As we mill about, I await the emergence of the ghosts of Allied pilots from the low-hanging mist, luminescent from the sun's golden rays. It is easy to fall back in time here. With its great farm-like expanse of dewy grass, bordered by low-lying pine trees, the Robert J. Miller Airpark could easily be a World War II airfield in England, say the base at Nuthampstead in Hertfordshire. Say that the date is April 25, 1945, and say that I am a B-17 pilot preparing for the bombing run over the Skoda Armament works in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia.

Hands clasped behind our backs, we listen attentively as Tim runs through the pre-flight checks. All loads are stashed, all doors are secure, and all systems are operational and ready. Up the ten-foot ladder we go, entering the plane via the rear side door. If I were 82nd or 101st Airborne on D-Day, I would be struggling to ascend with my heavy chute and leg bag, but today's ascension is feather-light. Walking inside the plane is like going home. As if I saw them yesterday, I mark the Berlin Airlift exhibits on the walls and in the glass cases; the jerry cans and oil drum strapped to the floor; the seven passenger seats, three doubles and one single up front on the right; the mannequin of the little Berlin boy from 1948; and the sacks of flour and coal.

Take-off is smooth and effortless. No great thrust, no steep climb, just a gentle lift and we are airborne. As Steve had warned would happen, the acrid smell of burning rubber fills the plane, generated by the hot front wheel pulling up inside the nose and coming to rest on the stop plate. Within moments the seatbelt light goes off and I head for the cockpit. It is an unusual and lovely advantage to be able to move about a plane at will.

I join Lothar in the cockpit. "160 knots," he informs me authoritatively, "a little faster than my Audi, ja?" I smile at his proud comment, studying the commemorative airplane pins liberally decorating his baseball cap. Lothar clearly loves airplanes, and he confirms my immediate sense of the professor in him when he asks if I know our flying altitude. "Twenty-five hundred feet," he answers with no small degree of satisfaction, correcting my estimate of one-thousand. There is a discernible element of brinksmanship in Lothar, which I intuitively ascribe to his perception of my youth and inexperience, and his Germanic blood. Being of like heritage, I am naturally agitated to engage this Teutonic tutor, but instead seat myself at the navigator's table and busy myself with a flight map, tracing my finger from New Jersey down to our destination of Suffolk, in the southeastern corner of Virginia. After a spell, I stand next to Lothar and gaze out of the cockpit window, and then after chatting with Tim and Kevin for a while, excuse myself to make some notes.

It feels rude and impractical, and above all else counter-journalistic, to desire isolation from my fellow travelers, but while I look forward to much interaction later, I am suddenly hotly possessed by the need to be alone. Fatigue cannot be discounted, given that Ray and I left Brooklyn at three in the morning to make the airfield in time, but like Garbo, I just vant to be alone.

Alone with my dream date. Her propellers, the inboards not two feet from my face through the window, and her wavy rhythm, throbbing through my body, lull me into a trance. If you are the sort who likes to fall asleep to the wind, or music, or a sound machine, then the pulsing of the C-54 is for you. If only I could reliably record these sensations for playback every night in bed, but that is the beauty of it all, that these sensations can only truly be experienced while airborne. Not the irony or the sadness of it, but the beauty. Rare is rare. Rare is infrequent, rare has unique value. That, I suppose, is why I need to be selfish for a moment or two here. I fix my nose to the window and stare at the vast landscape below; as farms and trees and dirt paths and toy cars and rivers and factories dreamily pass by below, I feel weightless, free of the C-54's wings and fuselage.

I am the one flying.

* * *

A loud ping pierces my reverie. As Steve had also warned, the oil drum might pop due to the pressure change. Dream over, time to engage. Rare can also describe fleeting. I am more relaxed now, and besides, I expect there will be other moments to steal throughout the weekend. Lothar summons me over to point out a giant C-5 cargo plane flying above us, ("most likely from Dover AFB"), and then offers me a donut, which precipitates a perceptible thaw between us. "Vielen Dank," I reply, but he states that he does not want to speak German. He has flown with Tim on the C-54 before, and is a regular attendee at air shows. And yes, he is, or was, a teacher. I now understand that I am on Lothar's turf as much as Tim's, and that is fine. They have their own specialized relationships with her.

