Mike was a student athlete of mine. His father was a pilot and encouraged his son to obtain his own pilot’s license. During his four years of high school, Mike racked up his hours in the sky. I admired him for tackling the challenge in addition to being the star of two sports teams and maintaining a high grade point average. A couple years after his graduation, he reappeared as my student at the community college where I worked as an adjunct instructor.. Pleased to see him and pleased to hear he was becoming a cop, it was summer in Illinois, hot and muggy, and I asked him if he flew, and he happily informed me he had his license and flew regularly.
“Ms. Bruchman, you should let me take you flying.”
I arranged to meet him after lunch at the regional airport. Along the way, I stopped for a bite to eat–onion rings with horseradish sauce. At one, he proudly opened the door to the cockpit, and I climbed into the small space about the size of the interior of my car. It was loud and hot in there, as we ascended and zoomed around the valley, the corn fields in tight rows, the Illinois River serpentine, and my smile constant.
“So, Mike, what did you have to do to get your license?”
With a mischievous smile, he dipped his wing to the left and leveled. Then he did the same with the right. “And I had to do this one, too,” and that’s when he dropped the plane. He steadied it and laughed at my expression, but I had the last laugh.
Oh, no! I looked for a paper bag. A plastic bag. A container of some kind. “Mike, I’m going to be sick. Please, what do I do?”
“Okay, I’ll take you back. Hold on!” The sweat dripped and my stomach flipped. I projectile-vomited the onion rings in horseradish sauce over the windshield of the cockpit and down the front of my peach colored dress. We had to sit in it for fifteen minutes while he returned to the airport and requested to land.
When the propellers came to a stop, and he had turned off the switches, Mike rushed around and opened the door for me. He looked at me and the chunks that speckled the interior and said gently, “Go home and rest; I’ll clean it up.” I was so embarrassed I couldn’t say anything. I had to walk through the hangar past a gauntlet of people who pretended to ignore me. When I got to my car, I couldn’t stop laughing. A decade passed, and I ran into Mike at a local bar who gave me a bear hug, and we shared a beer and had a good laugh.
*****
What’s my one memorable Thanksgiving? The one where my grown children and their kids had gathered at my house and in the span of six hours, five of us were struck with the flu. People were racing to every toilet and retching in the bathtubs. It was quite the sight and strikes me funny now, the sounds of people puking and the bodily fluids flushed and cleaned away.
*****
A flamboyant friend, Lisa, was in the middle of sharing a crazy story in her small office one morning. A deranged man suddenly stumbled into her office trying to find a bathroom. He had shat himself; and she pointed, shocked, to her bathroom. He locked the door and painted the walls. Authorities were called, the poor man escorted away, and Lisa retched uncontrollably and begged me, crying, to clean it up. It was a long morning. She still owes me, fifteen years later.
Why should the gross parts of being human bring about a laugh? Perverse!
