No one is going to see this, but I really wish my dad got to see this.

He was in the Air Force, and was in one of the fighter planes headed to Cuba during the Bay of Pigs incident. He was 19 and both excited and crapping his pants.

When I was really little, he was trying very hard to be an astronaut. He got close. Pretty darn close. Lots of training/elimination levels. But he didn't make the final cut.

So, instead, he became a commercial pilot and invented jet engines in our barn. He used to chain me to the wall and my job was to lob half-frozen chickens into a sucking vortex of blades while he monitored what happened. I thought it was great fun. So did he.

(Birds can make engines fail to this day. He was trying to invent an engine that could chew up just about anything meaty and keep going. I still love the hot smell of jet fuel.)

No one is going to see this, but I really wish my dad got to see this.

He was in the Air Force, and was in one of the fighter planes headed to Cuba during the Bay of Pigs incident. He was 19 and both excited and crapping his pants.

When I was really little, he was trying very hard to be an astronaut. He got close. Pretty darn close. Lots of training/elimination levels. But he didn't make the final cut.

So, instead, he became a commercial pilot and invented jet engines in our barn. He used to chain me to the wall and my job was to lob half-'frozen chickens into a sucking vortex of blades while he monitored what happened. I thought it was great fun. So did he.

(Birds can make engines fail to this day. He was trying to invent an engine that could chew up just about anything meaty and keep going. I still love the hot smell of jet fuel.)