I was at lunch today and someone was talking about how once they had ridden in a private plane, and before take-off the plane wouldn’t start so they had to jump-start it with a golf cart. And later the air conditioner on the plane started to smoke and they thought it was the engine. They were all terrified. Rightly so - if you’ve never flown in a private plane, those are some scary circumstances. But all I kept thinking was, “Remember that time the door blew off the Otter at Skydive Chicago because Roger Nelson was doing zero-g’s on the way to altitude?”

Nothing about my childhood was normal.