Flying at Night Quotes

“I spent a good amount of time considering my life and where I had been and the stunning fact that I had no idea where I was going. When I was in the midst of my career, I imagined myself on a trajectory that pointed only up, toward success. When Fred was born it was the same, a career of baby raising that led to child raising that led to the eventual victory of a young man capable of co-opting my responsibilities and then a young woman willing to fill in the gaps that Fred was unaware needed filling or uninterested in filling himself.”
― Rebecca L. Brown, Flying at Night

“I’m not sure what you want, Piper. Do you want me to send money? Would that help?” Curtiss asked. “He’s not like an abandoned pet, Curtiss. God! He’s your father and you could come up and help me out. That would be helpful.” I was angry with him. I felt like once again he had walked away from me and left me at a critical time. When I was a junior in high school, Curtiss went away to college and left me alone to navigate life with my father, and for those two years I held a vicious grudge. Curtiss left me alone to battle my father’s moods, alone to absorb Curtiss’s portion of his criticisms, alone to protect my mother from his cruel tone and even crueler periods of silence. Curtiss visited home rarely, but when he did I made sure that he could feel my wrath underneath my layers of friendly conversation. Finally, when he returned for my own high school graduation, he addressed my years of quiet fury. “Piper, you just don’t know how it is. It’s not like this in other families. It’s different when you get out into the world.”
― Rebecca L. Brown, Flying at Night

“Iam confused. It is hard to understand brains. My grandpa had a heart attack and now his brain is making him forget what is real. He told me yesterday that he was flying a plane and it crashed. He was telling me all about it when Mom made him stop and made me go home. She is worried that it will make me scared. I told her that there are so many things in the world to be scared about and this is just one. That did not make her feel better.”
― Rebecca L. Brown, Flying at Night

“The office of my daughter’s house is my new home. I sleep on something called a futon. I can sleep comfortably enough. When I wake up in the morning and the light is coming in the window, the painting that she made of koi fish in a pond looks like it is golden and shining. When I lie down on my futon bed in the afternoon or the evening, the gold and shine are gone. Sometimes something looks one way for a time and then becomes another thing. The fish are flat and orange, black and white. The painting doesn’t have anything to say. Above my futon is a crack in the ceiling, a big long crack. I lie here in the dark, but I can still see the crack. It frightens me because it means something is broken.”
― Rebecca L. Brown, Flying at Night

“She asked me if I had feelings about Grandpa. These were my feelings: A little bit sad because Grandpa was a person who knew a lot about some things and does anyone else know those things? A little bit glad that Grandpa did not have to die in any wars because then it doesn’t really matter what the legal documents say about dying. You do not have a choice about unplugging machines. You are just bombed or machine-gunned or crashed from the sky. When you are a person who is going to die is that something that you know about? It does not seem fair to be in the shower and then dead without a warning in between. Even though I know a lot of information about dying because of all the guys that died in wars that I know about, I don’t have any information about when a person that you know dies. Will it feel different to be Fred without a grandpa?”
― Rebecca L. Brown, Flying at Night

“Our family’s collective nonpanic at my father’s condition might have been shocking and even disturbing to many. The Silver Eagle, true patriot, lies at death’s door and his wife and offspring will get to it when they get to it. There’s a history here, one carefully covered and silenced. There’s a facade, curated over years, smoothed out by endless practice pretending everything is all right. As children, my brother and I learned that it was best to just avoid our father. If avoidance wasn’t possible, one could hope that he was in one of his shining moods. His everything-is-dandy-let’s-go-get-an-ice-cream-cone-and-toss-the-ball-around moods. Though these moods were shiny and glistening at first glance, it took very little to tarnish them: a drip of melted ice cream on the upholstery in the backseat, an easy grounder missed, unexpected traffic from a funeral procession”
― Rebecca L. Brown, Flying at Night

“I’m flying out of San Diego last week, and as I’m greeting passengers from the cockpit with Dave Huang, this new Oriental copilot I got, this good-looking athletic guy takes one look at me and says, “Captain, I’d like to shake your hand.” Now, I’m a pretty outgoing son of a bitch, but you can bet I didn’t know this guy from Adam. So I say, “Well, all right, but if I owe you money or booze, we’ll pretend this never happened.” We had a good laugh and then he says, “You’re the Silver Eagle! I’d recognize you anywhere.” Turns out, he worked the control tower at Kennedy ’93 to ’99. The Silver Eagle. I always liked that.”
― Rebecca L. Brown, Flying at Night

“And then it was over. The morning Fred woke up and renounced his seven a.m. viewing of Planes and How They Fly! I was immediately transported back to my ten-year-old self, the one who had refused to step onto Daddy’s plane, knowing she’d pay the price—his silence—for days. Airplanes faded from Fred’s mind as quickly as they had rooted themselves there nine months earlier. He no longer called me Piper, and I became Mommy once again. Fred’s miniature metal airplanes lay grounded in their basket in his room for a week before I had the courage to return my father’s calls and politely decline his invitation to join him at the airport. “What do you mean he doesn’t want to go to the airport? It’s been over a week.” “I asked him, Dad; he doesn’t want to go. He’s drawing race cars right now.”
― Rebecca L. Brown, Flying at Night

“My stubborn reluctance to fly was further evidence to my father of my status as second-rate adventurer and thus second-rate child. This battle over flight raged for my entire childhood, but airplanes never played as prominent a role in my life as they did from the fourth birthday of my son, Fred, until three months before his fifth. For those nine months, I lived and breathed jets, helicopters and fighter planes. I called my son Orville at his demand. I stalked appliance stores for refrigerator boxes that could stand in for crude, wobbly airplanes—cardboard boxes that Fred ate in, played in and slept in when I was simply too worn-out to fight him. As you can imagine, my father, Captain Lance “the Silver Eagle” Whitman, was thrilled with my son’s obsession. For those nine months, I was elevated to the first-class status I had craved my entire life.”
― Rebecca L. Brown, Flying at Night