know for certain, it is that our stories have gravity and weight. Years ago, I started documenting the life and work of my client, Jack Jouett, whose father was hired by Chiang Kai Shek to help establish the Chinese air force. Years later, Jack himself spent most of World War II working in the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater, a part of history about which I was at the time woefully uninformed. I spent a lot of time learning more than I ever thought I would want to know about World War II, aviation, and the CBI Theater. I also talked at length about it to almost anyone who would listen. Because I cared about Jack’s story, other people were drawn to it as well.

One of those other people was my father, who subsequently learned more than he ever thought he would want to know about World War II, aviation, and the CBI Theater. Once you’ve made a decision to learn about something, you start to notice details that you might otherwise have let slip by you. The gravity of an idea has a way of pulling them into your orbit.

Which is what happened last May. My parents attended the 90th birthday party of my mother’s uncle, David George, who lived about an hour away from them. I remember Uncle David from childhood visits. He was always cheerful and engaging, and a family favorite. When my parents showed up for his party, they arrived a bit earlier than most of the guests and sat around the table chatting. My father’s attention was captured by a framed set of images that included a photo of a younger Dave in a military uniform, and a flag with a bit of writing in Chinese. Years earlier, my father might not have noticed it. Now he was curious, drawn.

“What’s that all about?” he asked.

“The flag and the Chinese writing is a piece of cloth I had sewn on the back of my flight jacket when we flew B-25′s in World War II,” David said.

“You were in airplanes in World War II?” my dad asked him, feeling stories collide. “Over China?”

“Well, yeah,” said David. “the CBI.”

In the years I had been working on Jack’s story, talking about Jack’s story, I hadn’t known that a member of my own family, someone I knew and had talked to, had been in the same area of the war. I had never thought to ask.

It turned out that the flag was something called a “blood chit,” usually made of silk and sewn to the jacket giving instructions to people discovering the soldier in the event of a crash. Translated, the Chinese characters say:

This foreign person has come to China to help in the war effort. Soldiers and civilians, one and all, should rescue, protect and provide him with medical care.”

Horrifying and comforting all at the same time. It also often implied that a reward would be given for caring for a downed soldier. This bit of fabric apparently meant enough to David that, all these years later, it hung on his wall.

Other guests started arriving for the party and interrupted their conversation. Several times over the summer, however, my dad drove to David’s house and he learned the details of his life. These details built a story that now acquired a weight all its own. My dad gathered photographs, did research, taped interviews, and typed up what he learned. He sent a draft of the story to me. I’ll share a little bit of it.

In 1940, David Nobel George graduated from a small high school in Rifle, Colorado, on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies, and enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He was sent to Army bases around the U. S. to train on bomber aircraft. Training was haphazard, with the limited use of one bomber and broomsticks for rifles. The bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 shifted everything. David and his crew were sent by truck to Muroc Dry Lake in California, now Edwards Air Force Base. Training continued in earnest.

Chiang Kai-Shek (yes, here he is again…) had negotiated with the U. S. to obtain airplanes for its air force to use in the CBI Theater. Through the Lend-Lease program, the U. S. arranged to deliver 33 Lockheed-Hudson A-29 planes to China, using the opportunity to transfer 33 of the U.S. Army Air Corps’ own B-25 bomber pilots and crews to their bases in the CBI. All in all, 33 planes, 33 pilots, and 33 mechanics, or crew chiefs, prepared for the trip.

David George was one of the crew chiefs being sent, and was sent for A-29 training and to get the planes ready for transport to China. They picked up the planes on June 13, 1942. Dave’s plane was the first of the A-29′s to take off from West Palm Beach, Florida, following the same route established for all U. S. pilots to the CBI Theater, with stops in Brazil, Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic, Africa, the Sudan and on. Both David and my client Jack followed the same flight path.

David’s trip was more eventful, however. Leaving Sudan, David’s plane lost an engine and did an emergency landing on a small airstrip in Asmara, Eritrea. David was, of course, in charge of fixing the plane. There was a Douglas Aircraft depot 35 miles away through the mountains, but they somehow had to get the plane there. They pulled the wings off the plane, turned the landing gear around, put the tail wheel of the plane in the back of a jeep and towed Dave’s plane through the mountains to the other base. Dave learned that another A-29 had lost an engine as well. He sent the remaining good engine from his plane to Khartoum to repair the other plane and had the bad engine returned to him. For the next two months and 20 days, David rebuilt both failed engines and put his plane back together. He and his pilot resumed their flight to China, traveling through Karachi (then India, now Pakistan), on through Lahsa, Tibet, and finally into China. Instead of being the first A-29 to arrive, Dave’s was the last.

Having delivered his plane, Dave and his pilot were transferred back to their post in Karachi as part of the 10th Air Force. They were assigned to squadrons for bombing missions on B-25′s. Dave’s squad, the 490th, started in India at Malir Air Base, where they developed and perfected low-level ridge bombing, called “skip bombing.” They became so successful one of the generals started calling them the Burma Bridge Busters. Their skip bombing technique did the heaviest damage to the Japanese, taking out railroads, airfields, communications areas, supply bases and, of course, bridges. The insignia for their plane was the Skull and Wings.

Above is a picture of David’s squad (he is second from the right on the back row). As the crew chief, it was his responsibility to make sure that the plane could fly, and to repair it when it couldn’t. David told my father stories of mission after mission from those years as their squadron moved across India toward Burma. On the 47th mission:

The pilot brought it home all shot up. It had a big ack-ack shell go off right under the left wing. By the time I got it back up in the air again, I’d changed one engine, two gas tanks, an oil tank, and the left wing, all on that side. We did all that work out in an open-air environment. The only cable that was not cut was the right aileron cable. The others all had nicks in them. They didn’t have potentiometers to tell them how tight to adjust the replacement cables (since many were salvaged from other damaged planes) so I would just feel the tension on the other ones and try to get the same feel. It took about three months to rebuild that plane. The wing that I got to replace it with was a later model than my airplane and it tended to fly just a little yaw. They could trim it out and it would be okay. . . . I tweaked it just a fuzz more and it went on to complete over 100 missions without a turnback due to mechanical issues, so it must have been okay.

This was an understatement. Over 100 missions without mechanical failure, in the middle of a war, in spite of enemy sabotage, on-the-fly repairs, touch and go landings, and heavy use. Dave’s plane was the first to reach this milestone. It was considered quite an accomplishment, and on the day of the 100th mission, January 20, 1944, a reporter came to their base in Assam, India, to record it, singling out David George for his excellent work.

After writing up all of David’s interviews, my father decided to compile everything into one big notebook. He made a copy of David’s photo with the blood chit flag and put it on the front cover. About two weeks ago, he drove up to David’s house and handed him the notebook, another piece of evidence of his life to go with the framed flag on the wall.

Last Saturday, November 19th, my dad called me. Uncle David had died that morning, quietly, peacefully. Dad was sad, of course, sorry not to have time to have gathered more of the pieces of David’s life, wondering if he had captured enough.

But this week, which included our country’s Thanksgiving celebration, I am mostly grateful that David’s orbit crossed over into my father’s and, ultimately, into my own. His story has substance and weight. I know with certainty that it will connect to other stories, other people.

With thanks to David Nobel George, 1921-2011.

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