* * *

I study some of the exhibits that I missed last time, such as the "Summary of Russian Harassment Incidents in the Air Corridors to Berlin, August 10, 1948 to August 15, 1949," and the tribute to the thirty-one American flyers who died during the Airlift, including the poor fellow who walked into a propeller. There are so many different ways to die during a war. Many young pilots, for instance, never made it out of the United States, perishing during training. I have heard many stories to this effect, such as the demise of the young flier at an airfield in Nevada, sitting upright in his cockpit following his fatal crash landing, his blond hair fluttering in the breeze. One way or another, though, they all did their part.

* * *

After flying over the Norfolk, Virginia naval base and rounding Virginia Beach, we begin our descent into Suffolk Municipal Airport. Looking down the length of the plane at the steeply approaching airfield through the open cockpit door is exhilarating. Tim skillfully brings the plane down, cuts the outboard engines and taxis in.

It is just before eight o'clock on a blue summer morning in Virginia, and I am thrilled to discover that we are not the only warbird here today. I can see a PBY Catalina in the distance. Perhaps she flew anti-submarine patrol over the Bay of Biscay. That twin-propeller bird over there, dressed in combat green and wearing RAF markings, is a Lockheed Lodestar. I have her ferrying RAF brass between quiet zones in England. And that plane with the snarling mouth-full of sharp teeth being towed out of one of the hangars looks like a Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. I'll place her in North Africa, 1943, with the American Air Force's first all-black unit, the 99th Fighter Squadron.

The year 2004 rises like a weakly blown bubble before evaporating. While there are naturally plenty of reminders of the present about, I am now comfortably and squarely in the past.

* * *

We assist Tim and the crew with setting up for visitors to the C-54, and after affixing metal poles bearing the flags of the four countries involved in the Airlift-the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France-to a mobile gantry, Ray and I set off to explore. Picking a direction is easy. Two men are towing a Navy Corsair, its wings folded up, out of the small hangar at the western end of this small, tidy airfield.

We discover a small treasure trove of warbirds in the immaculate hangar with its highly polished floor, and introduce ourselves to Donald Anklin, who gives us a brief tour of the planes. Don is General Manager of Fighter Factory, a local organization engaged in the discovery and restoration of World War II military propeller airplanes. The collection also includes a North American B-25J, with machine guns poking menacingly out of its nose, a Douglas A-26 Invader, and a British Hurricane MkXII. The PBY Catalina out on the runway is from 1943; the Corsair is from 1945. We jump in the back of Dave's pick-up truck and he drives us to another hangar on the other side of the airfield. There are more marvels here. A Vickers Supermarine Mark IX Spitfire, the heroic plane of the Battle of Britain, and one of its foes, a German Messerschmitt Bf-109; a Russian Polikarpov I-16, once the mainstay of the Soviet Air Force; and most ominously, sitting in a wooden frame stenciled with Wehrmacht markings, a VI Buzz Bomb, the unnamed flying scourge that wreaked havoc on London and other British cities during WWII. Disarmed as it is, the V1 is no less foreboding than in its active days, and a strange sense of unease seems to exist among all these hangar-fellows. They were all enemies once.

