To Dad on Father's Day

Dear Dad,
Wow, daddy, it's been almost 9 years since you left, so much has happened since we were last able to chat. It's Father's Day 2010 and I really miss you today. Mom is right there beside you, she lived for almost 7 years after you were gone.
First of all, let me thank you both for giving me life and teaching me about the wonderful love of Jesus and His Amazing Grace! Life just hasn't been the same since you left. It seems so unfair to have to reduce your life to four words on your tombstone, as there is so much left unsaid. As I think about it, we should have put mechanical genius on there as I don't believe that there was anything that you could not fix. Whether it was our well-worn cars or washing machines or your cameras or a diesel engine in the jungles of Bolivia, you somehow were able to find the problem and get it going again. For what little of that I inherited from you, I am forever grateful.
I did the best I could taking care of the Georgia-Cumberland Conference plane for them and sadly, they had an engine failure on takeoff and crashed, killing five of God's hard workers. I will never get over that. You would recall our personal plane that you sold to a minister in Arizona that crashed in 1973 and killed 3 ministers. You would never get over that so we share that in common. After flying professionally all of my life and working on airplanes with you since I was 8 years old I am convinced of one thing: The forces of evil work harder on those committed to doing good in this world.
The most painful thing I have to tell you is that after 30 years of marriage, Cindy and I lost our way. I will take most of the blame for that and just say that when people don't stay totally focused and committed to each other, amazingly bad things can happen when you aren't even looking. The kids are fine, staying in tune and keeping in touch, and for that I am so grateful. Brad just recently provided me with my first grandchild, Sadie, with Jessica, who is busy finishing up medical school residency at Loma Linda. Shayna is busy with her Optometry program while her husband works as a pastor in the Portland, OR area. I have recently had a couple of great opportunities to visit them both.
I feel so lucky to have a new lady in my life, Karen, whom I met while working in the Pittsburgh, PA area. We are really newlyweds but already moved to New Delhi, India so that I could work at my new job here, flying for Jindal Steel and Power. She has been so supportive and patient with me while I recovered from a lot of pain as a result of all that bad stuff mentioned above. There have been times when I haven't been very loveable for sure. But, Shayna suggested that this job was probably sent from above to help me recover and I am hoping that all works out. So far, so good.
Also, since you left, unbelievably, Jim's wife, Vickie, was in a very bad auto accident in 2007 and has basically been in some altered state of consciousness ever since. That means that poor Jim has been alone and trying to finish raising the 3 girls by himself. Who would have ever thought that all this would happen? Life sure is full of twists and turns, that's for sure. There are times when I would just love to sit down with you and, while we work together on whatever piece-of-junk car you owned at the moment or agreed to fix for a friend, and with grease up to our elbows, we could try to make sense of our situation. There was always something very satisfying about coming in from the garage with the motor or transmission or the mechanical challenge of the day, now working. Cleanup was a very pleasant task after that. I don't see any solutions to all the messes here and I haven't had the opportunity to go out in the garage and fix something since 2006 when I had my last real garage to work in. Yeah, the house went away and lawyers advised a financial restart after the plane crashed. That was a bitterly hard pill to swallow but when you are at the emotional bottom of an absolute pit, I just felt like I was watching a horror show and it was my life and I couldn't change the channel. I can feel your strong will trying to make things right but it's okay. I have gotten over most of the pain and I have accepted the consequences of my actions. I actually feel positive about where I am now. Notice I didn't say Great, just Positive. The good part about it is that I haven't lost my way.
God is still an active part of my life, and while I have made numerous mistakes, I feel His tremendous care and watchkeeping over me.
I have been wanting to tell you all this stuff since it first began to happen but I get too emotional about it and I can't seem to bring myself to do it. Now, on this Father's Day, and since you are gone, I have really written this letter to myself. I have been thinking a lot about you. I know you loved the warm weather in Phoenix/Scottsdale and up there on Bell Road, it is certainly warm. Where I live here in India now, it's more than warm. If you came for a visit, you would like the temperatures. Mainly, I just wanted to tell you what all the big changes are since you are gone. Life just seemed like a roller coaster that was headed downhill fast and somewhere along the way went off the rails. Thank goodness His grace covers our follies.
While life is nothing like I ever imagined it would be, it is good, and I needed to tell you all this. I miss you and love you and can't wait to see you. God has tremendously blessed me with two amazingly wonderful kids and with a wonderful lady to help watch over me. Soon we'll sit down and talk about all this and be amazed again at God's Amazing Grace.
Love,
Dan

Eating Nacho Chips with a Spoon

Hi there,

Just wanted to give you an update from India since Karen is gone to America. I thought I would explain some of the social events that happen around here. Ignore the first picture for now, we will get back to that in a minute. The second photo just shows a group of folks
that are called the Gurgaon Connection. On Wednesday mornings they meet at the local Crowne Plaza Hotel for coffee and pastries. I don't get to go too often because I am out of town

but for the last two weeks I have been able to attend. It was here that we met our friends Gene and Kim Copeland. Gene was brave enough to come to these meetings, too, even though he and I and Bill are the only men who show up for this. The rest are wives of men who are in India working full-time jobs or are here with their own business and they have enough flexibility in their schedules to occasionally come to this.

