[Critique Group 1] Leonard's comments for group 1 Oct.

[Tuchyner5 at aol.com]

Deianna  


I love this piece. A lot of it is girl technology, but I  easily understand 
everything you are saying. Subtle humor is pervasive, but  occasionally a 
really punch line comes in which made me laugh out loud.  Good  job. 

No Outfit is Complete Without a Few Dog  Hairs 

Dogs shed.  This is a fact of life to be included when considering becoming 
 a dog guide handler.  By the time we left The Seeing Eye, Tammy’s   
When you say, :Seeing Eye,” I know it is the title of a  place because it 
is in caps. But I think it would be clearer if you added  something like ‘
facility.’ 
coat shone  with daily brushing.  This minimized the amount of fur she 
deposited on  carpets and my clothes, but didn’t eliminate it completely.  Labs 
have what  is called a double-coat.  The outer layer is made up of straight 
slightly  stiff longer hairs.  Under this is a soft fluffy fine coat for  
insulation.  Tammy had two shed-outs a year, one in fall and a major one in  
spring.  Taking her to a dog groomer for a good vigorous bath and brushing  
helped remove a lot of her undercoat.  But for a few weeks each spring and  
fall, daily brushing harvested enough fluff to knit a litter of puppies.    
I love this sentence. 
Before  training with Tammy, I had always loved red, pink, any vivid bright 
color.   In childhood, they were the colors I could recognize the longest 
as my vision  began to deteriorate.  When I was seven, I was disappointed 
that no one  noticed it when I wore a new red dress.  My mother laughed and 
marched me  into my room.  She opened my closet and pointed out that almost all 
of my  dresses were solid red, red plaid, red stripes, or red polka dotted. 
   
I realy relate to this. I see whatI think I should see,  so I am 
dumbfounded when I find out that my favorite black coat is really  green. 
Mom had taught me to make French knots to braille my  sweaters, headbands 
and socks to help me match my accessories when  dressing.  I tried not to buy 
two items of clothing that were identical in  fabric or style. I learned to 
sew in junior high and with a lot of help from my  mother I always managed 
to be attractively dressed.  Having grown up in  poverty, it was important 
to Mom that we not be embarrassed at school by our  clothes or appearance.  
It wasn’t always easy to provide shoes and  appropriate clothing for five 
children.  She had a great eye for color and  spent hours helping me redesign 
Goodwill Store finds.  Mom taught me to  take care with my appearance. 
Although I don’t care what other people look like,  I feel more confident when I 
know I am attractively  dressed. 
At five foot three inches tall and weighing one hundred and ten pounds, I 
was  petite.  The mini skirts I wore were longer on me than they were on 
taller  girls.  In high school I easily passed the skirt length tests our 
physical  education teacher imposed.  She made the class kneel on the floor and 
used  a ruler to check skirt lengths.  Any girl wearing a skirt more than six  
inches above the floor was automatically sent to detention after school.   
My stepfather joked that mini skirts were invented so girls could run fast 
and  that because they wore them, girls needed to run faster.  When I left 
for  college, I only owned one pair of jeans and one pair of tennis shoes that 
I had  used for gym class.  Curt said I made him feel like a bum whenever 
we went  out because I always matched from head to toe.  I borrowed a cambric 
work  shirt, put my hair in pigtails and donned my one pair of jeans and 
gym shoes to  meet him for a movie and he still thought I looked like a 
fashion plate because  I had tied my pigtails with blue ribbons to match my shirt. 
   
