“No,” I replied. “The new diet gave me a tailwind. If I had a propeller on my butt I could have flown across the Channel.”

She laughed. It made a sound like a rattlesnake, which I thought was downright cute.

“Perhaps the bumblebee dust doesn’t agree with you. Let me see what else we can try,” she said, reaching high on her bookshelf. Her voice was like a grinding stone, adding delightful music to accompany her coed glory.

“Here we are,” she said, scratching her beard. “Eye of newt seasons just as well.”

His tailwind must have spooked the rattlesnake I’d been observing, as I heart his unmistakable rattleshake as he slithered away.

Many seasons from now, when my friends recall the clubbing, music, and drinking of their coed glory days, I will instead point to the bookshelf of nature journals I kept throughout my college days.

Dim as she was, she recognized me as soon as I walked through the door.

“It didn’t have to be like this,” I told her. “It isn’t as if you had to have a rattlesnake tattoo coiling out of your ass. How hard would it have been for you to take a liking to Bumblebee tea? If you had done anything, anything at all, I wouldn’t be here.”
“What will you do when the seasons change?” asked the Dietician.
Her quirky delivery reminded me of a coed I once dated at the University of Victoria. She was music major—a harpist—destined for glory. That is, until she got caught in the tailwind of a low-flying airship, sucked up into the firmament, and then diced to beautiful little bits in a dirigible propeller.
The recollection made me physically ill. I turned on the Dietician with a retching belly and undid her with the chrome quill.

Did I mention how much I liked Chu? She would always make it a point to come sit by me, with our legs touching. She always tried to get me to come to lunch or dinner with her. When we were talking as a group, she would manage to work her way around to be standing by me. She started listening to the same music I did. Old jazz. You’ve got to love it. A couple of times she came up behind me while I was working and put her arms around my neck. I really liked the attention, but we had a job to do and she wasn’t part of it. Too bad though…

May has a very unique bookshelf. It’s very unique, made of an unusual wood, with carvings of bee hives and bumblebees on it. Although she is studying to become a dietician, she has a wonderful selection of history, biography, biochemistry, astronomy, nanotechnology, and microbiology books as well. I’ve borrowed a couple of them from her from time to time. She has one in particular that I’ve been trying to get from her, Depths of Glory. I really like it. It’s a biographical novel about the life of Camille Pissarro. Great read.

Anyway, Jowls really wanted to impress her. I mean, like REALLY wanted to impress her. SO he asked me if he could use my plane, the Four Seasons, to fly May and her mom to Albuquerque to meet Chu Zi. How was I going to refuse that one? I hadn’t seen her in about three years, and I still remembered the smell of her and the feel of her arms wrapped around me. I tell you… No, you can guess…

I’ve got connections at Lockheed, so I keep the Four Seasons in one of the unused hangers at The Lighthouse. We took off in a light drizzle, circled around the Center, wagged our wings over the Planter’s plant as usual, and headed west. Normally we have a bit of a headwind headed west, but today we had an unusual tailwind. The forecast had been fairly clear, certainly well within the range of normal spring weather. We planned to be in New Mexico for 10 days, so we should be back in plenty of time for the Festival of Flight the end of May.

We didn’t make it. I still don’t know what we hit, but the right propeller came apart in mid-air north of Nashville. I woke up in June.