Too Old for Old Tricks

onion pie

Despite his tri-annual testimonies to God’s grace, Yinka still did not believe in God. His atheism was not the careful result after a delicate balancing of the ledgers on faith and reason. An opulent joke, he preferred to think of it, something to titillate the God that probably existed, at the very least the brothers and sisters of the church he regularly attended. But really the reasons were more mundane. Laziness was more like it—the laziness of his spirit at failing to grasp the miracle of the heart. And flying a Cessna 172, beholding below the puckered Los Angeles landscape, he could believe in a kind of god—the god of loss.

Beneath him sparkled an array of lights, floating reds, boulevard of oranges riding up to the cracked egg of the Santa Monica Mountains, and there, a tree stood resplendent and phosphorescent, embossed against the edge of the world where sea met sky. Loss drummed in him profoundly. Alien, damning, unquenchable, the feeling splatted his senses, gummed up all his reason, and soon he was floundering in a mystery that as he might he could not claim to be of his own. His breath was slipping away, and his arms hot, heavy. The dials of the dashboard had coalesced into a gunky luminescent black. He could cry, but Naomi Cohn would not approve.

He glanced at her blue-green-lined fingers gripping the edge of her seat. Her head seemed to be slipping away helplessly beneath the drab blur of her loose linen blouse and trousers.

“There’s a falcon jet five miles ahead of you. Stay north of the approach,” the traffic controller said through the transmitter.

“I’ll remain north of the approach,” Yinka replied dryly.

They had been hovering north of the runway’s approach for the past twenty minutes. Yinka sighed. When would let they him land already?  There was a certain someone whom he needed to chop up into salsa.

“I can feel it. You’re going to overshoot the runway,” she said.

“They haven’t cleared us to land yet. But yes, probably I could overshoot the runway.”

“Oh rats! Bruce should have been flying this.”

Yes, Bruce should have been the one to pilot the plane. Yes, Bruce should have been the one to fly his own damn mother to Catalina Island. At last Yinka squeezed out a bead of disgust at the scent of honeysuckle and cucumbers that had stubbornly clung to her during their four hours of a do-or-die day in the sun and clung still at 6000 feet in the air.

He said, “I think I could crash us into the Getty Villa …”

Naomi glowered. The twilight could scarcely hide three score and ten years’ worth of sun damage, chemical peels, Winston lights, three am dirty martinis, scrawled over her face.

She tucked back the sides of her grey bob in a queenly manner. “For the sake of complete disclosure before we are charred and smoldering among Roman busts and Rembrandts. I never thought your mud-caked Dinka tush was ever good enough for my son.”

Perhaps another fifty years or sixty before the fact of his being a Nigerian of Yoruba ancestry, not a Dinka of Somalian ancestry, would fasten a knot in her Swiss cheese brain, but he did not care if she ever corrected herself. There was a familiar comfort in her not learning, as it bolstered his faith in inertia, in the weak little demigods that tried to keep order, stability and predictability.

He shook his head. “Bruce ended up well enough in spite of your narcissistic preening. Still I can’t complain, as you aren’t my mother…”

The whirr of the 180 horsepower engines shredded the minutes. Just when the traffic controller cleared him to land on runway 21 of the Santa Monica Airport, he realized he did not even remember what his own mother looked like.