magic carpet ride

A 75 year old woman rests on her walker, irritated that she still needs it these many months after her " routine" hip replacement operation. She is impatient with the limitations of her aging body, still enormously energetic of spirit and mind, but hobbled by eroded joints, and muscles too stiff with inactivity to carry her far. In her mind, she strides forward as a lithe athletic younger woman, but her present reality pulls her back with a short, cruel leash. She takes in the view of Lake Erie before her, stretching away far and wide to her right, with Buffalo looming as a distant smudge to her left. There in that smudge is her job and career as a college professor, and there also is her childhood, amid the sulfur flare of cracking towers and the smell of the steel mills. But here is her solace, her retirement, her reward for the life spent toiling on the other side. The South Buffalo girl's dream of a genteel cottage life on the Canadian shore has been brought to reality by persistent force of will. But the isolation and the physical limitations were not in the vision. Her family, six children making lives and families of their own, is scattered down the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, devoted, busy, and far enough removed to make visits cumbersome and infrequent. In the vision, they all live in the same town, and visit constantly.
The drone of a small aircraft overhead breaks into her thoughts, and she scans the sky urgently, craning to look through the maples and pines around her. The drone is maddeningly hard to locate, like the whine of a mosquito slapped at and missed. But at last she catches sight of a plane flying along the shoreline east to west, a distinctive plane, unlike most of the planes she ever glanced at droning above. The twin tail booms and high wings are unmistakable, and the wing-wagging as the plane flies overhead confirms her joyful recognition. She knows nothing of planes or flying, but she knows that particular plane, knows it bears her son and his family, bears them swiftly to the small airfield nearby. They are coming for a weekend visit, as in the vision, but coming from 700 miles away, with only the weekend to spend, and a magic carpet to carry them to her. She takes up the walker and labors to the car, already late for her meeting with her travelers. She doesn't notice her hip at all when the same plane lifts her for a sightseeing tour of her past and present, from a perspective she remembers from childhood dreams, but has never seen. She marvels that the boy she taught to walk and talk could learn a skill so alien to her, could learn to drive this thing. She knows he has learned many things she never could have taught him, but surely it was from her that he learned how to dream, and that the whole secret of life was to find new things to learn. So she taught him this after all.
I am that son and pilot, and that plane is our magic carpet.