* * *

Returning to the C-54, we introduce ourselves to a tall man wearing a World War II Veteran's cap. Bob Pocklington served with the U.S. Army's 1253rd Engineers Combat Battalion in World War II. He tells us about standing on one side of the Rhine while American B-17s flattened the city of Basel on the other, and then how he and 1,800 other men constructed a pontoon bridge across the river in fifty-seven hours. We talk about the Battle of Huertgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge and when the topic turns to Normandy, he relates the time he met Ken Small. Do we know who Ken Small is? As Bob informs us, Ken Small was a British innkeeper who, after discovering American high school rings and fragments of uniforms washing up on the beaches on the southwestern coast of England back in the sixties, dedicated himself to remembering the American soldiers lost in Operation Tiger. Yes, we do know, for we just happened to have seen a History Channel documentary on the subject the week before. The ill-fated Exercise Tiger had been a practice run before the Normandy invasion. 749 American soldiers had perished when marauding German E-Boats had attacked their defenseless convoy in the night. By many accounts, the U.S. Army had subsequently covered up the incident. Ken Small had seen to exposing the tragedy, as well the raising of a Sherman tank submerged offshore, which he then installed as a memorial near the beach.

"Well, that was Ken Small. He did a good job remembering those poor soldiers. He died earlier this year."

We thank Bob for his time and service. The metal and wood machines of dominion and defense back in the hangars are storytellers of one kind, testaments to the engineering of war; Bob is a guardian and curator of another kind, remembering the human side of conflict. There are as many stories of war as those who suffered and died; with so many more stories lost than remembered, it is imperative to preserve any and all memories.

Tim motions us to come over.

"I have someone important for you to meet," he says as we follow him up the gantry into the C-54. "This is our good friend Maurice Jackson," announces Tim. "He flew in the Berlin Airlift, and he has some good stories to tell."

* * *

The only available space to show the reel, as far as we can tell, is in the lounge on the ground floor. Maurice threads the reel into his vintage projector, also from 1948, while Ray and I move furniture around, set up the projector, and close the blinds. However, we cannot make the room dark enough, and seeing the images is difficult. When Maurice announces that he also has a copy on videotape, Ray and I launch into action. As we search every room in the building for a video player, I recall the scene in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" when the UFO team, requiring a map to verify suspected earth coordinates, bursts into an office, dislodges a large globe from its moorings, and rolls it into the control room. Their impatient energy is ours as we fly into the conference room, unplug and remove all extraneous items from the rolling audio-visual cart, and then hustle the cart into the lounge where a small crowd has now gathered. A real Steven Spielberg moment. He would appreciate what we are doing, I think to myself, he would enjoy this. The airport administrator is not too pleased, but our effort is completely justified, for Maurice's silent, color footage is a remarkable look at a time and place still throbbing from the aftermath of war. The first half of the film captures the essence of the Berlin Airlift: planes being loaded, planes taking off from the Rhein-Main Air Base, planes in the air, the view of Templehof Airport from the cockpit, planes barely clearing the apartment houses on the edge of the airfield, planes landing. There is young Maurice, and several of his fellow pilots. There they are, handsome, smiling, smoking, active, fifty-six years ago. The rest of the film starkly records Berlin itself. Citizens shoveling debris into wheelbarrows. The bullet-riddled statue of Frederick the Great. The Russian sentry scowling at the camera lens as Maurice shoots footage of the Russian World War II Memorial. The white-gloved policeman directing traffic. Children in costume, playing. The headquarters of the Gestapo. Hitler's bunker.

Mr. Spielberg really should be here.

* * *

This is like being fully in control of a dream. I did not really have seventy-five bucks to spend, but I had to do it. Maurice's film cast such a spell on me that I dared not allow it to dissipate, so I paid my money, strapped on a leather cap and flying goggles, and climbed into the front seat of a Stearman PT-17 two-seat bi-plane, the favorite trainer plane of American pilots in World War II. The pilot is a member of the Commemorative Air Force, and he ably takes me into the warm afternoon sky. The simplicity of this plane is remarkable. She flies without a care in the world and I go with her, looking straight down at the church steeple in town as we pivot in a tight circle. For twenty minutes, I am a young hotshot pilot from Brooklyn training down in, let' say, Ocala, Florida.

The smell of the orange groves rising from below is intoxicating, but nothing compared to the sensation of executing one barrel roll and snap roll and prolonged spin and Immelman roll and Chandelle after another. I push her to 8,000 feet, and now I can see the Gulf of Mexico off to one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. When you gotta fly, you gotta fly.

