Fear Not, I Will Pilot Thee
My
father used to sing in church. I forget that, sometimes, all these
years later. In a men's quartet, that sang so often that we called
them “The Quartet,” and we all knew who she meant when my mother
said The
Quartet was coming over after church on Sunday night. So long ago
that I forget exactly when he stopped, when he had the operation that
took his singing voice away.
My uncle must have sung in that church too. The uncle I never met, the one who left for the war, left his sickly parents and his youngest brother, left the chores and the cows and the machines to be fixed through the winter.
He fixed planes instead. Flying “the Hump.” Flying through mountain peaks too high for their planes, looking down to watch the tops of trees, their green limbs the only beacon through the fog, spelling the pilot when he got tired, or riding in the back with the supplies. Fixing things. “When we are flying blind through the mountains,” he wrote, “I'm singing that song, 'Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me.'”
He died first that year, in the spring, crash landing on one of the supply runs. His mother died in the fall. His father three weeks later, as easily as if he had seen her pulling out of the yard on her way to town, and he had run to jump in the car before she left.
And for my father, there was nothing to do for it, but do the chores, and get up every morning to milk the cows, and keep the machines running through that winter that must have seemed like the coldest that had been for a long time, when looking down at what your hands were doing was the easiest thing to do, like looking down at where you had been on a winding mountain road, because everything ahead is just steeper and higher.
What is courage, but doing the task in front of you. Living the day God gives you. Watching your child walk out the door every morning. Riding in the back seat of a car on its way up the mountain. Singing.
My uncle must have sung in that church too. The uncle I never met, the one who left for the war, left his sickly parents and his youngest brother, left the chores and the cows and the machines to be fixed through the winter.
He fixed planes instead. Flying “the Hump.” Flying through mountain peaks too high for their planes, looking down to watch the tops of trees, their green limbs the only beacon through the fog, spelling the pilot when he got tired, or riding in the back with the supplies. Fixing things. “When we are flying blind through the mountains,” he wrote, “I'm singing that song, 'Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me.'”
He died first that year, in the spring, crash landing on one of the supply runs. His mother died in the fall. His father three weeks later, as easily as if he had seen her pulling out of the yard on her way to town, and he had run to jump in the car before she left.
And for my father, there was nothing to do for it, but do the chores, and get up every morning to milk the cows, and keep the machines running through that winter that must have seemed like the coldest that had been for a long time, when looking down at what your hands were doing was the easiest thing to do, like looking down at where you had been on a winding mountain road, because everything ahead is just steeper and higher.
What is courage, but doing the task in front of you. Living the day God gives you. Watching your child walk out the door every morning. Riding in the back seat of a car on its way up the mountain. Singing.
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