The day I died

by RickiT

I convinced Sally to become a skydiver.

She has made about 300 jumps. I have made 5000.

Today I asked her to make a skydive with me.

Normally, skydivers practice on the ground what they plan to do in free fall. It is called dirt diving.

I decide to plan a follow-the-leader skydive.

The plan is that I will perform a maneuver in free fall and she will mimic it.

Then it will be her turn and I will copy her.

No dirt dive is necessary. It is a spontaneous skydive.

I manifest us on the next airplane.

We meet in the loading area all geared up.

I give Sally a gear check.

“Three ring releases correct. Buckles routed and secure. Cutaway handle and reserve handle good. Pilot chute stowed and handle visible. Both pins seated.”

“Did you turn on your automatic opener?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You’re good to go Sally.”

The flight to altitude is always exciting.

We board a turbine twin Otter airplane.

Seat belts secure. Door closed for takeoff. There is a roar of the engines and a dash down the runway. Wheels up and we are flying…

The ground rushes away as we climb toward the clouds.

At 12,500 feet above the ground we are on jump run.

The red light comes on and someone opens the airplane door.

Cool air rushes in.

The skydivers nearest the door lean out, looking down to spot our location.

They assure that no other aircraft are below us.

The light turns green.

EXIT. EXIT. EXIT.

The first group runs out of the plane.

Sally and I are next.

I look out the door and down.

The ground is a picture of what the ground should be.

It is a pattern of brown and green and there is a slight curve to the Earth.

I climb out of the door holding on to a hang rail, my body clinging to the outside of the plane.

I look into Sally’s eyes and take a deep breath.

“READY. SET. GO.”

We exit the plane.

I am in freefall.

Sally flies up to me and hovers face to face.

I grasp both her wrists.

We smile at each other.

I let go.

We are hovering in midair. The wind blows up and past us at 120 miles an hour, but we are weightless.

I begin the follow-the-leader kicking my knees up into a back loop.

When I come out of the back loop Sally is nowhere to be seen.

As I begin a slow turn, scanning the sky there is a painful impact on my back.

Sally had begun her back loop shortly after mine and was unable to stop it. She came down knees first between my shoulders.

We both spin wildly away from each other.

 

I find myself alone in free fall, a little dazed.

“This is not right,” I say to myself.

I try to bend a leg to turn my body and scan the sky for Sally. 

My legs will not move.

I reach for my main parachute rip cord.

My arm will not move.

I am paralyzed from my shoulders down.

I turn my head to my wrist altimeter.

“7000 feet.”

Every attempt to move my arms or legs fails.

I am not going to be able to open my main parachute or my reserve parachute.

“4000 feet.”

Time to deploy.

“I am really glad I have an Cypres automatic activation device,” i think.

My next thought is, “Did I turn it on this morning?”

I cannot remember if I had.

An unexpected calm comes over me.

“Either I turned on my Cypres, or I am already dead.”

Because I cannot move my arms or legs I cannot keep my body trim in free fall.

My body enters an angular flat spin.

I see ground, sky, ground, sky, ground sky.

Then there is a flash of white past my face.

My reserve parachute has opened.

Because of my spin, the steering lines are in line twists from the steering toggles to the parachute.

I think, “I should kick these twists out,” but my legs still do not move.

“I need to pull down the steering toggles to flair into a safe landing,” but my arms are still paralyzed.

My forward motion is about 20 miles per hour. This landing is not going to be pretty.

A telephone line sweeps past and my parachute snags on the line.

This stops my forward motion and dangles me from the line.

2 seconds. 3 seconds. 

The parachute slips off the telephone line dropping me about 5 feet.

I land flat on my back on my still packed main parachute.

I land in between a spiked fence and the asphalt street in a dirt meridian.

My white reserve parachute floats down over my face like a cloud covering the sky.

“Heaven,” I think, with a smile.

Then I hear voices. Spectators from the apartments where I landed are asking how I am.

I reach up and push the parachute off my face. I can move my arms!

I wiggle my toes.

I stand up.

The landing must have readjusted my spine.

Just then a pickup truck comes screaming down the road and the driver squeals to a stop.

He says, “I never saw someone open that low in my life.”

I say, “Neither have I.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I could use a ride back to the Drop Zone.”

So I climb into the truck, the driver calls ahead and we go to Perris skydiving center.

When I arrive at the parking lot I see Sally standing across the lot.

Like a scene in a romance movie, we run toward each other and into each other’s arms.

“I thought I killed you,” Sally sobs.

“I thought I was dead,” said I.

