Chapter Excerpt From Into The Blue On March 3, 2000, I flew with my father in his restored BT-13, a shiny metal bombing trainer used in WWII--loud as thunder and big as a three car garage. My father had rebuilt, flown and sold over a dozen antique airplanes and owned two now--the BT-13 and his favorite, a Fleet Series 9 biplane built in 1932.   Three weeks later my father suffered a debilitating stroke that left him unable to speak, read, write, tell time, reliably know the names of his family members--or fly. The medical staff told us the best we could hope for was to accommodate to a seriously altered life for my father. Their job was to get him mobile enough to ensure that he was safe and then he would be discharged to our care.  When I went flew from Vermont to Montana to see him, I knew I had one choice: find a way to get Dad back behind the controls of his beloved Fleet biplane as pilot in command.   The beginning of my father’s recovery was a day at the hospital when I made him a promise I had to find a way to keep.   From Chapter Four of Into the Blue titled "Give Me A Year": Give Me a Year   I don’t know what Jeff’s idea of raising hell was, but for the next three days the whole family did nothing but wait.   We asked about when Dad would begin rehab and they said they were working on a schedule. We asked about the schedule and they said they were waiting for a room in the Sunnyside rehab unit. We asked about a time frame and they said “shortly.” I asked what “shortly” meant. They said “soon.” I asked if they could be more precise. They couldn’t.   Rick’s pressing counsel, There’s no time to lose, was a curse that kept time with my pulse, measuring out the wasted minutes beat by beat.   Dr. Lilly, the rehab specialist, came around once a day, held up a pen, and asked Dad what it was. Dad squeezed his eyes shut, tightened his jaw, and forced out “a. . . p - p - p- ehh - n.” When the doctor left, Dad looked at us and rolled his eyes as if to say “What does he think I am, dumb?”  Other than that daily distraction, there appeared to be no plan.   We tried to fill the time.   “How about some ice cream, Dad?” I said this at about two o’clock every afternoon.  “Crit. C-c-crittle. ‘Kay,” he’d respond, heaving his legs off the side of the bed and pulling his sweatshirt down over his stomach, taking in a deep, sighing breath. I’d hold on to him and we’d walk down to the cafeteria.   I described to him the weather, easing him over to a window so he could see for himself. I told him about Rick’s latest furniture project and thrust photos into his hands so he could see for himself. He understood, but he could offer nothing back. Except mumbo jumbo.   Several times a day Sharon suggested to Dad that they take a walk. She held on to a belt tied around his waist to steady him if he started to fall. Desperate to communicate what he wanted, he used his finger to write on his hand, then he looked at Sharon and gibberish came out of his mouth. She held his hand and looked at him and said, “Dad, I don’t understand you right now.” It only made my father’s sense of frantic terror grow.   By Friday we’d been sitting there for six days. All of us. The days eking themselves out one reluctant second after the next.   At last the transfer process ground around to us, and by the end of the sixth morning after his stroke, Dad was moved from the medical ward to Sunnyside Rehabilitation Center. What a relief to see Dad’s name go up on the white board! His name on the left and names and times of his various therapy sessions in columns to the right. Speech, Recreational, Occupational, Physical. Finally, finally, it felt like things were starting to move. We walked with him to the first session--Orientation to Recreational Therapy.   Dad was surprisingly steady on his feet. He concentrated fiercely on putting one foot ahead of the other, trying not to betray to anyone that he had been physically compromised. We rode the elevator to the basement and walked down a long cinderblock corridor dimly lit with flickering fluorescent lights. Our conversation petered out as we began to hear it echoing back to us off the walls and ceiling. The smell of the place brought back dreadful distant memories of Bible school in the church basement.   