Force, while I explained what the recruiter had said. After my presentation, Dad was neutral on the idea of me enlisting but Mom was dead-set against it. With the Gulf War still in the news and on our minds, she said that there was no way she was letting her first-born son go to the military. It was one thing if joining the Air Force had been my dream she said, but it hadn’t. She and Dad knew well that flying for Pan American World Airways was my dream.
Dad, in an effort to help, chimed in saying that he had seen an advertisement in the Staten Island Advance (our local newspaper) for air traffic controllers that had said they would provide training and that salaries for controllers topped out at over seventy thousand dollars per year. “How about becoming an air traffic controller son, it’s in the same field,” he said. Dad was trying to be pragmatic, and he figured that anything in the aviation field would be good enough to make me happy. However, his suggestion had the complete opposite effect. Upon hearing those words from Dad, tears started to well up in me. I could feel my dream dying right before my eyes. My mind was spinning, I felt trapped. From what I knew, our family couldn’t afford what it would cost to put me through college, but Mom wouldn’t let me join the military to pay for it, and Dad was suggesting I take a consolation prize. I don’t want to be the one telling the pilots where to turn as they fly off to faraway places; I want to BE the one flying to those places! I thought.
We sat there silently for a while and then I looked pleadingly over at Mom, as I fought back my tears. I was an eighteen year-old boy, but I needed my mommy now. I needed her to do what she had always done for me: to tell me that everything was going to be okay. She put her hand on top of mine and looked at me, then at my dad, and said words I will never forget, words that instantly made everything okay again, bringing my dying dream of flying instantly back to life. “Son, don’t worry”, she said, smiling reassuringly, “we will find a way”. And they did.
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