A lot of this is girl technology, but even though I don’t  know what a 
French knot is, I still get the  picture. 
Because my brothers and stepfather were tall and had long  legs, I had 
gotten into the habit of wearing heels ranging from two to three  inches high.  
I had dozens of pairs of wild shoes.  My favorite shoe  store used my size 
in its window displays.  After they were taken from the  windows, the store 
often put them on sale for just a couple of dollars.  So  I left for college 
with chartreuse suede ankle boots, red high-heeled alligator  boots, baby 
blue Cuban heels and a lot of other exotic footwear.    They weren’t very 
practical for trudging across a rural campus. Although I could  even run in 
heels, I found that they gave very poor footing on slick surfaces  like icy 
sidewalks and rain slick steps.  If I needed to do a leash  correction, I had to 
have a solid stance.      
So, with Tammy in my life it was time to rethink my wardrobe.  Heels and  
platform shoes were out.  Boots had to have a good nonskid sole and be  
chosen for protection from mud, snow and rainwater.  Running shoes were  good 
choices for walking miles and looked okay with jeans.  Skirts needed  to be 
ankle length because they were easier to keep ladylike, while bending to  
harness a dog, clean up after her and sit on floors with her.  They also  worked 
better for climbing up into high vehicles like buses or pickup  trucks.  
Black skirts and slacks didn’t show black dog hairs left behind by  a wagging 
tail or Labrador sides and shoulders  as my girl guided or just leaned 
against me.  I could still wear bright  colored blouses and shirts but black wool 
coats and jackets were good choices if  I didn’t want to be running up large 
dry cleaning bills.    
Many people who are born blind forget that others can see them.  In a  
sighted world, it is very important to take special care with your  appearance.  
People are much more likely to approach in a friendly or  helpful manner, 
someone who is clean and attractively dressed.  Whether you  are going for a 
job interview, looking for a sales clerk’s assistance or just  striking up a 
casual conversation at a meeting or event, it is important to make  a good 
impression.  Having Tammy in my life meant resorting to a lint brush  or 
roller as just one more step to preparing for going out into the sighted  
community.   
Tammy loved her grooming time.  I can’t say she appreciated my need to  
vacuum more often because of her presence in my life.  She hated the noise  of 
the machine.  Perhaps she thought that the vacuum cleaner might start  with 
the dog hair and develop a taste for the flavor and a desire to consume the  
whole dog.   
I love the joke. 
Whatever the reason, my fearless protector in traffic and  dicey situations 
scrambled to remove herself from any proximity to that dreaded  mechanism.  
She almost fell out a window when she jumped to the bed and  pressed 
against the screen over  an open window to escape her nemesis. If  anyone were 
vacuuming a public building, she always cut a wide berth around the  infernal 
machine.  Attempts to allow her to sniff the vacuum when it was  turned off 
never completely convinced her they weren’t dangerous.    
Sensible girl 


Cleora   
The story was valid, but invalid. Some  of the engineering and scientific 
assumptions are seriously flawed. Thus the  plot does not hold together. 
Parts of the circumstances were murky, needing  further clarification.   It  
could be turned into a good story if instead of using a prototype futuristic  
electric car, you changed it into a mini car or an underpowered vintage Volks 
 Wagon micro bus. Or a Fiat Bianchina. 
1452 words
Go Greenish
by C. S.  Boyd

Sprinkles of rain dotted the windshield of the electric car as Jake  backed 
out of the driveway. He considered taking the old reliable gas powered  
machine instead. Glancing at the battery indicator, he saw that the battery had 
 charged some before the clouds had blocked the sun, and decided to go 
ahead.  It's just a short trip, there should be enough power in the battery. 
Even in the  rain, the wind turbine should pick up enough wind in the stop and 
go traffic of  city driving to put energy back into the battery. It would be 
a good test of the  prototype's design. He straightened up on the road  and 
headed for the post  office.
The light at the intersection turned red just seconds before he  arrived. 
Now, the rain was coming down in sheets. He could hear the little wind  
turbine whine periodically as gusts of wind buffeted the little vehicle. Each  
time the energy gage moved up a little as electricity was pumped into the  
battery. 
He saw the amber light for the other side come on and pressed down  firmly 
on the accelerator  
Are you sure one can see the light  which would be at right angles to the 
viewer? 
pedal as soon as the light changed. He  started forward slowly. With luck 
it would pick up enough speed to make it  through the light before it changed 
Electric cars are faster than internal  combustion cars in acceleration. 
Besides,  I have the impression that the light just turned green. Why would it 
 change again so quickly, unless this was city traffic and there was a long 
line  of traffic in front of him. If there was a long line, you need to 
tell the  reader that. 
. He could already hear the gas  guzzlers behind him honking.
What had he been thinking? Traffic would be  heavy at this time of day and 
his slow starts would anger drivers in a hurry to  get wherever they were 
going. Take the electric. Do the energy responsible  thing. Do the planet a 
favor, he thought bitterly. Right, and screw yourself.  
Then he heard a thump and felt a little jolt. "What tha...?" He looked in  
his rear view mirror. All he could see was grill. He began to pick up speed 
as  the vehicle behind him shifted to the next gear and continued pushing 
him along.  His eyes forward, all he could do was steer. He was turning left 
in a lane that  could turn or go straight. Maybe the truck was going straight 
and would go on as  soon as he was out of the way. But, that wasn't in the 
cards. The little engine  whirred bravely, but was unable to pull away from 
the deasil engine behind him  that was continuing to pick up speed and push 
him faster and faster in front of  it. Panic surged through him. He knew 
there was no point in trying to break.  That brute probably wouldn't even 
notice. It might even just roll over him like  he was a speed bump. 
He had used the electric because it was a very short  trip. Just down the 
street and around the corner to the post office. He would  need to slow down 
and turn in the drive way to the parking lot.  There was  no way he could 
make the turn at this speed and the truck was continuing to push  him ahead of 
it faster and faster.
He could see the turn in coming up and to  further complicate things, the 
light at the corner was red and a steady stream  of cars was crossing in 
front of him 
I don’t get the picture. How was a  steady stream of cars crossing in front 
of him? are you talking about a cross  section that he is headed toward? 