We turned left into the Recreational Therapy room. The “recreations” were organized into stations so patients could move from one activity to another. I spotted the shop station first. Its central feature was its surreal neatness. Two clear plastic bins held screws and matching bolts. A screwdriver, wrench, and several strips of wood with matching holes in them completed the set. A third bin contained nails and roosted alongside a hammer and several two-by-fours, each about eight inches long and pocked with dents from numerous missed opportunities. A longer two-by-four spanned two risers, firmly secured, with a small practice saw at the ready underneath. There was not a mote of sawdust. I was accustomed to Dad’s busy, messy, real workshop, and the preternatural Playskool tidiness of the ersatz station made it look menacing. I felt suddenly superstitious, seized with the fear that this station was a reverse Rosetta Stone. If Dad touched it, it would make him supremely stupid forever.   Beyond that was the home ec station, which showcased an apartment-sized electric stove, a tiny hip-high refrigerator, a few open cupboards holding several plates, cups and glasses, a small metal sink, a wooden cutting board in the shape of a pig with a small dull knife on top, and a plastic ring below the sink that held a red-checked dish towel. Another open cupboard held a jar of peanut butter, a plastic bag of white bread, and a colander of oranges alongside four or five plastic storage containers of various sizes. I surmised that the several drawers contained an unmatched array of silverware and probably plastic wrap and foil. A green formica table with ribbed metal edging nestled between two brown metal folding chairs. I guess Dad would learn to make lunch here. And eat it, too. And clean up after himself. I contained my enthusiasm.  Neighboring home ec was the games station. A game of checkers, the red and black disks set up for immediate play, rested on a round formica table along with two decks of cards. A bookcase, listing against the wall, was crammed with other games--Chinese Checkers, Scrabble, Yahtzee--all in frayed cardboard boxes held closed by big red rubber bands. Sand-filled egg timers, scorepads, and dice, all loose from their moorings, were crammed in another plastic bin.   Behind that sat the computer station with an ancient beige PC. A genuine typewriter--a blue IBM Selectric, the exact model I’d used to type term papers in high school twenty-five years ago--sat beside the computer, as if competing for suitors. I had a hunch there hadn’t been any for a long, long time.   The final station was a sitting area dominated by a brown plaid couch, a coffee table of the style that Sharon and I dubbed Trailer Court Chic, and a television set teetering heavily on a metal kitchen cart. An old man, white bristles sprouting all over his face like rime frost, sat slumped on the couch, pitched to one side. His red scaly legs, so swollen that his skin pulled tight against his ropy, purple veins, poked out like brittle tree branches from beneath his bathrobe. His hands, fingers twisted at odd angles from arthritis, flopped and jumped aimlessly in his lap while he talked sluggish, uninspired gibberish to someone who wasn’t there.   I took all this in with one sweep of my eyes and a big inhale of church basement air. Spontaneously, my teeth began chattering as if I had a fever. This whole place was making me truly, physically sick.   Paul, an ardent and cheerful recreational therapist, greeted us. He was probably a recent college graduate, but from my distant vantage point of forty-four years, he looked about twelve. He had short blond hair, gently spiked so it looked perpetually wet, an earring in one ear, and a muddy green tattoo circling his wrist--a snake eating its tail from what I could make out. His muscled forearms and mild strut seemed like advance press for nicely rippling pecs hidden beneath his cotton shirt. I supposed that it was an important job qualification to be strong. I knew it was a job qualification to be enthusiastic, which he was, categorically.  “Well, Mr. Edsall!” beamed Paul. “Do you like cards? Have you ever played solitaire? How would you like to learn to play solitaire? Would you like that?”   “No, Dad would not like that,” I said, with sinister calm. “He plays cribbage and he wins.”   “Well! We’ll get you back to using a computer! You can write letters to your friends!” It was irrelevant to him that Dad had never used a computer in his life--or a typewriter. Nor had he ever written a letter to his friends. He flew to small towns in Montana on Sundays for breakfast with his friends.   