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Show chairs and rolling on the floor. We held our hands to our chests, as if holding our harness, and guided ourselves to safe landings all over the house. It reminded me of when Ronald McDonald came to school and taught us to Stop, Drop, and Roll if ever engulfed by flame. I must have been in the fourth or fifth grade. With my classmates and Ronald, I faithfully practiced the three steps, dropping like one possessed to the hard linoleum floor. Most of the boys ran around the room pretending to burn before they l\ would finally throw themselves to the floor. Falling was not dangerous, it seemed, as long as you rolled. By the third day, having demonstrated to Donna that they could leap from any chair in the house and collapse like a potato bug into a ball, they were ready for the plane. My Aunt Sondra decided at the last minute to remain earth bound, but my parents were determined to dive through the sky. They packed their gear and we all piled into the Caravan, headed to an empty cornfield where the plane was waiting. It seemed like forever before they were in the air and much longer before they finally jumped. The plane passed overhead several times, surveying the terrain of clouds, making altitude, finding air without wind pockets. I stood on the ground below, holding my two brothers in front of me, waiting for my parents to fall from the sky, aware that I could witness my own orphaning. Only a few months before, at a summer camp in Mokuleia, while several of us watched a fellow camper bounce on a large, round trampoline, a man, not a mile away, tore through the sky with his unopened chute chasing him like a mad dog. The counselors would not let us go and check on him, but we knew he was dead. Soon ambulances could be heard in the distance. Standing on the open plains, waiting for tiny dots to appear in the sky, I remembered how fast a body drops 79 |