A blast from the truck horn almost  made him wet himself. The horn sounded 
again. Clearly the driver had no  intention of stopping or even slowing 
down. Jake closed his eyes and prepared to  meet his maker. Seconds passed, but 
the expected crash didn’t happen. He opened  his eyes.  He was through the 
light  
Is this a second light or the first  light? 
and veering a little to the right. He  corrected his trajectory just in 
time to avoid hitting the curb along the side  of the street. He glanced  down 
at the dash. They were going 50 mph. He  looked up and began to concentrate 
on steering while he wondered what to do  next.
One good thing, At this speed the wind was spinning the turbine at top  
speed. He eased his foot off the accelerator. Since he was being pushed along,  
the little engine was not using power and the energy generated by the 
turbine  was going into the battery. Luckily the upcoming lights turned green 
just in  time. It was clear that the truck driver had no intention of stopping 
for  anything. Soon they came to the long stretch of this road that had no 
lights.  The speed here was 50mph. He looked down at the dash, they were 
going 70. Jake  felt a new fear. He had never been a person who drove fast. He 
always obeyed the  speed limit and it had been decades since the speed limit 
had been 70.   Would the car even hold together at this speed. Typically it 
never got over  28mph. 
The upper speed limit of electric cars  is just a great as internal  
combustion cars.  

Time passed and he concentrated on  steering while desperately trying to 
figure out what to do.
This road, he  knew, intersected with an eight lane interstate. Was this 
guy going to plow  through that like he had the others? As they approached the 
light, an idea came  to him. Maybe he could just slide into the right turn 
lane allowing the truck to  go on by, and this nightmare would be over. As 
he began his plan, he heard the  truck start to gear down and they began 
slowing, and the truck continuing to  stay on his bumper turned into the right 
turn lane right behind him.   
What kind of road is he turning on o?  Is it the highway? 

Jake looked in the rear view mirror  at the ominous grill. What is it with 
this guy? Is he some kind of homicidal  maniac?
He was committed now, though. The turn was coming up and he cruised  around 
the corner much faster than he liked but still on all four wheels. The  
grill followed and he felt a bump as the huge bumper made contact  again.
How big is this vehicle? Is it huge like a 16 wheeler? If it is  not, why 
didn’t Jake  resist with  his breaks  and force them both to a  stop? If it 
was huge, I question that it would have been ab le to turn as  quickly as a 
smaller vehicle. It’s a matter of  inertia. 
he driver geared up again increasing  speed and soon they were again 
rocketing down the road  
at break neck  speed. 
Because of the superior acceleration  ability of an electric car, Jake cold 
have simply accelerated away from the  other vehicle and outmaneuvered it. 
Ofcourse if it was a souped up sports car,  that plan wouldn’t apply. 

