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This entry was inspired on Friday and Saturday as I considered how to research the Jan. 2 entry. I have always been terrified of both planes and flying. Yes, both. I flew once, Chicago to New York City and return, Spring 1971. I remember (blessedly) very, very little of the trip (although I do remember some of NYC). Amazing, because my memory from age 7 on is nearly photo-perfect.
When I was a young child, I read Philip Wylie's horrifying novel of nuclear attack, Tomorrow. For years, I cringed and quaked at the least sound of an airplane; this was in the pre-jet era. I was always careful near windows lest defenestration take me out of existence. I worried about the U.S. victimized by nuclear weapons, either by the Soviet Bloc or in retaliation for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nowadays I'm older: I worry about nuclear proliferation in North Korea, and a potential North Korean invasion of the U.S. (Yes, Virginia: I lived through the McCarthy Era, the Cold War, and the Korean Conflict, and all of it has warped my personality and mutated my phobias.)
Then in 1997 , I read Dean Koontz' bestseller Sole Survivor. That really iced the phobia for me about jets. I still can't think of that book without shudders and entire pages and scenes replaying in my memory. I love Mr. Koontz' novels, but that one I wish I had never read.
Even now, living in “the tiny little town across the wide, too-high, sometimes overflowing river from the even tinier town,” I still experience anxiety at the sound of a crop-duster (Hitchcock, North by Northwest), prop planes (our tiny little town has a tiny little airport), chem trails, and jets that I can hear-but not see. I live in the wrong century, let's face it. Some technology is good-but for me, airplanes? Take me back to an alternate time line where Orville and Wilbur Wright developed-spaceships.
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