A Fall from Gracelessness David Molina

 

My attraction-repulsion to dancing goes back to before I could stumble.

I consider myself representative of a wide swath of U.S. adult males

who grew up without even a faint odor of dancing talent.  Other odors, yes,

some acutely, egregiously evident at the 8^th grade end of year dance at St.

Bruno’s.  

The year was 1967.  I was 13 going on 10, and woefully short for

even a 10 year old, in my not too objective view of things.  Girls were generally

a head taller,  and most were starting to sprout these strange and somewhat mesmerizing

protuberances which due to the height difference were exactly at eye level.  All year long.

This was my first experience of being titillated.

So when the Sisters of Mercy (Edgar Alan Poe couldn’t have imagined

a more ironic name) announced there would be an end of the year dance for the 

boys there was a sickly, pukey feeling:  a coctail of equal parts fear and dread, but garnished with a certain nervous je ne sais pas qua - a heady brew of curiosity, anticipation, and a crazy feeling that perhaps by some strange millennial miracle this could actually work.  It is this same strange fascination, this epic attraction-repulsion that plays out every time I dance years after. More about that later. Much later.

The song that was the rage at that moment was the Rolling Stones “Let’s Spend the Night Together”.  Pretty tame by today’s standards, but in the 60’s this was incredibly

IN YOUR PARENTS FACE.  Ed Sullivan  - as staid and conservative a Catholic as any Sister of Mercy- allowed the Stones on his Ed Sullivan Show only on condition that Mick Jagger clean up his act and rephrase the refrain.  I remember Mr. Jagger rolling his eyes

as he moaned “Let’s Spend Some Time Together”.  But everybody under 20 knew what

Mick really wanted to do.

And somehow the Sisters of Mercy found out what Mick really wanted to do

and banned the song from the school dance.  Damn.  But you’ve got to respect the Sisters of Mercy.  I still can’t figure our how in the heck they get hold of a Life magazine to find out about the Rolling Stone lyrics controversy.

 

I vividly remember the parish hall the June evening the week before graduation.

The boys were lined up against one wall, the girls against the opposite.  The atmosphere

was tense.  It was as if two armies were poised, ready for battle, Greeks versus Persians.

Sister Mary Catherine Marie patrolled the no man’s land between the two, Sister Mary Carmel secured the perimeter. Sister Mary Louise stood watch at the gate to ward off

the  barbarian hordes of public schoolers (P-S’ers in the parlance of the day, pronounced ‘Pissers”.)

To this day I can’t explain how at a moment like this, when everything was poised

for great deeds and heroic action, the only thing I could think of was how dry my mouth was and how wet my underarms were.  Betrayed by 13 year old chemistry, what should have been wet was dry and what should have been dry was wet.  Big time.  

And then the music started.  Not Mick Jagger urging us to Spend the Night

Together, or complaining that he couldn’t Get No Satisfaction, but less threatening

and more Sisters of Mercy appropriate songs by Herman’s Hermits, Petula Clark, and

the Monkees.   There’ll be no orgiastic bodies thrashing about tonight don’t you know.

Well, the sad truth is even if the volume was amped to the max and the Stones

unexpurgated version was blasting, there was no way we were venturing out onto the

barren empty “no-mans-land”  between the battle lines.  Why?  Is it not obvious?

Put yourself in this predicament:  all your buds are watching you.  Remember

these guys are fully capable of teasing you for the rest of your life for any misstep.

“Hey Molina - you look like a spazz and dance like one too” ringing in my ears per omnia

saecula saeculorum. All the girls are watching you.  Any embarrassing move will ruin your chances with everyone of them for all time. Your experience in dancing is the total gathered by watching the Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.  You’ve never actually danced a step, you’ve merely watched.  Except for the one time your Mom came into the den and danced the twist (awkward) but at least no one else was watching. You knew deep down you looked dumb, REALLY dumb, but also that your mother loved you and it was OK.

The bottom line:  you don’t know how to dance, and any attempt you make will 

look awkward in the best case, but most likely extremely stupid.  So given the choice

of stepping out and humiliating yourself for all to see, you play it safe.  

As you grow older, there are ways to cope with these childish fears - louder music,

darker spaces, flashing lights, alcohol, and mind-altering drugs come to mind.   I’m  not advocating these things, but to be honest, if I had flashing lights, alcohol and mind-altering drugs in massive doses at the parish hall that night I am sure I would have danced and had a great time.  That’s about what would have taken to get me out there, or any of my friends who, like me, were hanging on to the wall like passengers on the Titanic, making small talk and trying to look cool.

