Navy

2014 in a Dozen Photos: January-April

2 Comments

Now that we’re a week into 2015, I feel a belated urge to offer up a neatly-wrapped version of my 2014 — you know, the kind of bloggish year-in-review that those writers on top of their game presented in the dwindling days of December. If you’re looking for evidence of grand, probing contemplation of the past year and its moments of deep significance, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed in my quick-and-dirty version of a year-end wrap-up.

I have selected one photo from each month of 2014 for a collection of twelve vignettes. These dozen snapshots will not present anything resembling a comprehensive look back, not least because there were a number of months in which lots of things were going on and I [arbitrarily decided that I] may only choose one picture. These pictures aren’t necessarily the most important or best artistically or any other superlative from each month. Still, each jumped out at me for some reason, so we’ll go with that and try to keep the analysis to a minimum.

January

January 2014: Pensacola Blizzard

This dusting of snow completely shut down our area for three full days.

The first month of 2014 brought something rarely seen in the steamy, Southern city of Pensacola, Florida: frozen precipitation. Although we grew up rolling our eyes at the way the DC area flails when it snows, even that looks like steely-eyed competence when compared to the Florida panhandle response. Of course, snow happens so rarely here that one can hardly blame the locality for investing in hurricane prep rather than plows, salt, and gravel. It was fun having my husband home for three unanticipated “snow days” from this single dusting, and we indulged in wax log fires and obsessive jigsaw puzzling.

February

February 2014: Peacock up a tree

A denizen of the Gulf Breeze Zoo surveys his domain from above.

Any semblance of a Floridian winter evaporated quickly, so we were soon enjoying “spring” with outdoor activities and strolls through the Gulf Breeze Zoo. I had no idea that peacocks were even capable of getting up into trees; I’d always thought of them as ground-dwelling birds, akin to fancy chickens.

March

March 2014: Chag Purim Sameach!

Chemistry geek alert: “Queen Ester,” at your service. (Not pictured: the whiskey flask in my back pocket.)

March brought the Jewish month of Adar II, which brings Purim! Purim is one of the most fun, carnivalesque holidays on our calendar, and its celebration involves reading the Book of Esther, dressing in costume, and imbibing spirits. I let my geek flag fly with a punny “Queen Ester” costume: each molecule on my shirt is a different ester, which are often responsible for a particular fragrance.

April

April 2014: Backyard Blue Angels Practice

We have an excellent view of the Blue Angels’ twice-a-week practices from our backyard.

In order to minimize my husband’s commute to the flight line, we chose to live very close to NAS Pensacola. One of the advantages (or disadvantages, depending on how one is disposed toward the “sound of freedom”) is that we essentially get a free air show from the Navy’s flight demonstration squadron twice a week throughout much of year. I like the Blue Angels, despite the fact that working around their practices is a pain for my husband and his fellow instructor pilots on base. It gives me a warm fuzzy that Pensacola natives, by and large, take a great deal of pride in “their Blues” even if they have no official military affiliation.

#BlogExodus 3: Enslave

Leave a comment

#BlogExodus promptsI am having trouble with this prompt. Although the holiday of Passover requires us to see ourselves as having personally been freed from slavery in Egypt, I am loath to use “enslaved” to describe any aspect of my life in the United States, a country where I enjoy personal, political, and religious freedom largely unprecedented in history. In a world where actual human trafficking and slavery still poison the lives of real people, anything I could say about enslavement in my own life feels like hyperbole to the point of absurdity.

With that in mind, it’s a good thing I have teachers who can help me to see that the concept of metaphorical or spiritual enslavement can provide a useful lens through which to view parts of our lives that have become tangled. Rabbi Rachel Barenblat’s post on today’s #blogExodus prompt acknowledges her own difficulty with using such a strong word as “enslaved” (“And usually it’s not a term I would use,” she writes) to describe a potentially unhealthy relationship with the Internet, email, and our myriad digital distractions. When they control us, we are — metaphorically — enslaved.

Reading Rabbi Barenblat’s take has helped me get past my initial strong hesitation about how today’s prompt could possibly apply to my own life. I can see where the way I think about my relationships with some things in my life have me entangled, or feeling other than free.

Take my husband’s daily flight schedule, for instance. It is a fact of military aviation life that we do not find out what Sampson is doing on a given day until about five o’clock the evening before. Depending on how the “sked” is written, we might find out this evening that he has a brief just twelve hours later at 5:00 AM, or we might see that they switched him to nights and he won’t be home until 10:00 PM. It is what it is, and mostly we roll with the uncertainty, despite the difficulty it presents for making dinner plans with anyone in advance.

Lately, however, I have noticed myself getting a little too caught up in it, allowing my own mood to be dictated by whether my husband has what I see as a favorable schedule. That ought to be a signal to me to loosen my grip, take a deep breath, and disentangle my emotional state from this thing over which I have no control. If I can shift my focus away from my frustration at the constant flexibility required of us, I think I’ll find that I feel less like a slave to the exigencies of squadron scheduling.

#BlogExodus, the brainchild of Rabbi Phyllis Sommer, invites participants to chronicle the weeks leading up to Passover through blog posts, photos, and other social media expressions.

#BlogElul 15: Learn

1 Comment

#BlogElul 2013Say what you will (and I have, in no uncertain terms) about the hassle of frequent military moves, they do serve to keep our minds in learning mode. Our PCS from Virginia to Florida earlier this year has provided us with ample opportunity to flex our mental muscles and make new connections in our networks of neurons. We are constantly rewiring our brains to deal with our changing situation.

