Off the Top

It’s time for our annual pumpkin carving post.

During the last year or so, I have noticed that with increasing frequency, G and B have been coming home with these underground rhymes that I learned when I was in grade school. I think it was probably natural for me to assume as a child that these were just going around during my few years in grade school and we had discovered something new and it would peter out.  Yet these boys are coming home and repeating these rhymes (mostly verbatim) as I learned them and I know they didn’t learn them from us and assume the other boys didn’t learn them from their parents.  So they are passed from child to child through the generations.  Well, now I wonder whether my mom and dad ever noticed this phenomenon and whether my dad learned the same rhymes in grade school.  I shall be sure to ask, but I shall also list a few here because I believe the chances are that you learned these in grade school also:

1. “[So-and-so] and [so-and-so] sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”  (Yes, everyone knows that one.)
2. “Here comes the bride, big fat and wide.  Where is the groom?  He’s in the bathroom.”  (G and B did not know the next two lines, so I had to teach them.  “Why is he there?  He lost his underwear.  Where did it go?  He flushed it down the hole.”)
3. “Made ya’ look, made ya’ look, now you’re in my baby book.” (I learned it as, “made ya’ read a story book.”)
4. “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg, Batmobile lost a wheel and Joker got away.” (This one even made it into Batman the Animated Series and The Simpsons).
5. See if you can finish this one: “Deck the halls with gasoline, fa la la la la la la la la…”
6. What underground rhymes can you remember from the grade school playground?

One of the joys of flying is taking folks up for their first flight and seeing the joy that it brings.  That joy is one reason I have concluded that “since the moment of Creation, God has intended that man would learn to fly.”  In other words, I do not believe it would give man such pleasure to fly unless God had designed in him the hard-wired ability to take pleasure in it.  So I derive my reason number the first from the reaction we have to flying.   I derive my reason number the second from one source of our desire — birds.  Seeing birds fly down through the years has given man the desire to fly and helped him to figure out how.  God knew that birds would do this and I honestly believe it was one of his designs for that creature.  I can’t really prove this, but it makes total sense to me.

Last week, I was able to go up with RK for his first ride in a small plane.  Yesterday, I got to take my friend EK for his first flight in any plane, small or large.  E is mostly bound to a wheelchair, so I think this was huge for him.  Normally, he is a talkative fellow, but I think he enjoyed the flight so much he was speechless!  Anyway, is it even possible that one could experience this without coming to believe what I wrote in paragraph one?

Our last flying club meeting featured a tour of the Wittman Regional Airport control tower. How awesome is that?! G tagged along.  The airport manager, who is a member of our club, asked us whether we had ever been in the old tower, and I recalled being in that tower when I was G’s age or maybe younger.  I. was the controller on duty and he was delighted to have pilots visiting him.  We were even more pleased to meet him. G got to turn the runway lights on and off. A pilot may say that isn’t too big a deal, having already done it many times from the airplane, but I think for a 9 1/2 year old, and doing it from the control tower, that’s pretty sweet.  Things you probably didn’t know: 1. *Not* including Airventure traffic, Oshkosh is the third busiest airport in Wisconsin, behind Milwaukee and Madison.  2. You can listen to the Oshkosh control tower live on the web

G takes the controls