miss nuanced changes in our children’s lives as they get older.
Just before Christmas last year, I was off for a few days, and Lorrie and I took our daughters, Kate and Kelly, on a skiing vacation at Lake Tahoe. It was so nice to have this extended time with the girls when they weren’t rushing off to school and I wasn’t hours away from returning to the airport. It was just a perfect, relaxed vacation.
Tahoe has always held a special place in our hearts. When we take Interstate 80 and cross over the Donner Summit, a part of us feels like we’ve come home. There’s the smell of pine in the air. The sky is clear and crisp. It’s just invigorating.
We always try to stay at Northstar, the resort where both Kate and Kelly learned to ski when they were three years old. The resort resembles a European village with cobblestone walkways, and the family programs there are great. We have many wonderful family memories of visits there.
On that particular trip, the first big snowstorm of the season had ended the day before, and the trees were still heavy with fresh snow. Decorated for the holidays, Northstar was covered with little twinkling white lights in the trees. It had a real magical, fairy-tale feel. The lights, the snow, the European village.
Late one afternoon, we had just parked the car, and we decided to do some window-shopping before heading to dinner. It was very cold out, and we were all dressed in heavy jackets, gloves, and hats. We were walking into this valley of buildings, on this cobblestone walkway, when I noticed that the girls, twenty feet ahead of us, were arm in arm and skipping along the sidewalk, Kelly’s head on Kate’s shoulder. I was so happy to see this, to realize that they had come to a place, here in their early teens, where they could publicly show physical affection for each other. Siblings, of course, are sometimes at odds, and here they were expressing so effortlessly what they meant to each other.
I pointed them out to Lorrie. “Take a look at that,” I said. I thought I was noticing something very special and new.
Lorrie took my arm and smiled. “They’ve been doing that for five or six months now,” she said. “It’s just that you’ve missed it.”
She said she had frequently seen them walking in the mall, holding hands. She said it was happening very easily and naturally, and she had loved watching it.
I had never fully noticed this. Not until that afternoon. And I felt sadness at the realization of how much of their daily lives I had missed—their activities, their interactions. How could I have missed witnessing these acts of love between my daughters for all these months? Lorrie looked at me sympathetically and saw a sense of loss and remorse in my eyes.
I put my hand over my heart. It’s a gesture I sometimes fall back on when the girls do something endearing, or that I feel grateful about. It’s a sign between me and Lorrie, a reminder of how lucky we feel about our girls.
I know why it hit me so hard. This was almost like a dream come true. When the girls were very young, one wish Lorrie and I had for them was that they’d be close when they were older. Seeing them together like this was a wonderful realization; I felt like maybe we had done something right. But it was also a painful reminder to me that I am so often not present in my children’s lives.
Lorrie says this was one of those “pilot moments”—a pilot comes home and notices a change in his home or family—and seeing my mixed emotions was emotional for her, too.
I took Lorrie’s hand, and a few seconds later we made a right-hand turn and came upon a large plaza in the village. Laid out in front of us were twinkling lights. Holiday music was playing and people were ice-skating and roasting marshmallows. There was a large outdoor fire pit. I held tight to Lorrie’s hand and enjoyed all of it.
When I go over that day in my mind, I think of the girls, but I also think about Lorrie. I know what a loving mother she is. Yes, I’ve tried my best to instill values in the girls, to help them find more reasons to care about each other. But Lorrie is on the front line, nurturing them, setting an example, being there for them day and night when I am far away. I marvel at how she has created such a wonderful home life for our family.
I am fortunate to be her husband, and to have her as the mother of my children.
JULY 6, 1936, is a red-letter day for me, and not just because it’s the day federal air traffic control began operation under the Bureau of Air Commerce.
Yes, I’m taken with the history, but that day stands out for me on a more personal level. Fifty years later, on July 6, 1986, a fiftieth-anniversary celebration was held at the Oakland Air Route Traffic Control Center in Fremont, California. Organizers invited the public to tour the facility, to see where controllers direct the flow of air traffic over Northern California. Pacific Southwest Airlines agreed to send over a pilot and a flight attendant to talk to the guests, and I was asked to be the pilot on hand.
I had flown a red-eye the night before, as a first officer, so I’d been up a lot of hours and was pretty beat. But I was more than happy to explain how pilots interact with air traffic control.
The flight attendant who had been selected to join me got sick and couldn’t come. So PSA sent over a vivacious twenty-seven-year-old from its marketing department, a young woman I had never met before. She told me her name was Lorrie Henry, and I introduced myself.
“Hi, I’m Sully Sullenberger.”
I have an uncommon name that she must not have heard clearly, and she never asked me to repeat myself. So that entire day, she didn’t know how to address me. She just knew I had a lot of
Lorrie will tell you it wasn’t love at first sight. Despite my pilot’s uniform, I looked tired, and she noticed my eyes were bloodshot and I wasn’t freshly shaved. And she kept thinking: What’s this guy’s name again?
At the time, Lorrie had sworn off dating. She’d had a few relationships she considered unhealthy, and had told herself she was taking a break from men. I was thirty-five years old, had been in a short, childless marriage, and I wasn’t exactly looking for long-term love either. But I was taken with Lorrie. She was attractive—tall and elegant, with a great smile—and she seemed smart, too. She was very engaging with all the passersby. Pretty quickly after meeting her, I knew I wanted to ask her out.
For about four hours, we stood next to each other greeting the public beside a large model of a PSA aircraft, the BAe-146. A lot of people who came by wanted to share tales of their most memorable PSA flights.
Lorrie wasn’t at all flirtatious toward me, and I also remained professional toward her. But I was waiting for my moment. As the event wound down, I said to her, “Why don’t we go get a drink?”
“There’s a commissary down the hall,” she told me. “If you’re looking for a vending machine, you can find one there.”
She wasn’t getting it, but I wasn’t giving up just yet. “I meant a cocktail,” I said. “In a bar.”
She looked at me, this weary pilot with a lot of
I tried to be clever. “You must be in great demand,” I said, “if you have your own eight-hundred number.”
She resisted rolling her eyes at me and just smiled, and then she gave me her local phone number. I gave her my card and she finally saw my name spelled out. We made a date for a couple of days later.
By the time Lorrie got home, however, she had decided she wasn’t ready to date anyone, and in any case, she wasn’t really up for dating me. She called me and left a message on my answering machine that she had to work the night of our date.
Listening to her message, I clearly sensed her lack of interest, and I figured that was that. But days later, Lorrie told a close friend that she had decided not to go out with me. Her friend told her, “No man is going to find you if you’re sitting home on the couch.”
Lorrie argued that the couch was just fine for her. She wasn’t looking for a man, anyway. Still, her friend’s words stayed with her, and a week later, she was surprised to find herself calling me.
When we spoke she admitted that she had been less than truthful when she canceled on me, and that she
