The Canonical Penguin: Planes

Growing up, our family was seasoned travelers in the sense that my parents felt it was important to see the extent of the world around us. Our parents were of the first real car generation in our country and so there were car trips everywhere, all the time. We visited relative all over the city, travelled to Washington DC, Wilkes-Barre PA, Lancaster Amish country, as well as lots of places in upstate New York. One type of trip we took really stands out in my mind. That was a trip to the airport to see the planes take off and land.

When you are young, something as simple as this seems ginormous. Packing all of us into the back seat of the old station wagon was hard I’m sure, but the excitement was palatable. Remember I told you about the giant spiders. Well that was a trip that started off with us going to watch the small single engine planes land at the tiny airport. We also went there to see the Goodyear Blimp. But there was nothing like a trip to La Guardia or Kennedy airports. Each was a different type of trip but both were enjoyable. We usually went to Kennedy when my family was visiting relatives in Rockaway, Queens. We would drop off my mother and grandmother and head out to the airport. Just off the highway, we would park with several other cars and watch the giant airliners land. They passed so low over us that you could almost touch the belly of the plane (or so we thought). The roar was tremendous and we would see them land a minute a part for an hour or two. In those days, LaGuardia was a much smaller airport and we would sit near a boat marina on College Point Sound and watch them land for a while and then ride inside the terminal to get closer to the action, overlooking where the planes lined up to take off. Again with the roar you would expect from these giant jets.

One would expect that a family so excited about watching planes would be beside themselves if going ON a plane flight. We had taken a plane tour of NYC, when airlines did that sort of thing, but had never traveled by plane TO a destination. The summer after my mother passed away, my father decided to take us on a trip to see his sister in California. Lucky for us, she was near Disneyland and the rest of the tourist getaways in Los Angeles. So there we were, with striped shirts and plaid shorts, sandals and socks, cameras hanging around our necks for the experience. As my sister says, we looked like a bunch of Asian tourists. My dad, who was into photography, took hundreds of pictures. And that was just out the windows of the plane at the clouds. Afterwards there was to be a slide show, with trays and trays of clouds over the country. We visited Disneyland, and Knott’s Berry farm, and went to an Angels baseball game and went bowling. You get the idea. What I remember most was playing the old fashion (for us then, it was a modern…) pinball game my uncle had in his garage. My aunt had desert turtles in her yard and orange trees and we picked fresh oranges for juice and watched hummingbirds all afternoon when we were there. All in all a great experience.

And we have the cloud pictures to prove it.

(These are stories about things that actually happened with plenty of witnesses. It has passed from the apocryphal to canonical in nature. Wiki says of canon – “material that is considered to be "genuine", "something that actually happened", or can be directly referenced as material produced by the original author or creator.”)