Jake had visions of himself and his  crumpled car being found in some 
farmer's back pasture. 
A green sign on the  right read "Southside Memorial Hospital 1 mile." He 
remembered that drive way.  It was wide and with luck he could turn into it 
even at high speed. He might  turn over but anything was better than the 
suicide trip he was on now.
He got  ready, rehearsing in his mind how he was going to pull this off. 
Then, the truck  began to gear down again. They were slowing. The driveway 
came up quickly and  Jake jerked the wheel to the right turning into the 
hospital parking lot. The  truck followed.  
I’m assuming that when the truck geared  down, contact with the bumpers was 
lost so that Jake could turn. If the contact  were not broken, Jake could 
not have made the turn. His car would probably have  flipped. 
Jake went straight ahead but the truck  made a dangerously  sharper turn 
heading down the gentle slope to the  emergency room entrance.
Breathing hard, Jake continued on into the parking  lot. He steered around 
and came to a rest in a parking place a few feet from the  emergency room 
entrance. He could see the truck still parked in its driveway. A  burly man 
was just coming around the truck. Seeing Jake, he started toward  him.
Jakes blood froze in his veins.
Coming up to the car, the man tapped  on Jakes driver side window.
Jake rolled down the window a little. 
"It's  my mother-in-law," he said. Reaching in his pocket, he pulled out 
his wallet and  took a business card out of it. He scribbled some information 
on the back and  handed it to Jake. "sorry about the -- well, you know. I 
noted your license  plate before and was planning to send you insurance 
information, but since you  are here, I'll just hand it to you. All the 
information is on the card. Have a  good one." he saluted Jake and was gone.
Jake looked at the card. "Henry  Gates, Tri-State Trucking 555-7200" Jakes 
mouth dropped open. He looked up to  see the man hoist himself up into the 
cab and drive away. He turned the card  over. All the information he needed 
to file a claim was on the back. 
At home  Jake pulled into the garage and went around to assess the damage. 
It wasn't too  bad. The bumper on the truck had been higher so the back was 
pushed in and he  would never be able to open the trunk until it was fixed, 
but Henry Gates --  WOW! He grinned and chuckled to himself. He had been 
pushed around by one of the  richest men in the country. He wondered if Gates 
always drove his  trucks.
"What's with you? And where have you been? I thought you were just  going 
down to the post office."  Then she saw the damaged rear end. "Are  you okay?"
Jake turned around to face his wife. "You are never going to  believe what 
happened," he said. 

I don’t get it. There is no motive  here.  I think his mother-in-law  
needed to go to the hospital emergency ward, but what has that got to do with  
pushing a little car around? that would only make him go slower. Besides Gates 
 had the time to give out his card and give an explanation of some kind for 
his  behavior. He did this rather than getting his Mother-in-law into the  
hospital.

