Dreams of Amelia

Dreaming of Amelia

As a teenager I was lucky enough to have both a new car and to live a short distance from an airport once called Palwaukee.  Now it's called "Chicago Executive," see image below and click here for some history.

Chicago Executive Airport, formerly Palwaukee

My car was sort of a mixed blessing. It allowed me a great deal of freedom and it also enabled me to skip school as often as I could get away with it, as my grades reflected. 

Not long after recognizing my instinct to have a child, I would frequently find myself during the school day with my nose pressed up to the fence at Palwaukee. Watching airplanes small and large takeoff and land just simply mesmerized me. At the school library, instead of performing research for my homework, I read everything I could about flying and its history, including that of Amelia, the pioneering and legendary female aviator. A woman who decided to be a pilot and then became one, in an age when the concept of female pilots carrying passengers was thought ludicrous and ridiculously dangerous.

Transfixed.

Amelia Earhart. She personified the image I envisioned for women in the new age which seemed to be forming post-Vietnam. The Age of Aquarius it was called, enshrined in song lyrics:

.. then peace will guide the planets

And love will steer the stars

This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius ...

... Harmony and understanding

Sympathy and trust abounding

No more falsehoods or derisions

Golden living dreams of visions

Mystic crystal revelation

And the mind's true liberation ... 

I believed in this vision or at least the general sense of it. Call me crazy all you want, I still believe. At the time I connected these thoughts to my vision of a child or children yet to come. Many years later at my daughter Amelia's naming ceremony one month after she arrived here from China, I gave the invocation.

"Today we name her Amelia,

because in the United States, her new home,

a woman can be anything she decides to be."

Today the offspring of all those bloviating Republican jackass Nazis who brought us the Vietnam War to refill their pockets after World War II, hold Amelia hostage. To refill their pockets. It's just too much to believe. I thought we were rid of these assholes 40 years ago. 

Drooling, self-interested idiocy dies hard.