Flying the Three Speed

Flying the Three Speed

When Paul and I were young, we spent many hours in our room exercising our imaginations. It wasn’t that our room was anything special, it was more that we were often grounded to it and, as all kids do, adapted. One day we were playing in front of the window fan and decided to turn it around, and thereby turn it into an airplane.

Logically we determined that the three speeds should be applied to represent the airplane in a climb, flying level, or in a dive. Pretty soon we were terrorizing the skies over Europe and the Pacific, alternately, as well as simultaneously (don’t criticize two kids, if historical accuracy and geographical possibility counted Hollywood would immediately vaporize into a cloud of dust). We couldn’t be satisfied for long just turning the switch on the fan every ten seconds; soon we were tipping the fan to represent the motions of the plane. We were making a full diving left turn, preparing for a machine gun burst into the wide open underbelly of a Nip Zero when it happened. We were hit. Smoke started pouring from the motor as sparks jumped and flames burst out of it! Not the pretend airplane motor, the fan was on fire! Paul jerked the plug out of the wall (he was normally a pretty quick thinker when he bothered to think) and we might have attempted to perform some damage control, but when he jerked the plug end of the cord, Paul also pulled hard enough to jerk the other end as well; we were going down, and there was nothing we could do. The fan fell off the windowsill and hit the floor with a resounding crash.

We wanted to bail out but it was too late, Mom was already halfway up the stairs, asking us what was going on up there. It was in the few seconds between her question and her opening the bedroom door that I noticed the cloud of black electric smoke hanging all along the ceiling, and the smell of ozone and burnt plastic in the air. Paul was frozen in place with a permanent expression of "oooh" locked on his face. When she entered the room, I expected her to have a look of shock and horror, followed by anger and frustration. But Mom was a battle tried Vet. She did have a look of quiet resignation; she wanted to yell, but caught herself, and then having played the game for years, pulled her trump card. “When your Father gets home He’s going to kill you.” That was all, she left the room.

Paul and I sat in the midst of a cold reality. We were confident that Dad was physically completely capable of killing us, and he often left enough doubt about the extent of any emotional bond to keep us guessing. So every time we found ourselves in this position, and this was a position with which we were totally familiar, we were compelled to question if this was indeed the straw that broke the camel’s back. Had we finally pushed him beyond the point of no return? To add to the complexity of our predicament, we had to consider the Mom factor too. Might she add her personal slant to Dad’s own judgment? Maybe he would be on the verge of giving us just one more chance when Mom would pipe up. “I don’t know Chuck, this might be the time, you know, they could have burned the house down. We keep trying, but they’re not getting any better.

We had by then exhausted our capacity for worry and had once again adapted our circumstance to a more kid friendly activity. We knew we were in too deep to actually have fun, so we spent the rest of the day in quiet captivity in a Japanese P. O.W. camp, waiting for the Commandant to arrive with our sentence.

While we were flying that day, we shot down scores of enemy aircraft. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many Krauts and Japs we got, but I can tell you this, when dad got home, and came up to the room, we both got our tails flamed in dramatic fashion. He had left us alive, and relatively safe, but with injuries just severe enough to end our flying careers.