I felt sorry for the girls.  A good number of them could have and would have liked to dance, but all these nubile, freshly minted nymphs were matched with a tribe of midgets with bad breath and rank underarms. They deserved better. 

   

* * *

High school dances were optional (I managed to be busy doing more important things almost every time) and at least were dark, loud, and largely anonymous. And

dancing - and calling it that was a stretch - meant doing your own thing.  You could flail and lurch and bend and quiver any which way and nobody really cared.  Your date would not even be looking at you, she’d have a far away spacey look like she was in a trance.

At least mine all looked like that - did any of you other guys have that same problem?

 Never would you be close enough to actually touch your partner.  It probably would have been really uncool, but here I am merely speculating because it never crossed my mind. It was so dark you couldn’t see who you were dancing with.  It was so loud you had to scream monosyllables at the top of your lungs to communicate.   

So in reality, it could barely be called dancing with someone - it was more like two separate people dancing in their own separate bubbles trying hard not to look at each other.  Dancing zombies.  I am not saying that all persons at all times in history are dancing zombies.  I know I was a dancing zombie the few times I ventured out, a

dancing zombie with a dry mouth and wet underarms.  

I never did the prom thing.  Quite sadly, I never met a girl in my all boy high school that was worth springing for a tux, a corsage, dinner.  You didn’t need to be a

business major to realize the return on investment would be not quite that of establishing an ice cream mine on the Moon.  It seemed like quite the recipe for disaster - spending too much for so little on someone to you knew next to nothing about.  

Well, there was one semi-formal Homecoming dance that I sprang for.  At the 

first school dance of my sophomore year I happened upon this surprisingly beautiful dark-haired girl named Lucretia (the only one I had known before or since.  I have since learned to pay closer attention to names and their karmic implications.  Lucretia as in wealth, lucre, success.  Little did I realize I was doomed from the start).     We danced - she swayed gracefully like an aspen in the autumn breeze, whilst I flailed and lurched and bent and quivered.  It was dark, but not so dark that I could see she was ACTUALLY LOOKING AT ME.  I tactfully adopted a faraway spacey look, but out of the corner of my eye I came to realize that not only was she looking at me, she was actually smiling at me.  

This was actually way beyond anything I had ever experienced before or even imagined.  Is this really happening?  It almost made me forget how self-consciously 

foolish I felt thrashing and flopping like a flounder on the dancefloor. When she most unexpectedly kissed me the hook was set.

Long tragic story short, I invited her to the Homecoming dance; she accepted;

I begged my parents to let me try out my brand new drivers license on her; wisely they

ruled that I could drive the family car (9 seater station wagon) and meet her at the dance.

 I arrived at Homecoming breathless to find she was not there.  Called her up, said she wasn’t planning on coming, either.  End of story, except that when prom time rolled around I made sure I had better things to do.

For the last 42 years I have found better things to do than dance.  A happy marriage, a demanding career,  a houseful of four growing children  kept me very busy. My leisure activities are physically demanding -  I have been playing and coaching soccer 

all my life and hope to continue into my 80’s.  I have lately become a dedicated cyclist knowing that for my knees to keep playing soccer the cross training is important.

I’ve ridden across the Cascades from Klamath Falls to Eugene and hope to ride the

Oregon and California coasts in the next couple years.

With a long list of better things to do, and my extraordinarily poor early experiences with dance it was highly improbable and very unlikely that I would ever

willingly approach a dance floor.  The social occasions requiring dancing were mercifully few and far between, mostly weddings.  Dancing with a bride - my wife Maria, and later

my daughter Ana - was actually quite easy:  1.) everyone was looking at the bride; 2.) there was no way anyone could possibly see what my feet were doing underneath the spray of lace and silk of a wedding dress; 3.) most importantly of all, I was unselfconsciously and serenely happy.  That last one actually worked better than flashing lights, loud music, and drugs.

       Quite unexpectedly - miraculously is a ridiculous understatement- my pathetic stumbling on the rocky road of a dance-disabled life led to a precipitous fall from gracelessness. 

    It only took six decades.

Southern Cross Memoir, by Paul Delgado

 

Southern Cross

When you see the Southern Cross for the first time, you understand now why you came this way

Stephen Stills

I have always loved that song.  

In so many ways, it has been a large part my life’s soundtrack.

When I first heard it playing on the radio in the early eighties, it evoked a spirit of adventure and images of distant lands across the sea.

