The Aviator

I just watched this movie about pilot and innovator Howard Hughes. He was one smart dude who went through a lot of kleenex.

When I was 15, I got a brilliant idea related to flight.

We lived in an old beach house up on an open hillside in Playa del Rey. Since then, rich people have built houses all around that 1906 house. The following photo will help put you in the right place for the following story. In particular:

• Find the hillside between the big reddish building (by the beach) and the whitest "cube" house back on the hill (the house we used to live in now dwarfed and squished in the tiny gap between the white cube and the house beyond it)
  
• Find the telephone pole at the top of the hill, next to the quaint little house
  
• Find the road at the base of the hill
  

Some trivia...

My Dad once worked for Hughes Aircraft, and there is a Hughes airstrip in the flat area just to the left of the cliffs.

Okay, while you're distracted by photos, let me toss in another one that's unrelated to the current story. Our house overlooked Marina del Rey (my gosh, what a view). The opening scenes of Gilligan's Island show their boat making its way out of a harbor. That was filmed in that harbor.

So, at 15, I was a brilliance factory. Like tossing kleenexes out of the upper floor window to watch the wind carry them way up to the houses on the hill behind us. Or throwing dirt clods down the cliff toward cars on the road below and inadvertently hitting a cop car and running back to my house in time to see the cop pulling into my driveway.

On this particular day of brilliance, I looked at the pile of scrap wood and peg board by our house. I thought of the cliff with its steady updraft, perfect for an excellent stadium-quality paper airplane that my brother taught me to make. (Paper airplanes would hover really well and slowly make their way forward. I even got one to land in the parking lot beyond the road. Planes that landed on the slope were easy to retrieve with a quick run down the slope and back.) Having actually learned some key principles of aeronautics from my own experiments with the excellent paper airplane, I considered that I might be able to make a small glider out of some of those wood scraps.

So, I slapped together the basics (2x2 for fuselage, long rectangle particle board wing, little tail and aileron) and tossed it in the yard. Okay, so it looked like a grade school drawing of an airplane, except that it was uglier. And it didn't fly. But I didn't expect it to fly on first attempt. I anticipated that I'd need to add wood here, bend particle board there, etc.

I took it to the cliff, near that telephone pole, and released it into the updraft. It went pretty much straight down, a few feet in front of my feet. I rushed back to the house to tweak this, chop that. I made three or four such round trips. I delighted in observing how my adjustments were improving the plane (Frankenplane, albeit).

The updraft at the cliff was steady. I held Frankenplane over my head with one arm and began a gentle motion forward to establish some momentum while helping the plane find its balance in the updraft. As much it could be called "flying," the plane flew. While prior attempts had invariably resulted in nose dives just ahead of me, this time, it didn't dive. Now, understand that my recent tweaks of the plane were never designed get this thing to *hover*. No! I was merely trying to solve the immediate problem, that of a plane nose-diving into the slope.

So, congrats to me, the nose was up. The plane was now flying parallel to the slope and picking up speed. The limit of my brilliance became instantly clear. It was irrelevant whether I was able to get the nose up a little or get it up a lot: the whole time, I had been directing this thing toward traffic. My wooden creation was now heading swiftly toward lane #2.

I now watched helplessly with sheer panic in my gut, the plane now about 2/3 of the way down the long slope. I suspect I made several heartfelt and every-last-cellfelt pleas of God at that moment. He was kind to answer in a way that I approved of. The plane lowered from two feet off the slope to a foot, then finally skimmed along to a stop on the slope, about 10 feet from the traffic. I rushed down the hillside with thankfulness bursting out all over, fetched Frankenplane and made my way immediately home where I tore up the plane. I didn't try that again. (Other brilliant ideas came along to keep me busy.)

I remember that story every once in a while. A story of momentum. A story of momentum of my making. A story of thoughtless momentum of my making. GASP--I could have trashed some car, something that was never in my mind at the start. How is it that I never considered the range of space between the distant lot and the nose-dive slope surface? I was spared of consequences.

