hadn’t given birth and didn’t need a wheelchair, but the aide with the wheelchair insisted on accompanying us out the front door. And so we walked, holding Kate, as the empty wheelchair was pushed beside us. It was ridiculous and surreal, but it was an amazingly happy moment, too.
In the parking lot, it almost felt as if we had stolen Kate. We looked over our shoulders, wondering if someone would be coming back to get her. We ended up putting her in our car seat, driving a mile from the hospital, and pulling over to the curb.
We looked at each other. We looked at Kate, who looked up at us. I wasn’t crying, but it was as emotional a moment as I’ve ever had in my life. I was a father.
Just fourteen hours after being born, Kate was on her first airplane ride, heading back with us to Northern California. As an aviator, I was certainly happy to get her into the air that quickly.
Two years later, another birth mother looked through thirty-six bios in a book of potential adoptive parents, and after meeting Lorrie and me, agreed to make us parents for the second time. On January 6, 1995, when the call came that the birth mother had gone into labor with Kelly, I was in Pittsburgh, receiving simulator training on the MD-80. I cut short my training and made plans to return home as soon as possible, which was the following morning.
Lorrie, meanwhile, headed to the hospital. For the birth mother, it was a very long labor, and Lorrie stayed up for twenty-four hours straight, just waiting. Unlike when Kate was born, this time Lorrie was in the delivery room, and the whole day had a cinematic feel to it. There was a huge storm outside, with rain coming down in buckets and a howling wind. Then, when Kelly was finally crowning, a nurse gasped and said, “Oh my gosh!”
Lorrie was taken aback. “What, what, what?” she said, her heart pounding.
The nurse answered, “We’ve got a redhead!”
As soon as Kelly arrived, just after 10 A.M., the doctor handed her to Lorrie, which was an overwhelming moment for her. The rain. The thunder. This new beautiful baby. And I missed it all. While Lorrie was cuddling Kelly in the first seconds of her life, I was above the clouds somewhere over Denver.
I made it to the hospital that afternoon, and seeing Kelly for the first time was another moment of instant love and gratitude. And the most amazing thing was how much Kelly looked like me when I was a baby: the shape of our heads, our eyes, our Irish coloring. I was strawberry blond as a boy. We’d later mount baby photos of me and Kelly side by side in a frame, and it was hard to tell us apart. It’s interesting how that goes in an adoption sometimes. Lorrie likes to say that we are blessed to have children who resemble us. It’s not that we need the girls to look like us, but it’s nice that they do. And over the years, it meant that if we opted not to voluntarily tell various people about the adoptions right away, we didn’t have to.
Kelly’s adoption was more complicated than Kate’s. There are a lot of factors that can slow down the paperwork—or even make it fall through. It’s hard for birth mothers to make their decisions final. They often have family pressures to consider.
Lorrie and I had to deal with some of these issues, and we struggled with the uncertainty. We passed the hours at a restaurant called Taxi’s, which was near the hospital. We ate lunch and dinner there while we anxiously waited for the paperwork to come through. We were deathly afraid, with time passing, that some bureaucratic snafu could lead other issues to unravel, and keep the adoption from being finalized. At one point, I had a very forceful conversation with the hospital administrator, telling him that the hospital had to get its act together. I was pretty worked up and assertive, but it was necessary to break the logjam.
On the day we brought Kelly home, we had her in a car seat in the back of our car. Two-year-old Kate came out of the house and stared quizzically at this baby. She thought Kelly was a new doll she was getting as a present. She’d soon know better.
Out there at the car, Lorrie and I looked at each other and I said what I was thinking: “We’re a real family now.”
As we get deeper into our marriage, Lorrie and I have become big believers in the idea that we should focus on what we have rather than what we don’t have. We have weathered some serious storms in our relationship, but on a lot of fronts, we feel closer than ever now. And we really try to live in a way that allows for the word
Lorrie and I have vowed to appreciate each other, appreciate our two daughters, appreciate every day. We don’t always maintain that positive attitude. We still have our arguments. But that’s our goal.
And so, yes, I choked up seeing our two teenage daughters arm in arm, skipping down that street at Lake Tahoe. It reminded me of what I’ve missed, and that was hard for me. But it also reminded me of how lucky we all are to have one another, and why we have a duty to try to live happily together, from a place of gratitude.
6. FAST, NEAT, AVERAGE
WHEN PASSENGERS ARE awaiting takeoff on a commercial plane, I’m guessing that most of them don’t give a lot of thought to how the pilots in the cockpit got their jobs. Passengers seem most concerned about when they have to turn off their cell phones, or whether it’s still possible to use the restroom before the cabin door is closed. They wonder about making their connecting flights, or being stuck in the middle seat. They’re not thinking about the pilot’s training or experience. I understand that.
Some passengers boarding Flight 1549 at LaGuardia said they had noticed my gray hair, which they equated with experience. But none of them asked about my resume, my flight record, or my educational background. And why would they? As they should, they trusted that my airline, US Airways, had rigorously selected its pilots based on federally mandated criteria.
And yet, every pilot has a very personal story of how he or she ended up in control of that type of aircraft and in that particular airline’s cockpit. We all had our own unique paths and career progressions, and then found our way to commercial aviation. We don’t often talk about all the steps we took, even among ourselves, but every time we pilot a flight, we are bringing with us all of the things we’ve learned over the thousands of hours and millions of miles we’ve flown.
Until the mid-1990s, 80 percent of pilots working for major airlines were trained in the military, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Now, just 40 percent of newly hired pilots get their training in the military. The rest come through civilian training programs, including some two hundred universities that offer aviation training. The World War II and Korean veterans—my mentors when I started—retired as commercial pilots more than two decades ago, after turning sixty years old, then the mandatory retirement age. There aren’t a great many Vietnam-era pilots left either, even though the retirement age was raised to sixty-five in 2007.
As for myself, I am grateful that I came into aviation through the military. I appreciate the discipline taught to me during my days in the Air Force, and the many hours of intense training I received. In some civilian programs, pilots aren’t always taught with the same rigor.
I was tested in so many significant ways during my time in the service that I sometimes look back and wonder: How did I make it through? How did I succeed when some didn’t? How was I able to complete every flight, landing my plane safely, when others I knew and respected didn’t make it safely to the runway and lost their lives? As I look back, I reflect on the intersections of preparation and circumstance, and that helps me understand.
MY MILITARY career provided many of the important steps along the way. The initiation to my military life began in the spring of 1969, when I was a senior in high school and went to see my congressman, Ray Roberts, at his office in the ranching town of McKinney. Then fifty-six years old, he was a well-regarded Democratic leader in Texas, who six years earlier had been in President Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas. He was four cars behind the presidential limousine when the shots were fired.
I had come to Representative Roberts because in order to attend one of the service academies, I’d need a congressional appointment. In some congressional districts, patronage determined which young people got appointments at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland; the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colorado; the Military Academy at West Point, New York; the Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York;
