Small plane

My friend Jacob learned to fly a plane without telling anyone. He kept it secret until he could really do it—fly the plane by himself—and he revealed the secret to our friends as a kind of joke. He told this joke a few months before a beloved comedian would make the same joke on prime time TV. Both jokes made me laugh; Jacob’s joke made me nervous. There are some things you can comfortably accept as being done by other people because you don’t actually know any of the people who do those things. For most of my life, that list included people who flew planes, operated on weak hearts and delivered strangers’ babies. Now I know people who do all of those things and, as a result, the acts have become all the more real and terrifying. I can’t seem to shake the awareness that everyone who does something unthinkable is actually just someone else’s friend, the way Jacob is mine. Is this part of growing up? When I got in the small plane, I tried to repress the thought that someone I met playing little league soccer was about to fly us 2,500 feet in the air. Instead, I kept thinking: my life in the palm of a friend. That part, at least, made sense.