We started learning new things long before we packed up and left the Old Dominion, such as how to prepare a house for rental. We learned about property managers and painting and plaster repair. We learned about refinancing and paperwork and how to make zillions of trips to the hardware store to take care of zillions of little things.

When we arrived in Pensacola, we learned how to search for a rental house, which we had never done before; the process differs from finding an apartment, moving into base housing, or buying a home. We started learning the local roadmap, all the ways and back ways and shortcuts and times to avoid certain routes. We scoped out the commissary and civilian grocery stores and the local restaurant scene, which seems to have changed for the better in the seven years since my husband’s SNA days. We learned about parks and trails and beaches, places to go and be outside in our new state.

Blackwater River

We can’t wait to learn how to go tubing down the meandering, sandy-bottomed Blackwater River.

We learned about frogs and toads and anoles. We got ourselves a guidebook so we could begin to put names to unfamiliar birdsong and feather patterns in our own backyard. We learned about gigantic mosquitos.

T-6A Texan II

A T-6A Texan II, the kind of airplane my husband flies here in Florida. U.S. Navy photo by Jeff Doty (RELEASED)

My husband jumped headfirst into learning the new airplane he was to fly for this set of orders. He learned T-6A systems and checklists and emergency procedures. He made flashcards for everything, and I learned about the Texan II as I quizzed him and helped him run practice checklists in “chair-flying” study sessions.

Our new synagogue proved full of things to learn. We learned new names and faces. We learned our new rabbi’s style of leading services, and we learned new melodies for familiar prayers. We started learning our congregation’s history, its feel, its tone — its ruach, if you will. We relearned, for the first time since college Hillel and Jewish Midshipmen Club, how sweet it is to spend time with other Jews close to our own age.

We learn every day, but I know the pace of day-to-day knowledge acquisition will continue to slow as we get more and more comfortable at this duty station. In a little more than two and a half years, though, we expect that impending-move jolt to kick our brains back into their thirstiest state. We’ll learn all over again.

#BlogElul, the brainchild of Rabbi Phyllis Sommer, invites participants to chronicle the month leading up to the Jewish High Holy Days through blog posts, photos, and other social media expressions.

#BlogElul 12: Trust

Leave a comment

#BlogElul 2013As the storm that had prematurely awoken us this morning growled and raged about us, I mentioned to my husband that today’s theme for that Elul blogging project is trust.

“Well,” he said thoughtfully between bites of (insanely delicious, decadent) churro waffle, “I trust the aircraft maintainers with my life every time I go flying.”

There are times I can almost forget that my husband’s job is a little unusual. I kiss him goodbye in the morning, tell him I love him, and say, “Have a good flight. Let me know when you land so I can start preheating the oven.” I send him out the door and go about my day without really thinking about the risks inherent in a naval aviator’s job. Just about anything will start to feel normal after a while, including the fact that my husband’s “office” has an ejection seat.

Every now and then, something — such as an offhand remark over breakfast — will remind me that military aviation isn’t a desk job.

The man I love most in this world relies upon the men and women who turn the wrenches, whose clothes are smeared with every kind of fluid an aircraft can possibly bleed, who work night and day to chase down gripes and keep these complex, often persnickety machines ready to perform the missions demanded of them. My husband places his trust in these maintainers, and he proves that trust by strapping into the aircraft, shutting the canopy, and taking to the sky.

I have not met most of the men and women in whom my husband, his fellow pilots, and the students yearning toward their Wings of Gold place their faith, but I, too, must trust them. Although I am not personally betting my own life on their maintenance of the aircraft, I am depending on their work for the safety of one I hold most dear.

Trusting others, particularly through some strange transitive property of faith, is not easy. I have to trust people I have never met, whose work or skill I have no means of personally verifying. I wonder if they ever stop and think about how many people — spouses, children, mothers, fathers — trust them implicitly. I hope they don’t think about it too often, though; the responsibility is awesome, and perhaps too distracting to bear in mind all the time and still be able to function.

I think it is good for all of us to sit for a while, now and again, and allow ourselves to feel the weight of trust upon our shoulders. Chances are, there are people we’ve never met who have placed their trust in us. I hope I am worthy of it.

#BlogElul, the brainchild of Rabbi Phyllis Sommer, invites participants to chronicle the month leading up to the Jewish High Holy Days through blog posts, photos, and other social media expressions.

Sojourn in the Sunshine State

1 Comment

Map: Norfolk to PensacolaMarch marked the month that we returned to Pensacola, Florida. Our three-year stint will see Sampson on the other side of the “Cradle of Naval Aviation,” this time as a salty, fleet-experienced aviator dispensing wisdom (such as the best places to get brunch in Bahrain) rather than as a shiny student trying to drink from the flight school fire hose. In some ways, it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long since Sampson was the one sporting butter bars on his freshly issued flight suits and striving for the day he’d add Wings of Gold to his name patch. In other ways, it feels like a lifetime ago.

The last time Sampson lived in P-cola was in 2006, before we were married. I visited him there a few times, and I remember finding the area pleasant. Of course, I could have been viewing things through the rose-colored lenses of one getting to spend a few precious weeks here and there with her long-distance fiancé, but I did recall enjoying the beach and McGuire’s and the zoo that let me feed a giraffe for the first time. (Giraffes’ tongues are startlingly long, purple, and probing when you see them up close. Their eyelashes are also long, but not purple.) It’s been a lot of fun exploring the area from a resident’s point of view rather than the touristy perspective of my seven-years-ago self.

We have now lived in Florida for a full season, from the vernal equinox through today’s summer solstice. As we mold our lives to the rhythm of the year in a new part of the country, I look forward to seeing how we turn and return and grow with the passage of the next eleven or so seasons.

Blue Dasher dragonfly at a local state park.