_______________________________________________

Salley 
This introduction certainly holds my interest and makes  me want to read 
the book, so mission accomplished.  I’m curious as to how much of the story  
will be about you and how much about  your guide dogs.  
Loving Laurence: A Year Of Growing Older With A Guide Dog  By My Side 
By  Sally Rosenthal 
Dedication: To Laurence and to Boise and Greta who paved  the way 
INTRODUCTION 
During the two decades my vision slipped away, a dog kept  me company. Not 
just an ordinary dog, you understand. A life-long dog lover, my  world had 
always been filled with mutts and rescued dogs. No, when I began  losing my 
sight in my late twenties from complications of retinopathy of  prematurity, 
the dog I could almost touch by my side was a guide dog. 
almost touch by my side is a little confusing.After I  thought about it for 
a while, I thought  you meant that he was a tall dog. Of course, the next 
paragraph explains  your meaning. Consider using a phrase like, “longed to  
touch.  
As  scary as becoming blind was to this single college librarian whose life 
revolved  around the printed word and living alone, I found comfort in 
knowing that guide  dogs made life much easier for their blind handlers. As a 
child and an adult, I  was drawn to books about guide dogs and had been 
fascinated by watching the few  guide dog teams I had seen. Their bond seemed so 
close, and the interaction  between canine and human appeared  almost magical 
to me. When I felt sad or began to panic at the thought of  how probable 
blindness would negatively impact my life, the mythical guide dog  inched a 
little closer to me, offering comfort  and, if truth be told filling me  
with  anticipation. 
You use the term ‘probable blindness.’ Does this  mean  you had hopes  of 
keeping your  sight? 
‘With’ should not be capitalized  with  anticipation) 
What  I didn’t know at the time was that an individual need not be totally 
blind in  order to benefit from the help of a guide dog. In fact, the 
majority of visually  impaired people who rely on the assistance of dogs have some 
amount of residual  vision, however small. Although I didn’t obtain my 
first guide dog, Boise, from the special needs program of Guiding Eyes for  the 
Blind until 2003 when I had lost all light perception, My deteriorating  
vision would have qualified me as a guide dog handler long before Boise entered 
my home and  heart. 
However, another fact about guide dogs and the schools  that trained them 
and their human partners became evident as I began researching  the 
possibility of applying. Most programs, at that time, did not accept  applicants with 
significant physical disabilities in addition to vision loss.  Born three 
and a half months prematurely in 1952 and weighing a not-so-hefty one  pound, 
thirteen ounces, I was the first preemie whose life was saved by the new  
incubator in my small town hospital. Unlike most infants in the same 
situation,  I did not become blind by the oxygen flow in the incubators of the day. 
At the  age of three months, I reached five pounds, and my much-relieved 
parents  prepared for my homecoming. The day before my intended discharge, a 
young  assistant pediatrician, without his superiors’ knowledge, decided I 
needed one  final blood transfusion before going home. He left me alone during 
the  transfusion, and, upon returning to the room, found a scarcely alive 
blue baby.  My parents were advised to institutionalize me since, having sus
tained  significant brain damage similar to a stroke, I would no doubt be, in 
the less  than politically correct description of the early 1950s, “a 
vegetable.”  Fortunately, my parents were up for a challenge. A paratrooper who 
survived the  Normandy  landing on D-Day, my father married an English woman 
who had lived through years  of bombings and deprivation during World War II. 
. Knowing that life was not  always fair or easy, Bill and Kay Bennett 
bundled their daughter into blankets  and took her home to watch her grow.  
While my childhood consisted of many orthopedic and eye  surgeries and I 
never did get to trade my braces and heavy orthopedic saddle  shoes for 
much-longed-for patent leather mary janes, I attended public school  and went on 
to obtain a graduate degree in library science and, later as my  vision 
worsened, a degree in occupational therapy.  It was while working as a college  
librarian that my retinas hemorrhaged, and I found myself diagnosed with  