The flight but those twenty minutes were so perfect, so beautiful, that they will last forever.

* * *

Back at the C-54, I help Ray set up for what should be a dramatic photograph. While I keep the surrounding area clear, Ray directs the crew onto the wings of the C-54 and then into position, each man atop an engine. They look great up there, standing tall and proud against the blue sky in their bright red suits with their arms folded, and I cannot wait to see the end result.

As the afternoon draws to a close, we meet another guardian of the past. Bill Mizell's father, Willie Warren Mizell, served in the 9th Infantry Division. Willie went through the hell of the Bulge and experienced the glory of crossing the Rhine at Remagen. Bill is kind enough to give me copies of a map showing the 9th Infantry's crossing of the Rhine at Remagen in March of 1945, and a map entitled "The Route of the Ninth Division Thru the NATOUSA & ETOUSA, Nov. 8, 1942-Aug 1945." He also has a 1946 Ford painted olive drab and outfitted to resemble a U.S. Army staff car from World War II. For our amusement, Bill dons a World War II infantryman's helmet and drives the car in tight circles while activating its woo-woo siren. Bill's pride and love for his father is profound, and all the more poignant in light of Willie's passing away last year.

Old wars can be remarkably current, especially for those who were not even there.

* * *

With the afternoon light fading and people starting to leave, we help Tim and the crew breakdown the display table and stow the equipment in the plane.

"Here's another friend for you to meet," says Tim.

Colonel Richard Vogel also flew in the Berlin Airlift. He has little time to speak, in favor of a standing appointment, but I take down his contact information. I have no doubt that our eventual "flying time" with Colonel Vogel will be engaging.

We walk en masse to one of the hangars for the evening's festivities. Tim had previously mentioned a dinner-dance on the base, complete with a 1940's style band; the band is actually just Bob, a one-man band complete with synthesizer, snapping fingers, and a host of selections from the '40's. I shut my eyes and swear that Harry James and his orchestra are here, and further, that I am a GI twirling my girl around in a happier moment before departing for war.

I hear it from so many veterans with whom I speak.

We had no idea where we were going, or what we were getting into.

The cuisine is southern Virginia's best: vinegar-rich pulled pork, fried chicken, hush puppies, potato salad, and hot rolls, all washed down with plenty of cold beer. And as we walk out into the cool night, painted pink and orange by the fading sun, I turn around and see the silhouettes of couples still dancing on the hangar floor.

The forty-five minute drive to our motel passes by in a trance-like weave of images from the day. We all check in and say goodnight, ruefully marking the late hour as Tim announces tomorrow morning's six o'clock sharp departure. Still, this is hardly a weekend for complaining. In fact, as the History Channel documentary on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising reminds us as we settle in, if you know your history and you know your war, you have a sharper appreciation of what to complain about. One thing you certainly do not moan about is lack of sleep.

* * *

Beautiful bird, it is another beautiful morning, but you'll have to bear with me for a while. Rough night's sleep, you see. I heard the sound of that Spitfire engine in my head all day, as well as the drone of that V1, and the two came together behind my closed eyes. I shot most of those damn flying bombs down before they dropped on London, but a couple got away, and the results were tragic. So give me a few moments to recalibrate my head.

"Our flying time to Danville is two hours," announces Tim at the pre-flight briefing, "and the good folks there have requested that we circle the town."

I am grateful that everyone is subdued as we fly towards Danville. It is communion time again with the plane, time to return to my womb of deep thought. Again the undulating waves of energy pulsing from her engines hypnotically carry me off, adding a great weight to my eyes and pulling me anesthetically into a dimly light realm of half-consciousness. It is her way of softly speaking to me, her way of softening her metal to flesh and turning my flesh to metal so that we are one. In this state, I see, as if it were a physical form, the beauty and freedom of flight.

And when we reach Danville and Tim puts the plane into a great sweeping arc above the town's streets and bridges and warehouses, my mind reaches the very center of the beauty of flight. Looking down her great shiny wing emblazoned with the American star at the town below, imagining what we must look like from the ground, is enthralling beyond words.