Can you see it?

"Can you see it?" said Mom tonight. "Huh?" I responded. She added something about showing it to people on a past trip to Hawaii to see if they could see it. I had no idea what she was talking about.

Then she turned a piece of paper toward me. It looked something like the following. In my handwriting below it was the note "Success!"

yuiopasdMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMqwe
sdMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.co
MqwertyuiopMsdMqwertyuiopMsdMqweryuioopMsMqweryuiooopMsMqweryuiooopM
iopasdMqweMtyuiopasdMqweMtyuiopasMqweeMtyiopasMqweeeMtyiopasMqweeeMt
yuiopasdMqwerMyuiopasdMqwerMyuiopsdMqqwerMyuopsddMqqwerMyuopsddMqqwe
sMxqwertyuiopasMxqwertyuiopasMxqwrtyuuiopasMqwrttyuuiopasMqwrttyuuio
MqwertyuiopasdMqwertyuiopasdMqweryuioopasdMqeryuuioopasdMqeryuuioopa
iopasdMqweMtyuiopasdMqweMtyuiopasMqweeMtyuioasMqqweeMtyuioasMqqweeMt
Mphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.
iopasdMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoons.com.JDMphoon

"Oh yeah!" I said with delight. I went over to join her in staring at each page in a stack of pages. These were a copy of my notes and sketches from the early '90s as I attempted to figure out how those "sterograms" worked, those colorful posters we saw at all the malls, where people would gather around and stare, waiting for their eyes to relax enough for them to see the 3D images. (So, can you see it, too? Let your eyes relax as if looking beyond the screen. The goal is to get any two M's to drift toward each other until they merge into one. An alternate approach: tug ever so slightly at the outer corners of your eyes to merge any two M's.)

After several more trips to the mall, I observed that every pixel was a repeat of a pixel off to its left. Pixels that appeared to be closer to the eye were copies of whatever pixels were a slightly shorter distance to the left. I figured the principle had to apply to something as simple as characters, too. Sure enough.

The example above is a recreation of that past experiment. I typed 14 "random" letters on each line and then repeated those 14 for the rest of each line. That established the "background depth." When I wanted to create the left edge of something that would appear closer to the eye, I typed whatever letter was 13 characters to the left and kept copying whatever was 13 characters to the left until I reached a right edge, where I'd resume copying whatever character was 14 to the left.

Soon after, I created the sphere (first diagram below) and more recently created the Phoon stereogram:



Try creating your own text stereogram. Share your success with me :)

So, which was the tough day?

A friend expressed a few days ago that she would be thinking about me and my family as today approached--6 months since Dad's death on June 27th. My brother David gave an account of the impact on him in his blog; Mom added some of her experience as a comment there.

Friends checked in on Mom today, knowing the calendar day (what a thoughtful thing to do). Mom and I reflected this evening on how today hadn't been much different from other days. I do recall Mom noting on Monday that "it was 6 months ago today"...Dad died on a Monday, so Mondays are more of an impact for her.

For whatever reason, I haven't been one to think about this in terms of weeks, months, anniversaries. So, was I impacted in any way? David's blog got me thinking back. Christmas dinner, Sunday the 25th, comes to mind.

Mom and I went out for a nice meal. We'd kept things generally light the whole day as well as on the long drive there and during the wait to be seated. After being seated, we looked around at the nice atrium setting; we enjoyed the beautiful koi gliding in the indoor waterway. Then there was a still period. Our eyes met. It was a moment to not shove thoughts of Dad out of my head. It wasn't "wrong" for us to reveal our grief to each other. In silence, we gave each other knowing nods and were tearful. We didn't know exactly what loss the other was experiencing at the moment. But we knew we both missed having Papa there.

I don't want to remember the details of the day Dad died. I was there--there's much I want to forget. But I'm not unwilling to grieve my loss of his friendship.

