Flights of Fancy (Things That Is)

No one who knows me well would ever accuse me of being either nimble or physically courageous.  I did not sky dive.  I did not zipline.  Unlike some friends and classmates, I did not leap from a promontory into the still waters of the Quincy granite quarry to impress the girls.

I have been mostly inert, and downright bookish.  But from time to time, like a 17-year cicada, I have arisen from my torpor to take flights of fancy facilitated mostly by wonderfully wrought machines that I have known and loved.  And thus I have been able to live in the moment, for a moment, viz. --

• Track Day at the Mid-Ohio race course in my blue Mini Cooper S.
• Upside down in a Soviet-era Yak military trainer.
• Flying "chandelles" in a Waco open-cockpit biplane from Martha's Vineyard, with a beautiful girl behind me at the controls.
• Galloping under the Newport Bridge in Weatherly in 15 kts of wind, she who defended the America's Cup in the same waters in 1962.
• A short sprint down from Plymouth Harbor to the mouth of the Cape Cod Canal in the stately and venerable gentleman's fishing schooner known as Roseway.
• Reaching down from Portsmouth to Ipswich (are there two more resonant nautical names than those?) in my own modest sloop with a small pod of dolphins for company.
• Breaking 100 mph in Skowhegan, ME in my little 1.5 litre Honda CRX coupe, because why not?

Perhaps, when my time comes, a chevron of P-51 Mustangs will fly low over my Sandy Point grave, and one will pull up and out of the chevron to execute a final salute -- the "Missing Mensch Formation!"