* * *

The first thing I notice after deplaning at the Danville Regional Airport are the two teenagers in military fatigues. Wearing crew cuts and adult faces, they are members of the local unit of the Civil Air Patrol. They can only be fifteen or sixteen years old, and this triggers thoughts of other young Americans in combat uniform. Did they look so young going off to Guadalcanal, to Normandy, to New Guinea, so innocent at Pork Chop Hill and Khe Sanh, so eager in Baghdad, Najaf and Fallujah? The sight of these young Americans in uniform is disconcerting. Their service is to be heralded, naturally, but it is the echo of generations of past lost youth, as well as the eternal potential for the loss of future generations, that is troubling. For all of the world that you see in New York City, one thing you rarely see is fresh-faced kids in military uniform. Seeing these youngsters, and more besides, reminds me of George Orwell's observation that "…war is not meant to be won…it is meant to be continuous."

I have to shake this head off, but there are triggers all around, like the four Vietnam-era helicopters to my right, and the giant C-5 transporter to my left. Ray and I head off in search of coffee.

* * *

Breakfasting in the conference room of the administration building, we look over the program for today's Southside Sky-Fest air show, which includes the Red Baron Pizza Squadron, the Hawaiian Jet Fire Truck, and the Lima Lima Flight Team, the only all civilian stunt team in the country. We have a chance to learn more about Lima Lima when we are joined for coffee by team member Gary Donovan. Gary, a commercial airline pilot, tells us about the team; he also invites us to make a future date to interview his uncle, who flew twenty-six missions as a bombardier on a B-24 in World War II. "My uncle has a map," he relates, "full of colored pushpins. The blue ones show the places he visited. The red ones show the places he bombed. And the green ones show places that he visited and bombed." Gary then takes us outside and introduces us to rest of the Lima Lima team. There is no mistaking the company of fly-boys, especially daredevil stunt flyers; you can just see it in their faces, and the pleasure of our conversation is all in listening and observing. In an hour or so, they are going to be flying headlong at each other in tight formation.

We stop by the helicopter display, presented by the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association, featuring a Huey, a Loach, a Huey Gunship, and a Cobra. The little boys merrily clambering on and off the stretcher inside the Huey do not know how lucky they are. There were other little boys of a different time who, by sheer accident of birth, came of age when it was time to fight, and it is their yelling and screaming voices I hear, praying and fighting for their lives and sanity in smoke-choked, bullet-riddled sanctuaries like these.

I will never stop being grateful for the year of my birth. 1965 has spared my life thousands of times over.

* * *

A sizeable crowd is building. There must be at least a hundred people sitting in deck chairs and milling about directly underneath the wings and fuselage of the C-54.

"I have a mission for you," says Steve, intercepting me. "See that fellow with the long hair? I just caught him lighting up under the plane…"

He does not have to say anymore. I go on cigarette patrol, as in stopping people from lighting up underneath hundreds of gallons of aviation fuel. Within moments, I spot my first offender.

"Plenty of gas right above your head, sir. Our heads, sir, in fact, as well all these mamas and babies around here. I'd sure appreciate it if you'd smoke that somewhere else."

Not really the way I speak, but we might have a real problem if I gave it to him Brooklyn-style. His eyes narrow into a Clint Squint and his ears mysteriously go deaf, but I play back an ace with a fixed eye and polite silence. Before my patrol is over, I catch five people in the act. Apparently nobody has heard the frequent P.A. announcements regarding the dangers of smoking with so many laden fuel tanks around. Perhaps the people missed the announcements in the midst of the tinny songs celebrating the joys of flight and the righteous songs celebrating the joys of Jesus. It is a strange mix, young soldiers and war machines and religion, but there is no mistaking the message down here in southern Virginia.

* * *

I half expect a punch to follow the tap on my shoulder, from some aggrieved smoker, but it is Lothar.

"You wanted to know about my time in the war."

Earlier, I had asked Lothar if we might spend a few minutes talking about his life.

