Snakes on a Plane....

....well, cobras anyway. Or huge anacondas with murderous eye gleams. Or, mambas. I don't care for those. Especially the green ones with those whippet-thin bodies and lightning fast reflexes.

That is what it would take to get me to JUMP from a perfectly good airplane. This is a philosophy that has suited me well in all my years and I rarely have to revisit the whole idea. I mean, you never know if you are going to be happily ensconced on a plane, reading a magazine, when some drunk herpetologist's menagerie gets loose and begins to wreak havoc on the plane.

Well, my niece is going to jump from a plane for her 18th birthday. She and I share a birthday, which I feel a bit guilty about since her mother, my only sister, had to push and shove and grunt and break blood vessels for hours in order to give birth to my niece on my birthday. Although touched by the sentiment, I just knew it would come back to bite me in my significant ass one day, snakes not withstanding.

My sister told me, via eMail, that I could "contribute" to this little endeavor as an 18th birthday present, considering, she writes, that I am having "a significant"
birthday this month. I replied that I would happily send a check. But thoughts linger.

How often, I wonder, will my niece and I have SIGNIFICANT birthdays the same day in the same year? I guess not ever. This is the year she turns 18, old enough to vote and be drafted for war - but not old enough to buy a drink or play cards in Nevada. This is the year our birthdays are like Halley's Comet. They mathematically coincide and need to be celebrated in a big way.

I am supposing that my contribution isn't just monetary. I ask my sister for birthday suggestions and infer that I am to abandon my perfectly good nasty-snake theory of jumping from planes and actually hold hands with the niece and JUMP?

It would be historical. I turn 50 - a half century. She turns 18 - legal adulthood. We would do this in Lodi, of all places. A place familiar to me because of a song that was played on the radio each morning my father would drive me to school during the period my mother was in the hospital. I was around 10 years old. I rode in the front seat of the Mustang. A band sang about Lodi and being stuck there. Lodi is a place where wine is put up and people get stuck.

I find the whole idea of jumping put of a plane in Lodi beyond preposterous. Ludicrous to the Nth degree. My formerly-hospitalized mother would kill me if the fall did not.

I have, in my lifetime, conquered my fear of snakes. Except for the ones mentioned above. But I consider that fear an issue of safety and sobriety. It is reasonable to be fearful of green mambas curled up where they don't belong and just waiting to do damage - like chasing significant birthday holders from planes.