Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [30]
When in 1966 I was the overseas winner of a Veterans of Foreign Wars speech contest, I think it is safe to say that I was the only contestant whose father was then engaged in a foreign war. Thirty years later, to the week, our son Wade was one of the winners in a similar national essay contest sponsored by Voice of America. In my case, and later in his, all the winners were to gather in Washington. Arrangements were made for me to fly from Haneda International Airport in Tokyo. There was terrible weather the day I was to depart. My mother and I stood in long lines after my flight was canceled, trying to get me on one of the few departing flights. Finally I was put on a flight to the States that was boarding right away. Mother watched from the observation windows as, in the dark rain, I walked up the steps and onto my flight. But just as I stepped into the cabin, behind the plane the sky lit up, as, on the incoming runway a Canadian Pacific flight from Hong Kong was cartwheeling in flames. There had been a plane crash four weeks earlier when a commercial flight fell into Tokyo Bay, and pilots and their families all believe, or at least fear, that crashes come in threes. And now this was crash number two. Mother found someone who found someone who got me off the plane, and, her hands shaking the whole way, Mother walked me past the waiting families of the Canadian Pacific flight as they stood in shock and grief. She drove me home, promising we would try again in the morning, when the weather would be better.
The weather was only marginally better the next day, and the airport was chaotic. Four days earlier, a fiery Argentinian named Horacio Accavallo had won the flyweight boxing title in Tokyo. In addition to two days’ worth of passengers trying to leave Haneda at once, Accavallo and his entourage were an impenetrable knot of yelling and exaggerated hand gestures, and as I tried to make my way into the lounge for outgoing passengers, I was stuck on the wrong side of this juggernaut. Two businessmen rescued this helpless-looking sixteen-year-old, took me around the edges of the dangerously vigorous crowd to the lounge where we all waited for our flights to be announced, bought me a soda, and asked about my trip. Their flight was announced first, we said goodbye, and mine followed shortly after. Mother watched again as I climbed onto my plane, and she went to her car for the hour drive back to Camp Zama. She had been in the car only minutes when, over Armed Forces Radio, they announced that a plane that had just taken off from Haneda had crashed into Mt. Fuji. The third crash. She was the daughter and wife of pilots—how could she have let me fly? She could hardly drive. She turned for Tokyo, to get to the American embassy or somewhere, anywhere, they could tell her what plane it was.
I spoke to her next nearly a full day later when I was in Washington. “It wasn’t your plane,” she said, telling me the obvious. “It took off at the same time yours did, but it was headed to Hong Kong.” Hong Kong? The businessmen, my rescuers, had been going to Hong Kong. I never knew their names; I had no one to tell how they had spent their last minutes helping me. No one to thank, no way to thank anyone, except maybe now, maybe here.
CHAPTER 5
CHAPEL HILL
WHEN I WAS in eighth grade, I sat one rainy day under the covered review platform on the Naval Academy parade grounds and talked to one of the younger Navy wives from our street. She was pretty, in white capris and a blue sleeveless shirt. I adored my mother, but she was, well, a mother, with shirtwaist dresses and a perfect French twist. This woman had wispy short hair, not done at all, and she sat on the cement platform