He grew up in West Berlin. Fascinated by flying as a child, he used to ride his bicycle to Templehof Airport to watch the planes. Drafted into the Germany Army as an eighteen year old in 1942, he saw action with the 168th Infantry Division against the Russians in the Battle of Kursk in the Ukraine. "They simply threw us together. There was little camaraderie and no unity. None of us wanted to be there, but we had no choice. It was so cold, so very cold. We had few weapons and fewer supplies. I remember this one fellow performing reconnaissance on a bloody bicycle. I was injured several times, including being shot by a machine pistol."

Lothar returned to Berlin in March of 1945. Acknowledging that he was lucky to get out just ahead of the Russians, Lothar was captured by the Americans in Leipzig. He remembers playing baseball and exchanging cigarettes with the American soldiers. "Rather silly, isn't it," he says wistfully, "to be playing games, with so many dead? Still, I was happy that it was over. For the most part, we all just wanted it to be over."

In 1949, Lothar boarded an RAF C-47 at Gatow Airport in Berlin, bound for Lübeck en route to a ship in Hamburg that would take him to the United States. After a missed approach at Lübeck, the plane crashed by what was called CFIG, or Controlled Flight Into Ground, due to rain and darkness. Eight of the twenty-four passengers aboard died in the fiery crash. The plane had gone down in the Russian zone; imagining the crash a British plot, the Russian soldiers were less than friendly to Lothar and the other survivors. They refused to believe that Lothar was bound for a small liberal arts school in Wisconsin, and instead asserted that he was a spy. Luckily, they took no further action, and Lothar was released to the British a few days later. He went on to become a college professor in the United States.

"Thank you, Lothar," I say when he is finished, "I appreciate hearing your story."

"My story is a small one," he replies, and I take that as a signal to say no more. From his perspective, perhaps these are times best forgotten. From my perspective, his story reminds me once again that I ought to be eternally grateful that I did not have to go to war as an eighteen-year old, especially a war in which I did not believe or want to fight.

* * *

Equipped with two Rolls Royce Viper jet engines and tires rated for 450 mph, the Hawaiian Eagle Jet Fire Truck is perfectly hilarious, blasting back and forth along the runway with a giant flame erupting from its tail.

After a World War I dogfight between radio-controlled Sopwith Camel and Fokker models, and a fine display of aerial trimming by the Flying Lawnmower, the two-ship aerobatic Red Baron Pizza Squadron dramatically opens the air show. From the moment the two World War II-era Stearmans take off, I am rapturously lost in the sound of their engines, in their smoke trails, and in their dream-like loops and arcs. The pilots execute the moves that I could only imagine during my Stearman ride yesterday: wing-overs, barrel rolls, hammerhead turns, inverted spins. I alternate opening and shutting my eyes, allowing sight, and then sound, to guide my imagined memories. I go back in time at least eighty years, before advancing forward through the barnstorming days, the World War I days, the Golden Age of flying, days, the World War II days. These two arcing, swooping angels drawing shapes in the sky are telling the story of men and machines long dead but never forgotten, never silenced.

In his sleek, high performance Walter Extra 300, Charlie Schwenker streaks up and down the sky. According to the air show literature, the Extra 3000 is built for a 3,200 feet per minute climb rate, and I expect that is precisely what Charlie is demonstrating. The forces inside his cockpit, known only to him, must be monumental. He is all alone up there, in the rapture of his own glass-encased heaven.

The Lima Lima Flight Team has been out of sight following their take-off fifteen minutes ago, but here they come, six bright lights approaching from the east. Painted in original Navy training yellow, the team executes several formation configurations, including the six ship wedge, the double arrowhead, the basic finger four, and the diamond. Pushing the envelopes of machine, skill and sheer fearlessness with each breathtaking move, Gary Donovan and his colleagues hold the crowd in their sway. I envy their view of the earth, upside down, sideways, rocketing up, plummeting down.

I'll bet each one of these flyers will tell me the same thing, if I ask them why they do it. They loved airplanes as children, and never looked back.