I remember one night driving to San Francisco with my kids in our 1984 Volvo station wagon. My youngest son Cristian (Coco) was asleep in his car seat. 

As we drove up highway 101 it was late and I was lost in thought wondering where my life would eventually take me.

Little did I know that many years later, I would be overseas in SE Asia running operations for a major Aerospace corporation and travel the world.

As Managing Director, I had the opportunity to travel throughout Asia Pacific. My company was a world leader in the manufacture of hydraulic and geared actuation systems for Boeing and Airbus. In addition to the OEM manufacturing sites, I had responsibility for our aircraft repair stations servicing all the major airlines in the region.

It was a wonderful time. And it was particularly a happy time for my son Cristian who attended the local International School. My older kids were in college in California and would come out for the summer, but Cristian lived with us all year round. What an incredible time in our lives.

Business was booming and we were growing leaps and bounds trying to keep up with customer demand. I had responsibility for all the operations across the Asia Pacific region and I loved my job. 

“How in the world did I get here?” I would often ask myself. 

I had graduated from UCLA in 1976 and then went onto USC to hone my engineering skills. Later, I joined my dad’s company where we manufactured precision aerospace components. We were a small company but proudly had our hardware on almost every rocket engine launched by the United States. Working with him was great. He was my hero and will always be an inspiration. We sold the company in the 90s and I had to face the sobering reality of looking for a job in the cold hard world. 

“De Milagro” (by a miracle), I met a recruiter who was looking for a GM for a multi-national company’s operation in the Philippines. I had no experience in Asia but tossed my hat in the ring. 

I was always comfortable with different cultures and although it was a long shot, I hoped I could nail it. 

Interviewing with the “big guys” at corporate headquarters was daunting and the same question kept surfacing during the interview…

”What do you know about SE Asia?”

“Well not much to be honest!”…LOL!

I tried to explain how I could make a difference with my limited business experience in Mexico and my comfort with different cultures ….Yet…it was painfully obvious I wasn’t hitting the mark with the senior leadership team.

But then…right then and there…when I thought all was lost…the VP of Human Resources asked me…

”You’re from Southern California...Right?…Where did you go to High School?”….I answered “Servite”…He tossed his head back and laughed….”Oh my gosh…My roommate at Notre Dame went to Servite!!” He laughed again and asked if Fr. Motsko was still there!

He then looked across the table at the other execs and said…

”This guy is alright…Let’s give him a shot….And that was that!!”

Go Black & White!

Next thing I knew we were on a Cathay Pacific flight via Hong Kong to my first assignment in the Philippines.

Twenty five years later after having run operations in SE Asia and Latin America and Europe, I will never forget the trust they placed in me. 

My first assignment in the Philippines was relatively small with about 100 employees but we were growing fast. I learned alot back then and felt at times I was drinking out of a fire hose. The corporate world was very different from a family owned business and despite many rookie mistakes, my boss, Steve B, the President of the company never lost faith in me and was my guiding light. We are still close friends today.

It was undoubtedly one of the happiest times in my life.

My wife found us a beautiful home in the mountain hillsides overlooking the Visaya sea. A former coconut plantation house with veranda was everything we could have hoped for.

After five years, my division was sold, but I would go onto run operations in Latin America and Europe and finally once more back to the Philippines to take over all the Asia Pacific business. 

We were happiest living overseas. It provided us the chance to experience new cultures and make new and enduring friendships. We travelled extensively…Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Viet Nam as well as Australia and New Zealand.

The kids loved it there and it was a wonderful experience for them. The friendships they made while overseas are still strong. Even my grandkids were with us for a few months before my retirement. They still remember riding elephants in Thailand and sailing with their grandpa in the Andaman Sea.

Great memories.

I remember the first time I travelled to Viet Nam in 2002. 

The company was considering expanding its manufacturing operations outside of the Philippines and Viet Nam was a natural candidate.

As I touched down in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City now) I thought back to 1971 when I first graduated from Servite and remembered those dicey days during the war and the draft lottery…whew…but for the luck of the draw, I could have been slogging it out in a rice paddy in 90F with a fifty pound rucksack! 

Sadly, seeing the battlegrounds in Hue, DaNang, etc. where so many young Americans lost their lives was very moving. Viet Nam was a different place in 2002 and the scars of the war were not evident by the warm welcome of the resilient Vietnamese. Even in the North, the welcome mat for business was rolled out. Yet I couldn’t help but feel a deep sadness for all those who had lost their young lives in a pointless war. 

As we walked through the ancient city of Hue, the site of a major battle between the Marines and the NVA, I thought to myself, if not for the draw of a lucky draft lottery number, I could have been one of the fallen. 

