SPOT the Perfect Gift
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Or … SPOT, the Perfect Gift.  It all depends on where you put the comma!

Before one becomes a parent, you have this fantasy vision of a bundle of joy arriving in your life, followed by 18 to 22 years of blood, sweat and tears (with lots of joyful moments thrown in, just to keep you going) getting your little cherub prepared to fly the coop.  Why the heck would they stay, since they’ve drained your bank account?  In this scenario, you’ll both be glad to see the last of each other and your job as the parent will be done.  Finis.  It will then be your turn to sleep blissful, worry-free nights and go about your business without a care in the world.

WRONG!  What you find out after they finish going to college, or traveling through Europe or guiding on the Colorado River, or whatever it is they choose to do after high school, is that you’re never done being a parent.  You’re never done worrying about them, and thinking about where they are and if they’re ok. Oh, maybe it’s not at the forefront of your mind, since hopefully they’ve acquired enough life skills to not fall and skin their knees at every bump in the road, but it is always there in the background.  Isn’t this exactly what my own parents warned me about?  Why don’t I ever listen?!

Then, every once in a while, you get an extra-worrisome child like mine.  I’m pretty sure this is Butterfly’s fault.  She use to shake her finger at me while saying, “I hope you get a daughter just like you!”  as I was racing out the driveway on my “wheels” at the time, an old nag of a horse named Gypsy.  She knew she would not see me again that day until darkness arrived, and she would have no idea where I was, mostly because I had no idea where I was going.  The world, when I was 12 or 13 or 14, was my oyster.  I had transportation, a girlfriend with a horse, and two river canyons to explore.  What more could a girl want?

Fast forward a few decades, and along comes Fifinella.  She seemed pretty normal at first; once we got past the little birth defect that required some sawing on her skull at age 4 months (I would tell the neurosurgeon at check-ups afterwards that I regretted not having him install a dimmer switch). 

Fifinella the day after surgery

The birth defect was craniosynostosis, which means some of her skull sutures were fusing at the wrong time (but don’t listen to me, go to the link for all the information).  It turned out that some of hers that were supposed to fuse at age 4 were starting to fuse at birth.  Long story short: The surgery was a complete success and we never looked back.

Fifinella was a spitfire and Butterfly’s only (smug) comment was, while I was tearing my hair out, “I think you got what you deserved.”

Still, life with Fifinella, for the most part, was pretty uneventful.  There were plenty of arguments, because she is nothing if not stubborn.  But she never wrecked the car, she never got a ticket, she never called from jail (at least she never called me)… we managed to get through the terrible teens without killing each other and I thought maybe, just maybe, I was home free.

I even had an inkling of what I thought she might be when she grew up.  From her earliest years in school, and I’m talking first, second and third grades here, she loved to teach.  The special education teacher would even “borrow” her from her classroom to help out in his class because she could get his students to do things that he couldn’t – like eat their lunch, for instance.  She just loved to help and show other kids how to do things.  I had this vision of little Fifinella being a school marm somewhere, a sort of Mother Goose, surrounded by lots of little kids.

Could I be more wrong?  Fast forward once again to Fifinella in college.  Now she’s playing rugby and taking flying lessons.  What the heck???!!  What happened to my little school marm?   And she’s not just taking flying lessons; she’s telling me she’s flat-out in love with flying.  She’s found her passion, she says.  I can’t say that surprised me, since there is a strong flying gene (another birth defect, perhaps?) on our side of the family.    It wasn’t long before she was following the air show circuit and she started bringing me the videos she took of one particular air show pilot named Sean D. Tucker.

She’d bring home video after video and make me sit and watch them with her.

“That’s how I want to fly, Mom!”

“Excuse me?  You want to fly upside down?!”  I’d ask her.  I didn’t want to admit to her that it looked like total fun!

“Yes!  And sideways, and spinning! “Doesn’t that just look like a blast?”

“What,” I thought to myself, “have I created?”

“Are you sure you can’t be happy with straight and level flying?  Are you sure you don’t want to fly for the airlines?” I checked one more time, trying to direct her along a safe career path.

“No way!” she said emphatically.  “I want to spin and dive like the birds!  I want to know everything the plane can do!  I want to be the plane!”

“Holy cannoli!” was I all I could think.

I have to take some responsibility for how things turned out, because I decided that it was probably best to find out once and for all how she would feel about this flipping-around-in-the-air business.  It took me weeks of dogging Mr. Sean D. Tucker, and I had to catch his wife on the phone to do it, but I finally managed to purchase an hour of his time as a Christmas gift for Fifinella.  It was, I think, the best gift I’ve ever given her.  Before the start of the next air show season, she spent a day at his hangar using up the hour of time.  She could only handle short flights because of the G-forces on her body.  She’d then rest for an hour or so and off they’d go again.  At the end of the day, she was sold, hook, line and sinker.  Sean assured me she had all the makings to be a very safe and excellent pilot (at the time she didn’t even have her private pilot rating) and told her she needed to go away and get all her pilot ratings, become an instructor, study like crazy, etc.

All of that was about 6 years ago and now she works for Sean as his business manager, ferrying planes to shows, selling Cubs, all while training to one day fly in the shows herself. 

And yes, she’s teaching, just like I thought she would.  Except she’s not safely tucked into a classroom at an elementary school somewhere.  No, she’s at the airport teaching people to fly.  Doesn’t she know that could get her killed?  How the heck do those students know how to land the plane?  I repeat, HOLY CANNOLI!  I repeat, could I have been more wrong?

Ferrying planes from show to show can, to put it in her words, “be kind of sketchy”.  You’re on a deadline and you have to deal with weather, which means either going around it, under it – or, when safety dictates, landing and waiting it out.  Safety always trumps deadlines.  These small aerobatic planes are kept as light as possible and don’t have a lot of the fancy electronic gadgetry (read “tracking devices and instrumentation”) that one is used to in large passenger planes.  All of this, of course, makes for gray hair in mothers.

All of this is a long way of leading up to me telling you about a new device on the market that I recently purchased for Fifinella and had implanted under her ribs.  Ok, not really, but I made her promise to keep it on her body when she’s flying so that I can track her every move.

It’s called a SPOT (http://www.findmespot.com), which is a combination GPS and satellite phone. 

Fifinella, call home!

This handy little device can be programmed to send email messages and text messages to cell phones so that the people who care about you know that you are ok as you travel.  You can also set up a website so that it will overlay your messages on Google Earth satellite and terrain maps.  You can program it to send a location message to the website (with latitude and longitude), or you can hit one of 3 buttons – one sends an “ok” message, one sends a “help” message to your friends, and one sends a “911” message to authorities, with your location (updated automatically every 5 minutes).

comforting words to live by

This is the first thing you see when you start to take your new SPOT out of its box.  Point taken.

I feel much better knowing that I can just log on to her SPOT website and watch her progress as she flits around the country in whatever plane she has commandeered on that particular day.  Since she won’t wear a tracking collar like garbage-can-raiding bears, this is the next best thing.

You, too, might want to look into it if you have a wandering or adventuresome loved one.  The peace of mind it brings is worth the price.