I was so brokenhearted that all I wanted to do was haul off and smack that guy. I needed someone to blame for how desperate I felt and how desperate I knew Dad felt. We had been fighting for nearly a week to get Dad into rehab. Now that we were finally here, it seemed like the centerpiece of their plan was to wheedle Dad into lowering his standards, prepare him for a more sedentary life, to teach him to settle for making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and not falling down in the shower. It seemed to me that this therapeutic setup was the beginning of trying to fob off on Dad the notion of pleasant puttering as a lifestyle. I could barely take it in.  I looked at Dad. I could tell that he wanted to sock someone too. His back was rigid, his jaw was held in close to his neck, his lips had shriveled into a thin gray line. He frowned. This was worse than the day he had to walk me down the church aisle and give me away to a man neither one of us loved. At least in marriage there was a way out.   Paul put his arm behind my mother’s back and directed her to the card table, patting its wood-grain formica surface. Dad followed. But he wouldn’t sit until Paul nearly shoved him into the metal chair, misunderstanding Dad’s slowness, which was not because he didn’t understand but because he did. Dad understood exactly.   Dad eyeballed the home ec station. A morbidly cheerful therapist in a brightly colored smock was trying to coax food into the mouth of a woman who was strapped into a wheelchair.  “Goddamn shit hell son of a bitch fuck assholes assholes goddamn son of a bitching assholes assholes assholes goddamn sheeee-it shit shit shit shit!” Someone was shouting in the hall. I sidled toward the door. A man, probably in his mid-sixties and another stroke victim, was strapped into a chair. He’d lost all power of speech except for swearing. The nurse was trying to quiet him, which only propelled his frustration, and in consequence his swearing, into high gear. This could be my father, I thought. I was certain that Dad was thinking the same thing.   I looked for clues to what Dad was feeling. His eyebrows seemed to have slipped down the edges of his face to frame flat black pebbles for eyes that kept darting over to me, to Sharon, to Mom as if he were sending an SOS in Morse code. His shoulders disappeared into his body, leaving a gentle unbroken line from his neck to his elbow. He looked like something held together in a sack, drained of all shape. A husk.  A vague feeling of foreboding clung to me. We were up against a medical monolith, a rehab machine whose crowning purpose seemed to be to strip us of all expectation as quickly as possible and then set about helping us be at peace with the hopeless situation. Watching my accomplished, virile father fight against the fear of being buried alive loosed in me a force I had never known before. I could tell Sharon was feeling it too. In that moment we became the Furies, those mythical winged women who punish crimes against their kin by hounding their victims until they die in madness.   Frank, another recreational therapist, made the first mistake early the next day.   Dad was slumped in a pink plastic chair with thin metal arms outside the speech therapist’s office waiting for his thirty-minute session. Sharon and I stood next to him--not because we wanted to stand but because there was only one chair. Frank, a good six feet tall, dressed in boot-cut Levis, a tooled leather belt, and a denim shirt, moseyed on up to Dad, put his hand out, and bellowed as if calling cattle, “Hello, Mr. Edsall! Say! Who’ve you got here with you?” Dad looked at us. His eyebrows drew together in concentration and worry. He looked down at his hands, his fingers rubbing the pads of this thumbs as if to conjure thoughts, words, names.   “Sh-sh-ar-ron,” he posed, feebly. Then he looked at me. Blank. Rubbing his thumbs smooth. He squeezed his eyes shut to focus his thoughts, and shook his head. He let out a long stream of exhausted breath and slumped even further down.   “Susan,” I offered, reaching for one of Dad’s hands to stop the rubbing. Frank plowed on.  “I heard you used to be a pilot! Well, you’ll never be able to do that again. But we’ll find something else for you to do.”  Sharon moved so quickly I was surprised I didn’t hear a sonic boom. She grabbed Frank by the elbow, her long red fingernails sinking into his biceps, wheeled him around on the heel of his cowboy boot, and yanked him down the hall. Had she been taller, she would have grabbed him by the ear or the hair.  “Dad is a pilot, Frank. He didn’t used to be a pilot.” She jabbed at his face, her polished fingernail like a red-hot stiletto. “Got that? He is a pilot.” She let that sink in. “If you tell him that he’ll never fly again you might as well cut his throat,” she snarled.   