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My teacher wrote at the end of the essay: “You are doing fine.” That’s the way things went in those days. Teachers and parents didn’t spend a lot of time stroking kids, telling them they were special. Back then, “you are doing fine” was what passed for a compliment.

I see my adult self in that essay. I remain regimented, demanding of myself and others—a perfectionist—though I think that has made me a better pilot.

In another essay, celebrating my family, I wrote about my sister “of whom I am proud, despite her behavior at times.” I wrote of how fortunate I felt to be my mother’s son: “She cares for me day and night.” As for my father: “He guides me and teaches me and makes me wiser and more able to profit from my mistakes.”

In the end, it didn’t matter that some of the floors in our house were slanted, or that my dad wasn’t paying attention to making money. I was supremely lucky to grow up on Hanna Drive, to know where every nail was, and to be nurtured and taught by two people who got so many things right.

5

THE GIFT OF GIRLS

I HAVE SEEN breathtaking sunrises and sunsets from the highest altitudes. I have seen the brightest stars and planets from what feels like a front-row seat. But there are things I haven’t seen—things that happened down on the ground while I was up in the air, earning a living and appreciating the view.

Being away from home so much, I’ve missed milestones in my daughters’ lives. Many pilots can recite a litany of missed moments. Our children don’t wait for us before they take their first steps, say their first words, or need a visit from the tooth fairy. And it’s not just early-childhood rites of passage that we’re sorry to miss. We also miss nuanced changes in our children’s lives as they get older.

Just before Christmas last year, I was off for a few days, and Lorrie and I took our daughters, Kate and Kelly, on a skiing vacation at Lake Tahoe. It was so nice to have this extended time with the girls when they weren’t rushing off to school and I wasn’t hours away from returning to the airport. It was just a perfect, relaxed vacation.

Tahoe has always held a special place in our hearts. When we take Interstate 80 and cross over the Donner Summit, a part of us feels like we’ve come home. There’s the smell of pine in the air. The sky is clear and crisp. It’s just invigorating.

We always try to stay at Northstar, the resort where both Kate and Kelly learned to ski when they were three years old. The resort resembles a European village with cobblestone walkways, and the family programs there are great. We have many wonderful family memories of visits there.

On that particular trip, the first big snowstorm of the season had ended the day before, and the trees were still heavy with fresh snow. Decorated for the holidays, Northstar was covered with little twinkling white lights in the trees. It had a real magical, fairy-tale feel. The lights, the snow, the European village.

Late one afternoon, we had just parked the car, and we decided to do some window-shopping before heading to dinner. It was very cold out, and we were all dressed in heavy jackets, gloves, and hats. We were walking into this valley of buildings, on this cobblestone walkway, when I noticed that the girls, twenty feet ahead of us, were arm in arm and skipping along the sidewalk, Kelly’s head on Kate’s shoulder. I was so happy to see this, to realize that they had come to a place, here in their early teens, where they could publicly show physical affection for each other. Siblings, of course, are sometimes at odds, and here they were expressing so effortlessly what they meant to each other.

I pointed them out to Lorrie. “Take a look at that,” I said. I thought I was noticing something very special and new.

Lorrie took my arm and smiled. “They’ve been doing that for five or six months now,” she said. “It’s just that you’ve missed it.”

She said she had frequently seen them walking in the mall, holding hands. She said it was happening very easily and naturally, and she had loved watching