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A Letter Home
By Steve Delafield
Email: stopshockdallas at aol dot com
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February 21, 2008

Dear Mother and Father,

Greetings. I pray this letter finds you and finds you well. As I compose this page, the dogs lie around me like casualties on a battlefield in an old Civil War photograph, and three feet of snow blankets the Earth, with sage and cedar poking through the snow like stubble on an old man's chin. You will be glad to hear the animals and I are in good health—for nothing is more important than good health. Huckleberry, for the most part, is master of his bladder and bowels, and the cats, only infrequently, pee in the corner or, seemingly strategically, regurgitate amorphous blobs, so that I might step in them. They are good companions—all. It is a privilege and a sublime joy.

I flew into Colorado on 30 December, and I was forunate to land at all. Our pilot did a wonderful job of lowering our expectations. About an hour in the skies outside of Vail, he announced that it was unlikely our plane could land at our destination due to poor visibility. But, we would go anyway, he said. His resoluteness in the face of slim odds and daunting weather was, somehow, both reassuring and disquieting, but it helped us forget about the surliness of the flight attendants. The Federal Aviation Administration mandates a minimum three-mile visibility to land and, alas, visibility was only one mile in Vail, according to our pilot. The good news was that visibility could improve, however unlikely, by the time we got there. So, not to worry, the good pilot said, and, besides, if visibility had not improved, we had enough fuel to "fly in a holding pattern" for several hours.

"Flying in a holding pattern" sounds better than "flying in circles," so being reasonable people, we were happy. Furthermore, if the weather failed to cooperate, the pilot said, we would get a free trip to Denver that very day, which was exciting because many people have never been to Denver, and some people say that Denver is the real "Gateway to the West" and not St.Louis, as St.Louisians are apt to claim.

Despite our exciting prospects of flying in a holding pattern and getting a free trip to the real "Gateway to the West," many passengers began grumbling, grumbling being an inalienable right, as most Americans know, perhaps our most cherished right. At first, the grumbling annoyed me, but then I realized that the pages of history are littered with great grumblers—from Socrates, to Jesus, to Thomas Paine, to Jack Benny. Grumblers have paved the way for the advancement of Civilzation. On the other hand, it occurred to me that the Buddha (a grumbler in his own right) said that desire was at the root of all suffering, which brings me back to our pilot.

The firmament favored us that day, for the skies did clear, and we did land, but I was impressed with the way the pilot handled the collective psyche of the passengers. I suspect that he had the secret, esoteric knowledge that joy is inversely proportional to expectation, at the very least, in regard to the airline industry. Think of it as the Prodigal Son Theorem. The pilot, through his artful use of lowered expectation, gave the grumblers a reprieve from their fears and maximized their joy. A nifty feat. That's what happened, Dear Parents, on 30 December 2007.

love,
your son

About the author:
I am an itinerant farm laborer, but hope to be a full-time mendicant very soon.