She stormed back, ablaze with righteousness.  “Took care of that,” she reported to me and Dad.   But Dad hadn’t even noticed Sharon’s departure or indignant return. He was probably still trying to absorb the ferocious fact that he used to be a pilot.   We never saw Frank again. But it hardly mattered. Each therapist pounded out the same monotonous drumbeat. Dad would not recover much. He would learn to find happiness in the subtler things in life like playing checkers and making meals without using the stove.  They gave him a set of cards that said “Please be patient. I have had a stroke and have trouble speaking,” trying to persuade Dad to gambol around the therapy room role-playing how he would use these in public situations so he wouldn’t be mistaken for a degenerate. “You wouldn’t want people to think you were on drugs or an alcoholic would you?” the therapist asked Dad.  The next day in Sunnyside we met Ann, an occupational therapist. She sprang into the room as if propelled by a slingshot. She was tall and athletic, wearing red sport pants with a white racing stripe down the side, white tennies with soles that wedged out at the bottom for a good solid grip, and a T-shirt tucked into her elastic waistband. A thick elastic band held her long dark hair in a high ponytail that bounced and swung when she walked. Her cheeks were naturally rosy, her lips soft. I could just tell she ate a big bowl of cereal for breakfast, plunging her oversized spoon into it with gusto and slurping. I imagined there would be lots of jobs she’d be perfect for--doggie day care, summer camp for overweight children, handing out food samples at Costco.  “Hel-lo, Mr. Edsall!” she yelped. “How are we doing today, huh? Okey dokey! We’ll work on balance today, okay? Ba-lance? O-kay?”   “Can I talk to you for a minute?” It was my turn. Ann followed me out of the room. I turned to face her. “Dad’s not retarded and he’s not deaf. You’re talking to him like he’s both and it’s not helping.” “Patients like us to be peppy and encouraging!” Ann chirped. “It gives them a shot in the arm!” She bounced up and down on her toes, grinning.   When they weren’t engaging Dad in activities he found irrelevant, like building birdhouses out of tongue depressors, they scheduled him in group activities that simply gave him the creeps.  Dad would roll his eyes before going into a session, or give a rip roaring Bronx cheer after a session to let us know what he thought. We got the message. Amy, a recreational therapist with a big red dog, wanted Dad to sit in a circle and try to talk with other stroke patients about how they were feeling. In an admirable effort of orchestrated mismanagement we ensured that Dad missed every one of those sessions. We didn’t even tell him about them.   My growing fear was that Dad was beginning to believe in his own disability. The humdrum expectations of the medical professionals, people we’d counted on to be the experts, were debilitating. I continued to press for answers. How long do people improve before they level off? Does recovery progress through predictable stages? What’s the best we can hope for? All I got was a contemptibly fainthearted vagueness.   We soon came to realize that, as a family, we had to be our own lodestar. We had to set our compass on one destination: Dad would fly again. On this we chose to agree.  We didn’t talk as a family about whether Dad would fly again. Ever. To do so would have been a bald act of betrayal. Dad flew. That’s how we understood who we were as a family and who Dad was as a man. It wasn’t something you questioned, it was just a fact. Like agreeing on gravity. Sharon had already staked her claim that Dad would fly again in her shoot-out with Frank, coming at it full throttle and straight from the heart. Mom was reliably in the camp of thinking positive, so she didn’t have to struggle to believe with all her unwavering might that Dad would fly.   That left me. And Dad.   I tried to imagine what life would be like for him--and us--if he didn’t return to piloting. There was nothing--nothing--to imagine. I needed some time to think--alone--and found the hospital’s family lounge. It was mercifully empty, and I slouched onto the beige plastic couch. A wiggly brown water stain on the ceiling framed my view.   