delayed-onset retinopathy of prematurity. More retina damage, cataracts, and  
uncontrollable glaucoma followed as did almost twenty surgeries before I 
thought  seriously of a guide dog. 
Wow!  You  define the word “overcoming.” 
I  discovered that Guiding Eyes for the Blind in Yorktown Heights, New York 
had a special needs  program designed to train visually-impaired people who 
also had physical  disabilities to become guide dog handlers. Even better, 
the administration  allowed home training, a necessity in my case since I 
couldn’t leave Sandy, my  paralyzed polio survivor husband, alone while I went 
to the Yorktown Heights  campus for training. As I mentioned, Boise arrived 
in 2003; she retired for medical  reasons in 2006 and spent the rest of her 
life with her puppyraisers, Judy and  Skip Franz who became close friends. 
In 2007, Greta came to be my second dog and  retired in 2014. Laurence, the 
main subject of this book, arrived in 2015 just a  few months before my 
sixty-third birthday.    
With  Boise and Greta,  my life was active. I was in my fifties, and my 
husband had recently left his  law practice due to the increasing pain and 
functional losses of post-polio  syndrome. Still, we ran daily errands,were 
active in our church, and had a  fairly busy social life. We were hospice 
volunteers for several years with Greta  and Sandy’s  service dog Pumpkin and had 
volunteered with all three dogs for a local pet  therapy organization. 
As  the saying goes, that was then and this is now. Over the last few 
years, my life  has become significantly harder physically. I have lost fifty 
percent of my  hearing in both ears due to age-related genetic hearing loss. 
Along with  developing lymphedema from cumulative effects of surgeries and 
physical trauma,  osteoarthritis seemed to creep into every bone of my body 
along with  osteoporosis. Tasks I had taken for granted became more difficult 
and required  more energy than I had some days. The combination of blindness 
and significant  hearing loss often left me disoriented in travelling and 
conversation; the lack  of incoming stimulation along with using more energy 
trying to decipher my  environment and what was happening around me left me 
drained. When Laurence came  into my life, I began using a support cane to 
increase my balance and decrease  the falls that had started to occur far more 
frequently. Sandy, meanwhile, had  problems of his own with severe chronic 
pain, extreme fatigue, depression, and  cognitive changes. At sixty, I had 
weathered changes most of my peers wouldn’t  have to cope with for decades. 
In addition, Sandy needed more help than I could offer, so  we began hiring 
home health aides to assist in bathing and dressing. 
Eventually, we felt we needed the safety and support of  living in a retire
ment community rather than alone in our condominium. In  January 2013, we 
moved into an independent living apartment of a nearby  retirement community. 
I have always been one for looking back and noticing  (the changes) and 
looking ahead to the challenges in store. As I get  older, I find it hard to 
believe we have lost so much physically; the changes  seemed to have occurred 
overnight. However, in most cases, our lives changed  slowly until it was 
impossible not to notice the losses. That made the abilities  and skills we 
still have even more necessary and precious, even as we know that  these, too, 
will change over time. 
These changes and how we meet or fall short of the  challenges they present 
as aging occurs are what I hope to chronicle in this  memoir. Laurence 
makes my life easier, safer, and more connected to people, even  if our work 
together isn’t quite the same as was my work with Boise and Greta. Still, he  
is invaluable to me on many levels. 
I  have chosen a journal format for this book for a few reasons. I have 
always  loved reading journals and reveling in the minutiae of others’ everyday 
life. I  also feel that a journal forces me to face or muse about aging and 
all that it  encompasses in the here and now rather than through the 
selective focus of  memory. Finally, I hope readers will come along for the 
journey and find that  Laurence and I, despite some significant obstacles, manage 
to travel with  purpose, determination, and even joy. If you are someone who 
is losing vision,  caring for a loved one who is, or simply interested in 
how we are more alike  than different in our aging challenges, I hope this 
memoir provides some answers, hope, anda little  laughter. 
 