* * *

As the show winds down, I conduct some informal interviews of visitors exiting the C-54. One family haughtily complains about having had to pay for the visit.

"First we pay admission, and then we have to pay again?"

The five dollars she paid for her husband and two children to go aboard the plane supports the Foundation and makes its educational mission possible. The woman continues to grumble even as she walks away. I ask two children, ages eleven and thirteen, for their impressions of the plane. "Old and big," is their reply. I inform the next young visitors-after clearing with their parents first, naturally-that I want each of them to tell me one thing they learned about the Berlin Airlift when they leave. These star performers do very well. One tells me the total number of Russian harassment incidents during the airlift-733--and another tells me the name of the "Chocolate Flyer"-Lt. Gail Halvorsen, the pilot who personally arranged the drop of chocolates to the children of Berlin. Above all else, the C-54 is a classroom, designed to remind present and future generations about the consequences of war, and how humanity can achieve as profoundly as it destroys.

* * *

"Time to go," announces Tim, and he means it, too. He wants to depart in thirty minutes.

After removing the "Bearlin" teddy bear from his perch, I look out of the cockpit window. Gazing out at the Vietnam helicopters, Lima Lima's T-34s, the Red Baron Squadron's Stearmans, the giant C-130, and all the people still gathered at the airfield, my mood grays along with the skies. I have been in a heightened state since three o'clock in the morning on Friday, with feet and eyes locked in as far back as 1914, but now it is time to fly back to 2004. Still, we are not quite done yet. The people are staying to watch us take off, and I can feel their anticipation. Better still, Tim will be circling back and dropping a wing to the crowd to say a proper farewell.

Once more, until the next time, I watch the engines fire up one by one. Once again, I shut my eyes and absorb every pulsating ounce of her four-way heartbeat. And when she takes off, I imagine once more that I am her, a beautiful flying bird.

I wave goodbye to the people as they wave to us, and again as we zoom past with the left wing down. They, too, love flying.

* * *

After we have flown over the glistening waters of Chesapeake Bay, I return to my seat and reflect on the weekend. The experience was so much richer for going the no-expectation, no-anticipation route, and allowing the people and the stories and the moments to come to me naturally. I did not know in advance that I would be spending half a day with Maurice Jackson, an esteemed veteran of the Berlin Airlift, or that I would be strapping on a leather cap and goggles and flying around in a PT-17 Boeing Stearman, like some eighteen year old patriot sixty years ago. I did not anticipate dreaming about buzz bombs and Spitfires, or seeing the fiery crash landing of a C-47 in Berlin.

She made all the dreams and thoughts possible, the C-54. She transforms me, along with all the events around me. She is the vehicle for education and understanding; by taking me back in time, she helps me understand my place in time.

* * *

There is one last gift before we land. Returning to the cockpit, I listen to Tim as he radios ahead to Hammonton Municipal Airport in Hammonton, New Jersey. He has some friends on the ground, and for their viewing pleasure, he will circle the airfield with the left wing dropped. The perspective is riveting, staring straight down out of my window on the pine trees below as Tim rounds the field. Moments later, we touch down and descend the ladder in the fading light. As we say farewell to each member of our weekend family, I catch sight of the Allied ghosts heading out to their B-17s and Lancasters and Spitfires and Mustangs, going off to engage the enemy once more.

* * *

Ray and I say little on the drive back to Brooklyn. Mission completed, we both know we are returning to our regular lives. Save the inevitable pre-Monday angst, however, we acknowledge that we have just spent a weekend making dreams come true, and that whatever gnawing hunger or thirst Monday morning may bring, we will have much on which to feast.

The night is hot and muggy. I switch on my Casablanca ceiling fan to the highest speed. Some nights I lie on my bed and imagine that I am Martin Sheen in the beginning of Apocalypse Now, staring up at the fan and seeing helicopters. Tonight though, the fan is one of the four propellers of the C-54, carving a hole in time and sweeping me back into the past.

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