It’s at times like these that many people want to pray. Right then I was among them. I wanted to be in a soothing, roomy chapel, able just to pray and feel awash in grace and composure and certainty. But I couldn’t believe in some well-intentioned Somebody who didn’t have enough power to keep things afloat in the first place but would pitch in now that we were drowning. While I couldn’t bring myself to pray, I was willing to say out loud what I wanted, and if God wanted to eavesdrop, there wasn’t anything I could do about it anyway.  I stared at the water stain and said out loud, “Dad will fly again.” I had planned for that to be my little ritual, my mark of commitment, the declaration I would utter and then hustle back to Dad’s room to resume my duties. But it didn’t go like I thought it would. Quite unexpectedly, my heart started to race and great waves of feeling made me shudder and shake. “Dad will fly again,” I forced out again, repeating this over and over until I was overtaken by racking sobs that left me with the hiccups.   In the strangest way, I felt that only in this very moment had I truly chosen to be in this thing--that I was no longer snatched away from my real life to fight a reluctant battle but choosing to take this trip, wherever it might lead. I had no idea how we would ever get Dad to fly again. I just knew we had to figure out how to make it happen.   Then I grabbed the Kleenex and blew my nose. Now we just needed Dad. He needed to choose to be in this thing too.   The next day, yet another occupational therapists, bounded toward where Dad and I waited in the hallway, Dad in the single pink plastic chair, me on the floor beside him. Mike looked like he belonged on a box of Cheerios. His blond hair was cropped close to his ears, his striped cotton shirt tucked neatly into pressed khaki pants. His polished brown loafers made the slightest squeak when he walked. His face was soft and pink, and he smelled pleasantly of soap and mouthwash and deodorant.   He held out his hand to Dad in greeting. “Hello, Mr. Edsall! I’m Mike! Gosh! I hear you’re a pilot! That’s a heck of a talent, isn’t it?” Dad leaned forward, his elbows resting on his thighs, his hands clasped between his knees. He was dog-tired. He gripped his hands together, the muscles in his face tightened, and his head dropped. His eyes squeezed shut in the by now familiar effort just to talk. “That’s h - h - h - is - tory.” Then he exhaled, the thought completed, his face as lonesome as a burned-down barn.  “Well, I’ll see you at three o’clock! Just wanted to stop by and say hi!” Mike slapped Dad on the knee and hurried down the hall to another appointment.  I crawled over to Dad. I knelt in front of him and I grabbed both his hands in mine.   “Look at me, Dad. Look at me.” I waited. He stared at the floor. I couldn’t control the trembling of my elbows and knees. Never before had I been so intimate with my father. Ours was a sort of man-to-man relationship. I was much more likely to sock him in the arm to show my affection than give him a long warm hug. He returned the affection by routinely poking his stubby finger in my ear and making an irritating swishing sound whenever I was engrossed in a book. I had never grabbed both his hands and looked him square in the eyes, except maybe when I was four and I stood on his feet, holding tight so we could dance together.   “Look at me,” I pleaded, clutching his hands. I waited, the silence piling up by the pound, pressuring me to abandon the promise I was about to make. “Please Dad,” I whispered, willing myself not to cry.   Slowly, Dad moved his head up so his eyes met mine. Was he afraid of me? Of what I might say? “It’s not history, Dad, and you have to stop saying that. You will fly again. I know that. I promise. You are a pilot and you will fly.”  “I’m outta luck, h - h - h - oney. Bet - ter get u - u - u - sed t - t - to. . .it.”  “No, Dad, you are not out of luck. I know you will fly. You have to believe that too, do you hear me? You have to believe that you will fly. Do you understand me?”  I was on my knees. I didn’t know if I was begging or praying or raving. Maybe they’re all the same thing. But I wouldn’t let go of my father’s hands. My pink fingers, the nails ragged from years of nervous chewing, enveloped by his big calloused hands, couldn’t have looked that much different than when I was a child. “You will fly again, Dad. In one year. You will fly. You will fly me for my birthday. We will do this together. Okay? I promise.”  Silence. Dad stared down at the floor.   I leaned forward. I would not let go. “Okay, Dad?”  Dreadful, lengthy silence spooled out before me.  “Please, Dad. One year.”  I could feel his warm hands tighten around my own. He squeezed them hard, decisively, and then looked up.  “O-k-k-k-ay. Wuh - wuh - one year.” He was spent.