I’m not sure how the journaling  process  is intended to work in this  
book. Have you kept a journal or diary to which you can refer and thus not be  
reliant totally on memory; or do you intend for the book to give that  
impression? In other words, are you talking about  style?
Martia 
I loved this piece. Evven  though, I knew you were going to survive, the 
story was extremely exciting. The  progression of events was well metered and 
excellently described. The inner  experiences and the outer experiences were 
woven toether in a very satisfying  way.  
You wouldn’t find me jumping  out of a perfectly good aairplane with or 
lwithout a parachute. If I knew I was  dreaming and that I’d wake up and find 
that Hillary had won, I’d think about it.   
I’d like a little more detail  about the landing. Do lyou get disconnected 
from your guide at the landing? If  not, how does he not land on you?  You 
say that you saw your family and terrain details while landing. the  language 
seems to be saying that in the mids of all that hopping, jumping and  what 
not, you were also observing these details. Don’t you mean just before you  
landed? 
Age Before Beauty 
Marcia J. Wick, The Write  Sisters 
Copyright October 2017 
Word Count: 1068 
Dad’s 93rd birthday is Tuesday. We will  celebrate with his favorite pie 
and ice cream, although he won’t remember our  party the next day. 
The anniversary reminds me of another special birthday  which Dad won’t 
recall. The year he turned 80, I turned 50. He and I Separately  hit on the 
idea of celebrating our big day by jumping out of an airplane, with a  
parachute of course. When we discovered that we both had happened upon the same  
adventure, we decided to do the bigg jump together. 
My older daughter, 16 at the time, strongly objected to  my risky endeavor. 
 She imagined becoming an orphan on her mother’s  birthday. I presumed the 
tandem jumper who would be attached to my back did not  himself have a death 
wish, and so I put my life in a complete stranger’s hands  that day. 
Dad and I watched a brief instructional video, after  which we were require 
to place our signature on page after page, waiving our  right to return to 
sue or haunt anyone in the event of injury or  death. 
I love the part about not  being allowed to haunt. 
We struggled into jumpsuits while our instructors talked  us through, 
step-by-step, what to expect after we departed the plane.  My  instructor yanked 
and pulled on the straps and buckles of my harness, demanding  my full 
attention. The voices of family and the complaints of my daughter faded  as my 
jumping buddy manipulated my body, pivoting me through a practice dance on  
the ground, preparing me for what to expect in the  air. 
He stood behind me and tugged me tight into a bear hug,  clamping my 
crossed arms to my chest. Next, he demonstrated the deliberate tap  on my back 
which would indicate the moment I should lift and spread my arms like  wings, 
stabilizing the tumultuous first part of the free fall. I tried to absorb  
the cascade of information overflowing my limited brain bucket. I noticed my  
dad’s instructor demonstrating the same gestures, explaining that it isn’t  
possible to talk while free falling from 13,500 feet above sea level at 120 
 miles per hour. 
My instructor assured me that he would deploy the  parachute after a 
30-second free fall, that’s about a mile of nothing but  dropping like a rock 
through the thin air. Once under the canopy, we would drift  gracefully above 
the Royal Gorge and Arkansas  River with panoramic views of the Rocky Mountain 
 Range. 
None of this would I see, being visually impaired, nor  would I glimpse the 
ground coming up to greet me. The instructor assured me that  he would tell 
me when to tuck my knees up to my chest and be poised to spring  upon 
hitting the ground. The thought of terra firma suddenly seemed too solid  for 
comfort. 
Dad and I giggled and our hearts raced as we waved “so  long” to family 
and friends. They applauded our mutual adventure, some of my  siblings jealous 
that I was the one sharing this once-in -a -lifetime experience  with our 
dear old dad, others relieved that I was the one who had  volunteered. 
We were led out onto the tarmac and climbed a portable  set of stairs to 
discover the outside shell of the jump plane concealed an  interior stripped 
to the bone, barely large enough for the four of us to sit  back-to-back on 
the hard floor. Naturally, I had assumed the plane would have  seats, but in 
fact there was not even a canvas flap to close the open  doorway.  Dad and I 
backed away from the void as engines drowned out our  voices and the ground 
disappeared. Shoulder to shoulder with my aging father, I  realized Things 
were getting serious.  
My instructor commanded my focus to distract me from my  heightened 
nervousness. Dad’s did the same. I felt my father tense as he  listened to his 
guide. Until then, I had imagined, like in the movies, that we  would maneuver 
toward the door attached to some sort of zip line while a  commander called, “
Go, go, go!” 
As it was, our fellow jumpers pulled us in tight, our  backs to their 
chests, our butts between their legs; I felt oddly familiar and  trusting with my 
jumping partner in this intimate position, my life literally in  his arms. 
It was then that I realized Dad’s life was also in the care of a  complete 
stranger. I hoped he felt implicit trust as did  I. 
“Who goes first?” Dad’s fellow jumper asked. Not planned  ahead, I 
quipped, “Age before beauty, right Dad?” 
In an instant, Dad’s trainer shifted, inching up to the  yawning exit. Dad 
reacted, his fingers locking like a vice grip to the door  frame. The guide 
urged him to release his hold while prying the right hand  loose. He nudged 
Dad further toward the gaping passage and, before I could catch  my breath, 
they were gone.  
Whoosh, I watched my father fall out of the plane. Daddy,  come back, I 
cried in my mind, Meanwhile, I was unaware that my guide had  shifted and was 
moving me toward the expanse ahead. Blink, we were falling,  twisting, 
jerking, the force of the fall plastering my skin to my skull. My  mouth opened 
and closed, opened and closed. I wanted to scream in jubilation,  the thrill 
was so thrilling, but no sound came out. Time and space stood  still. 
A tap, then a more urgent nudge, reminded me to uncross  my arms which were 
gripping my chest. I spread myself open like a butterfly, my  hands and 
feet free in front of me. Like flipping a switch, the force of the  fall 
stabilized and we continued free falling through the cold air with nothing  
relative by which to judge our speed or distance. It’s an eternity, when there  is 
nothing but air under your feet. 
I’m a little confused about  the free fall position. In my mind, I see  the 
hands out in front like Super Man flying. But I also see the legs  being 
begind, not in front. Can you clarify? 
Too soon, the parachute opened, interrupting our freedom  from time and 
space. We slowed, gliding in a controlled fashion round and round,  round and 
round, down and down, feeling the pull of the  ground. 
My new best buddy assured me that my father and his  partner were also 
drifting without distress. Laughter and relief erupted, along  with 
disappointment that the best part, the free fall, was already  over. 
Reality and my family on the ground reappeared as I  tucked, bumped, 
hopped, and rolled to a stop, my glee overtaken only by the  sounds of my Dad’s 
laughter and my daughter’s  tears. 


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