Flying Carpet

Holidays With Grandma

We'd always joined the in-laws for Thanksgiving. The whole family would be there: Jean's folks, her brothers and sister, uncles and cousins. But behind the scenes Grandma Buschkopf had always pummeled us with her gravelly and authoritative voice, "When are you coming to my house for Thanksgiving?" Family politics be dashed, this year we were finally doing it, flying up to Grandma and Grandpa's to celebrate an old-fashioned holiday.

Shorty and Lulu were everything grandparents should be, living in a big old house in the small Wisconsin town of Juneau, loving but just a little bit tough, opinionated but accepting. When I was new to the family and an outsider, they'd welcomed me with open arms, believing so much in their granddaughter that I got to be their grandkid too.

We loaded our then-little boys in the flying club's Cessna 172 and took off from Lafayette, Indiana, for the glacier-cut Kettle Moraine of central Wisconsin. It was unusually warm for November, and we bounced among clouds over Indiana farmlands, then above Chicago suburbs teeming with holiday traffic.

"I need a sack!" cried one of our sons, urgently and unexpectedly. We looked back in alarm. Never before had either boy become sick in the air. Frantically, we searched the plane for relief sacks, probing around the cooler and homemade pies to no avail. Finally, Jean requisitioned a retired cookie bag from the trash. But my son lingered in opening it.

"C'mon," I said. "Hold the bag to your face!" Slowly, our young son opened the bag, and peered inside....

"Very funny!" he said, grimacing. Jean and I looked at each other.

"I want a snack!" he repeated.

Laughter displaced the in-flight emergency as we fished for more goodies.

It was now late afternoon over southern Wisconsin, with glacier-sculpted contours transcending the human boundaries of farms. We peered ahead for Juneau's ancient brick water tower.

Grandpa was waiting in his old Pontiac at the airport when we landed. "I saw you fly over," he said, dentures clicking through his expansive smile as he shook my hand. He admired our sky-blue steed, then chauffeured us to the smells of food baking in a big old warm house with fallen leaves in the yard.

The next day we ate turkey and Syrian kibbe and cranberries and pie. In the meantime, rain began in the manner so appropriate for holidays and gradually changed to sleet and then snow, all while we gathered warm and laughing in Grandma's bright kitchen.

Grandpa regaled us with stories of a past incomprehensible within the short span of our overlapping lifetimes - growing up on a farm with horse-drawn vehicles. "I remember the first airplane I ever saw - a barnstormer that landed over by Mayville...and the first car, too, a Badger made right here in Wisconsin," he said. He'd garnered a ride from its owner, making him a celebrity among his school friends. Grandpa told, too, of his days as a "speed cop," riding hand-shift Harleys on gravel roads, and of courting Grandma in his Model T up at Fond du Lac, and his adventures as Dodge County Sheriff in the 1930s.

"You kids aren't goin' home tomorrow," called Grandma with feigned disappointment from the window. "It's snowing out there to beat the dickens!" But there are worse places to get stuck than at Grandma's on Thanksgiving weekend, so we slept soundly and happily that night under homemade quilts.

The next morning we awoke to 18 inches of snow on the ground and more falling. Flight Service said it would end before noon, so we built a snowman with the boys while Grandpa watched from the porch, then packed our bags and bundled off to the airport.

Skies were blue when we arrived at the airport office where a man in a red flannel shirt sat sipping coffee.

"The runways haven't been plowed?" I asked, disappointed, surveying unbroken white out the window.

"No problem," he said. "I'll call the county, and they'll take care of it." Being a city kid I was astonished when, sure enough, a plow materialized on the runway 15 minutes later. By the time we had cleaned the airplane the runway and a short stretch of taxiway were clear.

Tears filled Grandpa's blue eyes as we said our goodbyes. We started the engine and taxied for takeoff. It was slippery as the original rain had frozen under the snow. A rough spot served for runup, but at the end of the runway I couldn't turn for takeoff - every time I added power we skidded toward the snowbanks.

So I shut her down at the end of the runway, and with the two little boys sleeping in the back, Jean and I slithered the airplane around manually. Then we cranked up the engine and departed skyward from our one-and-only most special Thanksgiving ever at Grandma and Grandpa Buschkopf's house.

Grandpa could still be seen at his Pontiac when we took off, so I waggled the wings goodbye and turned toward home. Some special flights you get to make only once in life. Oh, if we could only go back.