Joyriding: The Airplane Story

When I was a teen my dad wasn’t terribly strict, but there were certain boys from whom he forbid me to accept rides. I grew up in a small town, and my dad knew who had a reputation for reckless driving. He never said anything about airplanes, however.

One Fourth of July weekend, I was scheduled to work at the local pizza shop. I stayed behind while the rest of my family traveled to my grandparents’ farm. I was a fairly responsible kid; I held a job, participated in Young Life, and had a track record of making reasonably good choices.

After my shift I drove to the local McDonald’s to grab something to eat. Although I could have eaten as much free pizza as I wanted while at work, somehow it made sense to my teen brain to spend my hard-earned dollars on greasy fast-food burgers. Besides, McDonald’s was the center of my town’s teen universe, and I knew I might run into my sometimes-on-sometimes-off-again high school boyfriend there.

I was right. Just as I pulled into the parking lot he pulled in next to me. In the passenger seat beside him sat a friend, a young man whose father owned one of the two funeral homes in town.

“Want to go to Cleveland?” asked the sometimes boyfriend.

“Sure,” I said. “Do you want to drive, or do you want me to?”

“We rented a plane,” he said.

I remembered hearing the voice of Mrs. McGinnis, the school’s secretary, crackling through the static on the intercom, and disrupting classes for an important announcement. She congratulated two of the school’s students for achieving the distinction of becoming the youngest licensed private pilots in the state. So, of course, this girl with the reputation for making good choices said, “Okay!” And off we drove to the local airport.

In my defense I had an uncle who was a private pilot, and he had taken me up in the air with him several times. And these two were licensed pilots, I reasoned. “How dangerous could this be?” my incompletely formed teenage brain must have concluded.

Because it was the Fourth of July, we were able to witness fireworks displays below us. It was a perfect summer night, and the lights below shone with stunning brilliance. All at once it occurred to me that my parents were somewhere down there amidst the lights below, and they had no idea where I was. They slept soundly, not knowing their responsible daughter flew overhead, having entrusted her safety to the hands of two teenage boys.

If I were the parent of my teenage self, I would have grounded me for all of eternity. World without end.

We arrived safely at the Cleveland airport and found a small sandwich shop which was about to close. Because I hadn’t eaten at McDonald’s, I was hungry. All I could afford was an order of fries which probably cost four times as much as those I would have eaten had I stayed safely on the ground back in my hometown.

After we ate, we returned to the plane for the return trip home. The flight was uneventful, and we arrived safely. None but the three of us knew about our late night Cleveland escapade.

Until.

Several years later, when I was in college, I took a human development class about death and dying. I was given the assignment of interviewing a funeral home owner and writing a paper about the process of planning a funeral. I scheduled an appointment with the father of my Cleveland adventure co-pilot, and drove home one weekend for the interview. My mom thought the project sounded interesting and asked if she could sit in with me.

“Sure,” I said.

When we arrived for our appointment, the funeral director shook my hand and asked, “Aren’t you the girl who flew to Cleveland with my son that night?”

My mother looked at me. I looked at her.

“I never mentioned that? Funny story. . .”

Thankfully the statute of limitations on parental anger must have expired by then. There seemed little value in grounding me since I had moved on to college. But years later, Mom was able to exact a small measure of revenge.

When my kids were teens, I hammered them about the importance of making good choices. I knew from experience that even responsible kids sometimes did really stupid things. One year when my daughter was in college she decided to spend fall break with her grandmother. While she was visiting, my mother asked her,

“Did your mom ever tell you about that time. . ?”

Telling my tale of childhood stupidity and linking with emily: