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the next chance to measure himself against his own demise.
I looked at him. He looked like an eagle, circling above the earth,
searching for his next meal.
The plane banked, and my vision was filled with perfect blueness.
I screamed. Grandfather was laughing, great hearty laughs that
shook his entire being. He whooped, and soared upwards, higher
and higher, and then dove abruptly downwards. Something inside
of me thawed, and I screamed again, not with fear, but exhilaration.
Again we soared up, towards the sun. My stomach tied itself into
knots. Would we crash? Would the steel wings keeping us afloat
fail? Would the next moment be our last? The countless dials filling
up the dashboard spun out of control. Grandfather nudged the
joysticks. We were falling.
In the split second we were hanging upside down, suspended in
the middle of the sky by a giant metal bird. I looked down upon the
world, all of it, all at once. I could see where Lake Erie emptied its
guts into Lake Ontario, and close by, the faint lights and metallic
spires of Toronto. And if I looked west I’d see where the family tree
had taken root, fed by the waters of the Saint Laurence, its broad
canopy sheltering the growth of future generations. And further,
out of sight but not out of reach, the airborne battlefield of Vietnam.
Reflected in my grandfather’s eyes was the impenetrable canopy of
the jungles beneath a black sky filled with faintly flickering lights of
mechanical dragonflies. To the soldiers below it must have looked
like the very stars were falling. And fall they did, plucked from the
sky, the burnt out shells of fallen angels.
Here’s a man who was never meant to die old and wingless. He
wasn’t made to sit patiently, watching his body decay before him.
He should have died in the heat of battle, gone out with bang, with
his heart in his throat and his blood flooding through his veins, eyes
focused on an imperceptible point far beneath him.
I looked at my Grandfather, really looked at the whole of him
and then looked at my hands. They were clenched tightly around
the edge of my seat. I let go.
Something within me unthawed, like it was finally the end of a
long winter, and burst free. The white, hot center of my own
mortality burnt through my veins and I could finally breathe long
enough for the world at the periphery of my vision to come back
into focus, perfectly sharp and deathly beautiful.
‘
On The Floor
Of The World
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