This discussion has reminded me how everyone's pain is their own and how they process it is different. I appreciated my brother's observation well before June that there weren't rules, that everyone would face Dad's death in their own way. I remember how helpful it was for me to connect with Patty in Australia a good year before Dad died. Her father had just passed away and she wrote about it in her blog. I wrote to her and she shared more about her experience, admonishing me to make the most of my time with Dad. Over the next year, she gave me additional glimpses into her own journey of dealing with the loss of her father. It was so helpful. Am I now doing the same for someone else? I hope so.

Soon, Mom and I inhaled, looked elsewhere, changed topic or whatever. I suppose this Phoon activity was in part a distraction for my mind, one of the ways I seek to "resume normal life." (Dad would've shaken his head and, with a slight smile, chuckled at the activity.)

Amazing Grace

This day...a reminder of a birth brought about for a death, a death that would make life possible for me, one undeserving of such a gift. Thanks from one who wrestles to comprehend the full significance of this.

Seagulls and junior high detention

The shrieks of seagulls in the mall parking lot took me back to junior high where I did after school detention for a few days and then agreed with an administrator in Mom's presence that I wouldn't be involved in this sort of activity again.

The outdoor lunch area was huge, full of tables and benches packed with students every lunch period. Twenty to 30 seagulls would line up along the edge of the tall auditorium next to the lunch area, anxiously watching for us to leave so that they could pick from among the scraps we left behind. What you couldn't tell was that there were easily another hundred gulls behind them on the roof.

Rusty knew exactly where to throw an apple from a less visible spot on the side of the auditorium and startle the whole hoard of seagulls off of the auditorium and directly over the lunch area. When I heard he was going to do this deed again, I wanted to see how it was done--and most definitely be out of range of the impending mayhem.

I knew well what it was like to be out there when the gulls bolted from the roof and unloaded their tanks, midflight. You'd hear screams from all directions as kids frantically sought cover that just couldn't be found in time. Soon after were groans and pointing toward who and what got hit. This time, I wasn't at risk of getting hit. But I ended up in detention.

I'll bet kids are still carrying on the tradition.

Loved you, Papa

I printed several of this last year's status reports in preparation for the current dreary task of forming a self-appraisal for company evaluation. I squared up the pile of printouts and flipped through the stack, skimming the "Issues and Notes" section at the bottom of each status report in search of a particular set of work details. I wasn't expecting to see one of the entries:

Loved you, Papa.

It's been nearly 6 months now. And yet how quickly that lump still forms in my throat. A week or so after my father died, I had written up my status report, giving an account of my time. Accomplishment this, accomplishment that, a handful of meetings. Yet my mind and heart had been elsewhere; my life had been changed. I wanted to say *something* about that in my status report. Status reports are cold, impersonal; not a place to spell out life issues. Who would care? I didn't expect any coworkers to comment, didn't expect any sympathy. It was just something I needed to do, to not forget, to not gloss over the event. In that moment in July, I stuck a symbol of my life into that status report, a detail about what really mattered, like carving my initials and date on a tree: "All this other stuff doesn't matter, Papa. I loved you, and you loved me. I'll remember."

Digital signature

My airplane seat was next to the window...with a view of a steady white light on the wing. All I could see in the dark. Booooring. And I wanted something to do. I had a camera.

I knew the camera lens would remain open for a bit longer due to the lack of lighting. How much of a squiggle could I create with the wing light during that time? Hmm...could I draw a circle accurately? How about a square? (Okay, so the lens was only open long enough for me to make a hangman shape.)

Hey, why not try my signature! 7809 and 7812 show bad squiggles of "Jo". Increasing exposure to 5 seconds, and with lots more practice, I was able to write the names of people I had just visited on a trip. (My real handwriting is better...but not much!)



By the way, when you do this, your signature comes out upside-down in the camera. I'd "write my name" in space, then turn the camera upside-down to see the results. (These images are right-side-up because I flipped the images over for you. Alternate approach: turn the camera upside down before writing your signature.)

Then I got bored with that and snuck back to the stewardess area to do this.