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| Airplane! | |||
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When I was a kid it didn’t take much to excite me or my brothers. A car or truck traveling down the road in front of our house didn’t go unnoticed. We could see dust rising in the air before we could hear them coming.
Then in the late 50s Mississippi’s highway department decided to pave that gravel road in front of our house. In doing so they changed the elevation of the original road, straightened out the bends and curves and built new bridges.
My mother loved it. Less dust and dirt filtered into our home. After the new road was constructed we ended up living on a high hill that overlooked vehicles traveling by. The new highway was about fifty feet lower. Not only that, they changed its name from Old Robinson Road to Highway 25.
Living so high up, we couldn’t hear the cars and pickups coming down the road anymore. Nor could we watch them approaching as dust rose into the air. Those days were forever gone. But there were two things that we could hear. With the advent of the paved road came semi trucks traveling across the state. We could lie in bed at night and hear them coming from a long way off. Their exhaust pipes pointed upwards, and by the time they reached our hill they didn’t go unnoticed. It took a while to get used to that particular sound of progress. With no air conditioning the windows of our southern home were always raised except during a heavy rainstorm. Only during winter months was the noise muffled.
As time progressed we noticed another sound. More and more airplanes were going over our house. At first, my brothers and I would run outside and peer up between the large oaks on the hill to get a better look at what up there in the sky. We’d jump up and down waving at the plane passing by, like Robinson Crusoe stranded on a deserted island. Occasionally, one would tip its wings or circle back by to acknowledge our efforts. That would the highlight of our day and we’d talk about it in whispers while lying in bed late at night. We wondered what it would be like to fly in a plane.
It’s odd how time has reinvented itself. Here I am, an old man living near a railroad line and an airport. Nowadays I sit on my patio and listen to the freight trains blowing their horns as they pass by. Another thing I do is watch the planes coming and going from Barkley Field a mile away. Once I saw Air Force One taking to the sky after President Bush had made a campaign stop here.
As I reflect back sixty years to that kid I once was living beside a cotton field, I find it difficult to believe so much has changed in such a short amount of time. That kid has traveled to forty-nine states and three countries. The only state I haven’t visited yet is Michigan. Hopefully I’ll see it one day.
But while this COVID-19 thing is going around I’ll remain here on this ridge in timeout; sitting here on my patio watching whatever happens to pass by. Be it a train, a garbage truck, the mailman or a plane.
These days will pass by more quickly than we can imagine at the moment. Years from now our grandchildren will be sitting around reminiscing about the pandemic of 2020 and how they lived through the great toilet paper shortage. They’ll remember the time their parents couldn’t go to work and they couldn’t go to school. They had to watch reruns of their favorite television shows forever because all taping of new ones couldn’t be done. Hard times. But they will smile at how they made it through and came out a little stronger than they were before.
And perhaps one of them will even write down their memories like the kid that grew up beside a cotton field did.
Revelation 21:1-5
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