Later that year, I opened offices in Bangkok and Singapore and Jakarta. Every day I learned more about the varied cultures and how to manage effectively.

SE Asia was great. Such happy memories…It was truly living the dream.

On my off hours and days (not too many) I especially loved sailing with my friend Dirk Van Straalen and my son Cristian. 

I remember one time sailing in the South China Sea off the coast of Indonesia. It was a starlit night with a following sea.

My son Cristian had the helm. Watching him handle the sailboat made me proud. He was seventeen and was becoming a competent sailor under the watchful eye of my friend Dirk, an experienced blue water skipper.

I will never forget when Cristian shouted out,  

“Dad….Look!….The Southern Cross just off the horizon!…

What a memory.

I wanted that moment to last forever. 

But now he is gone. 

Tragically, I lost him two years ago when he was thirty five.

I will never be able to see him again in this life, but hope he is at peace and soaring amongst the stars we loved so much while at sea.

Whenever I hear the Southern Cross it takes me back to those incredible days sailing with him.

And despite the incredible sadness I live with everyday,

I know he has his ship and all his flags are flying.

Someday we will sail again on the other side and never be apart. 

Last week I was in Kauai. My grandson Matias was at the helm. 

As we sailed off the majestic Napali coast we sang songs as we tossed flowers into the ocean for Coco.

What heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten

in the Southern Cross…

Memoir by Don Taco

 Memoir item.

 An odd and interesting and cool thing happened to me this week, for the first time ever.

 As it got dark, I was wandering the old time fiddle campout with a beer, not looking for a jam at that moment, just seeing what was going on. I wandered into a corner camp, where some 20-ish players, about the age I started playing, were banging out some rowdy jug-band-ish tunes, and I realized as I got closer that they had a washtub bass. So I moved in to where I could observe it. I'm always interested, as there aren't a lot of tub players. The young man wasn't that good or that bad, but he was enthusiastic, and trying to add to the music. And, he was plucking the string, not bashing at it, which is an important first step. And, he played by varying the tension, like me, not by fretting or choking up on the string, which is far more common.

 When the tune ended, he asked me if I wanted to check out his bass. He called me by name. He called me by name. He knew who I was and what I play and how I play. I think all his friends did, too. And I didn't recognize a single one of them.

 That's never happened to me. It was wicked cool.

 The next day, in daylight, he came up after a demonstration I was part of, and asked to inspect my tub's construction, and also asked for a bunch of advice about quite specific aspects of playing and building the tub. He was again, enthusiastic, and cheerful, and respectful.

 The future is in good hands.

 

Ditch Digger by rickiT

When i was a little boy my mother encouraged me to study hard in school.
“You don’t want to become a ditch digger when you grow up,” she said.

So i studied hard.

i excelled in high school. My grades were good enough to be accepted at a prestigious university. i started my university courses in the sciences and segued to English and the Arts. As VP of my residence hall i had access to the underground steam tunnels. Was this a preview of things to come?

Mine was a full and rounded education.

With a degree in hand i drove a bus, sold insurance and worked with my father-in-law at his cabinet shop. When i took over the cabinet shop from Fred i learned how to run a business.

After the cabinet shop i expanded my wood crafting skills at an architectural mill, becoming a stair builder. These skills gave me the resume to work at Disneyland on the Fantasy Land rebuild project. There i combined jig making and “Innovention” to create unique barley twists for the Dumbo Circus Calliope.

After Disneyland myself and some fellow cabinetmakers found jobs in the trade show industry. The skills we learned included modular cabinet building, jig making, electrical wiring, plumbing, advanced elliptical layouts, crate building, graphics, warehousing and fulfillment. We learned to bend tools to our will.

When i bought my first Macintosh i leveraged the project planning software into a front office job as the estimator. This job made me the liaison between Design, Sales, Graphics, Purchasing, Production, Union and Accounting. Ultimately my title was company Ombudsman.

My experience as the de facto IT guy for the trade show company network and its Apple computers prepared me to become an Apple consultant.
i am the iMentor to this day.

In my life at home in the country, now-a-days, i have become a ditch digger.
i dig holes for plants, trenches for shed foundations and ditches for irrigation and water control.

i am very good at it.

i understand the need for the right tool for the job. Living on a granite mountain actually prompted me to buy a jackhammer… for planting trees.

My experience and knowledge of construction, tools, design, planning, physics and math have well prepared me to dig a stable and functional ditch.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

—T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets