My sister Pam jumped out of a perfectly good airplane last Saturday. For her sixty-fourth birthday, her kids gave her the gift of a Tandem Skydiving Jump. Man, they must love her. Either that or she’s heavily insured. Seriously, though, it’s been on her bucket list for a while and she’s not one to shrink from danger. The weather was beautiful at West Tennessee Skydiving’s Wings Field outside of Whiteville, Tn. She was given extensive training (she watched an instructional video), then strapped to an experienced skydiver, flown up to about fourteen thousand, five hundred feet and then exited the aircraft. They were in freefall for about a minute. She liked that part the best. They zoomed towards the earth at about one hundred and twenty miles per hour. Then they popped the chute and glided around for another five minutes before they landed semi-gently on a soft, grassy field. She said she loved it. I think it’s pretty awesome, and I would love to do it myself this year. We’re both crazy like that. Must be genetic. Pam’s definitely my hero.
Gravity is a fact. There’s no way around it. You jump out of an airplane with just a silk (space-age polymer?) chute on your back you can be certain of one thing: you will make it to the ground. The question is just how fast, and how hard, you will meet it. There’s a ton of trust involved. Trusting the quality of the equipment. Trusting the person who is assembling and packing your chute. Trusting the readings on the instruments in the plane and altimeter on your wrist that tells you when to pull the rip cord. Most of all it’s trusting the people who trained you and then trusting yourself to know when to do the right things and when to do them.
Marriage is kind of like tandem skydiving. You strap yourself to someone you trust and you jump into life. You’re both going to go in the same direction, but how you get there and how hard it’s going to be is dependent upon the cooperation and coordination of the two people joined together. Laura Gail and I took our tandem jump on March 25th, 2012. Thirteen lucky years ago on last Wednesday we joined ourselves together and jumped out into life. I’ve not always made it easy for her, but she hasn’t cut me loose so far and I’m grateful. She’s never let me down and I’ve made it my goal in life to never let her down. Sometimes it’s like an exciting freefall, and sometimes it feels like we’re tangled up in each other’s risers, but we always manage to pull out of the troubles and get the chute open. Life keeps throwing bad weather and gremlins at us, but we pull together to get past them. We have our days of blue skies and lifting winds, too. Every single bit of the journey with her is worth it. One day we’ll land softly on the grass and look back at our life together and know that we did it all-together. Wild ride and all.
Solo jumping looks pretty cool, too. Some people handle life better solo. Me? I like someone to yell with as we fly into the ground. It soothes my soul.
Happy Anniversary, Laura Gail! May our skies always be crystal blue and fair weathered and may our chute always open!
Happy Landing, Pam! So glad you didn’t go “Splat”!
God bless Y’all!
Rolling Stones 