CHAPTER 6

Skydiving

God was with us so we’d be with each other.

My son Adam is out of college and is fearless. He’ll try anything once,

but he’ll do it several times if it’s life-threatening. If you can’t lose your
arm doing it, he’s usually not interested. He started taking skydiving
lessons this year. These weren’t the tandem jumps I was familiar with,
where an experienced skydiving instructor is attached to the novice.
These were solo jumps.
Understandably, there’s quite a bit of on-the-ground training involved
in getting a skydiving license. In addition to taking some pretty involved
classes before you get in the airplane, there are quite a few solo jumps
you need to make with an instructor free-falling nearby to make sure you
don’t freak out and crater. While there’s more instruction than I thought,
there certainly isn’t as much as is needed.
When the kids were growing up, we weren’t a family you would find
at the local field every weekend for Little League baseball or soccer. I
would have had our children join a team just so I could eat the corn dogs,
but the kids never seemed interested in organized sports, so we skipped
most of it. Going out to the drop zone each weekend to watch Adam
skydive felt a little like what I imagined going to a Little League game
would be like. Except my son, the shortstop, would be falling from
thirteen thousand feet. An unforced error in skydiving would be more of a
game changer than a ball going between his legs near second base. This
was more than a little unsettling to me as I watched him strap on his
parachute each weekend, get in a plane with no door on it, and fly away.