I could go running home every weekend. I wanted a residential campus, and I wanted to be on my own, with all the freedom and all the responsibility that came with it.
I took my SAT that autumn and got a score of one thousand out of sixteen hundred, which, coupled with my B+ average in my high school classes, opened up quite a few options for me as far as schools that would accept me. I had become an avid reader of Flying magazine and became familiar with a couple of universities that always advertised in its pages; Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida and Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) in Melbourne, Florida. With a dearth of college choices, I applied to both of those schools early in 1991, and both accepted me that spring. I ended up choosing FIT, in part because unlike Embry-Riddle, it had a wider variety of students. I wanted also to be exposed to people who were studying things besides aviation.
When I got the acceptance letter from FIT, I excitedly went to Mom and Dad to tell them the good news, and they beamed with pride. The initial enthusiasm I had felt at the prospect of going to college quickly gave way to the sobering reality of just how incredibly expensive it was going to be when the first bill from FIT arrived in the mail. Learning to fly while getting my degree was almost as expensive as law school or medical school. With five kids and a shiny new house with a shiny new mortgage, my parents were faced with the daunting prospect of finding a way to help fund this dream of mine, and I knew that my college expenses would be a big strain on our family’s finances in the ensuing years. With that first bill in hand, my parents and I convened at the kitchen table and started to put our heads together to find a way to pay for all this. We had a number of ideas on how to go about it but we realized that it was not going to be easy. I, however, thought I had the perfect plan.
My last chance for love
It was Spring of my senior year, and Jennifer (the girl I had been secretly in love with for four years) and I had become very close friends. However, she seemed oblivious to my true feelings for her. Whenever she smiled or talked to me, I was totally lost in the moment. I wanted so desperately to tell her how I felt but since I dreaded the thought of rejection, I had continued to settle for just her friendship. But as the saying goes “nothing ventured, nothing gained”. Faced with the impending end of high school and with Jennifer going to a different university than me, I finally decided that I would tell her how I had felt all these years. As fate would have it, Miss. Kirsch assigned Jennifer and me to a special project, which meant I would finally be spending time alone with her. The few weeks that the project lasted were some of the best memories I have of high school. Jennifer and I talked, joked, and got to know each other more than ever before. You would think that I could have mustered up the courage just to let it out, and I tried on more than one occasion, but the sound of my heart beating in my ears from fear always stopped me. Then it came to me; I had always been able to express myself on paper, so I decided to write her a love letter.
I sat down that night with pen and paper and started to pour out all the feelings for her that I had held inside onto that page. I told her how beautiful I thought she was and how much I admired her warm personality and her intelligence. I told her how I had sat silently all those years wishing I could tell her how I felt, while dreaming she felt the same way. I told her of all the times I had tried to express my feelings but had stopped out of fear of rejection. I finished the letter by telling her that I didn’t expect her to feel the same in return but that I just HAD to tell her before we parted ways since I might never see her again. After I finished the letter, I folded it neatly, placed it in a sealed envelope, and decided I would hand it to her first thing the next morning.
When I saw her the next day, my heart started thumping more than ever... this was it... but I chickened out. We had a class together during the last period of the day, and I told myself that I would put off giving it to her until then so that I could quickly make my escape after handing it to her. When the last bell of the day rang and as everyone started heading home, I walked up to her with my heart pounding and handed her the letter. “I have something for you, Jen,” I said, as she took the letter. Then I turned and walked away without another word, dreading her reaction the next day.
The next morning, during our first class together, I tried my best to avoid her. I felt vulnerable and exposed now that she knew how I felt about her. I sat down at my desk, and she sat down at her desk behind me. I heard her call my name. “Steve”, she said, “I read your letter”. When it comes to matters of the heart, many of our behaviors often don’t make any sense. I would like to tell you that when I heard her call me, I turned around, looked into her eyes, and our love affair began. I would like to tell you that she confessed that she had felt the same all these years and that she too had been afraid to speak up. Yes, I would like to tell you all of that… but that’s not how it went.
When I heard her call my name, I froze with a sick feeling of dread about what she might say. I sat there unable to talk and unable to turn around to hear what she had to say. I have come to learn that in life, we don’t regret trying; we regret not trying. The things we try, whether or not they turn out right, we always learn from, but the things we don’t try, we never get to find out if they would have worked out or not. I was paralyzed by an inexplicable fear, and didn’t turn around. For years, I regretted not turning around because I never got to hear what she was going to tell me. I felt as if I’d made a big mistake. However, as the years went by and I learned more about life and love, I realized that there really are no mistakes in life, only lessons. As for Jennifer and I, after a few awkward days of me avoiding her and smiling shyly at her as she passed by, she finally approached me one day and sat down at the desk beside me, smiled, and simply put her hand on top of mine. We looked into each other’s eyes and smiled without saying a word. Silence can speak volumes. After that, during our last few weeks of high school, we went back to our routine of talking and joking and being good friends and neither one of us ever mentioned the letter. We graduated, and I never saw or spoke to her again, but I knew that she knew that she was my first love, and for me, that was enough.
War cry
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in summer 1990 and the build up to the first Gulf War began, thoughts of my Uncle Jolex came to mind. He was stationed in the Pacific Northwest at the time, and we prayed he would not be sent to Iraq. I still remember sitting on the steps of our basement family room when the bombing started one evening in early 1991. The US-led coalition force was starting “Operation Desert Storm” to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. With college and my first flying lessons due to start that fall, I was filled with a sense of anxiety about the war, and wondered what it meant for the future. One of my back-up plans for paying for college was to join the military for four years, for which they would pay for a large portion of my college costs via a program called the Montgomery GI Bill. After my acceptance into FIT, I arranged a meeting with the Air Force recruiting station located down by the Staten Island Ferry terminal in the St. George area of Staten Island. I knew that Mom and Dad had many family and home expenses, and I wanted to find a way to minimize the burden that my college costs would be on them. I met with the recruiter shortly after my 18th birthday and explained that I wanted information about military college fund programs and came away feeling as if I’d found the solution to our family’s problem of how to pay for my college tuition. I did the math, and after four years of service in the Air Force, I could combine my military college fund money with government grants, loans, and scholarships, and Mom and Dad wouldn’t have to pay a dime. Although I wouldn’t be eligible to learn to fly in the Air Force (that privilege was reserved for Air Force Academy officers), I would get some training in basic aircraft maintenance, which I reasoned would help me when I started my flying lessons after my enlistment ended. The Air Force Academy had long been ruled out as an option for learning to fly because my dream was to fly airliners, not military planes. Therefore, I concluded that enlisting for four years was the perfect compromise. Although the military was not my first choice, I was ready to make the sacrifice since it would reduce the burden on our family.
After the meeting with the recruiter, I went home to tell Mom