That's Bill on the left of photo 3. His wife is an attorney who is here helping develop their clientele in India. The last photo is Kim, and Gene with me at the coffee. I hadn't taken my camera out with me for awhile so I brought it today and took a couple of photos of the group.

It's one of the meetings around here that is mainly for people from other places for whom India isn't home and to share feelings and thoughts about living here. Gene is a training pilot under contract with Air India on their CRJ commuter jets. Kim came to India once and then went back to Texas. Gene has been here for 2 and 1/2 years and now he got Kim back and I believe she is going to stay this time. She is really good friends with my Karen. After our social gathering this morning Gene and Kim were kind enough to give me a ride home so I suggested that we go out to eat lunch on the way. Gene suggested this new restaurant out by our place that we thought was a new Mexican food place because the name was Picante's. It also has a picture of a huge chili pepper on it's sign. In America this would definitely be a Mexican restaurant. So, while Gene and Kim were up front I went on back and looked for a table. As soon as we walked in, which was more outside than in, but with a covered area with ceiling fans, we sat down and got the menu. Now, here we were captive at this place and pretty much committed to eating here and now the menu doesn't have one, single Mexican item on it. It's an Indian food place with a chili pepper picture and Picante as a name because they put pepper pretty much in everything they cook. Oh, and if you look at that menu from the restaurant in the picture up above, you will see an interesting picture of a woman smoking from a "hookah" and apparently they have Picante flavored hookah if you want at this place. Now tell me the closest restaurant to where you live that offers Picante flavored hookah right on the menu!! See, we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. I just had to take a picture of it and send along for the blog page this week. We ordered some "chili potatoes" and some chicken with "low spice". Actually, while we had fear, the food was pretty good and we came out okay on our risky deal.

Now for the closer on today's stories, I have to tell you why I am now eating Nacho chips with a spoon. When I was in California with my son and was going to be flying immediately back to Delhi, I asked him to take me somewhere where I could buy some huge bags of nacho chips. He knew exactly where to take me to get some "Mission tortilla strips". They are great chips and I purchased two huge bags to put in the special suitcase I had borrrowed from Brad and Jess just to bring food that I like back to India. I had canned foods and flushable baby wipes and batteries and all sorts of things in there, along with my books from my refresher flight course. Well, I found out that the TSA, our new government Security forces were not at all happy with the two huge bags of tortilla chips since this is possibly a way to smuggle drugs. So, they left a nice note in the suitcase that explained that due to new rules they had to go through the tortilla chip bags. The clear plastic windows on the sides of the bags were both pierced (I hope they were wearing clean gloves) and of course, it wouldn't do to just put your finger in the bag, no, you have to check all around in case someone is smuggling something in those chips, so, when I arrived in Delhi, the cans of food were quite bent and the chips looked more like powder than chips. I am not to be deterred and, so, while in America I would have thrown them away, I have determined not to let TSA beat me at my own game, so now I have to eat my chips with a spoon because there is really no other convenient way to eat chips that are ground pretty much to powder. Amazingly, the taste is still great and in the dry climate here in Delhi they are staying relatively fresh for having been a month and a half since I bought them. See what you can do when you put your mind to it. The main reason I had bought them was to enjoy with Karen's homemade "Poor Man's Caviar" dip recipe that we got from Jennifer in Pittsburgh. It is an awesome recipe and we picked out the largest pieces as carriers for the dip. It worked and now the rest of the chips are way too small to do anything with but dip with a spoon and enjoy the taste, if not the texture. Remember my father said one of the ways to survive in a foreign country was to remain "adaptable?" Well, here's a good example of adapability.

Tomorrow I have to fly for the first time in about 5 days. Just to make it interesting, the aviation authorities in India have decided since the Air India crash that they should occasionally ride along with everyone and make sure that they are using safe procedures. Fortunately for me, my pilot buddy Gene has been on a couple of checks with this very inspector so he told me what to expect and the kinds of questions that he will ask. Very helpful and it should be an easy day if the visibility cooperates. The airport we are flying into is a Visual airport only so we will be required to have 5 kilometers of visibility (about 3 and 1/2 miles). This will be reported by the tower guy at the destination airport, who is the local flight instructor at the flight school walking around with a low powered walkie-talkie to be the "controller" at our destination. The runway is only 4000 feet long and it will be hot so we will keep the fuel way down since the airport is only 25 minutes from Delhi. It's just a drop off of passengers and head right back to Delhi, so should be an easy day.

Karen called and the wedding proceeded according to schedule in Las Vegas so she is enjoying a few family days and then heading back to our place near Pittsburgh to finish cleaning up some of the messes we left behind and to put some stuff in storage.

I hope you all are doing well and enjoying your summer.

Dan

Any Sunday in the summer

Hi friends,

Well, this time of year for many, many years our family would head out on Sunday for our favorite little paradise, Lake Ocoee, in East Tennessee. Since I am currently in India with no opportunity to ski I have to just take a trip down memory lane. When I first moved to Cleveland, Tennessee in March of 1980, one of the first people I was introduced to was Doug Jones, who flew a King Air for his father and their company owned the hangar next to ours in Cleveland. Luckily for me, as a ski enthusiast for all of my life, Doug was also a skiier and since we were also both pilots, we spent a tremendous amount of time together at the lake. Doug was single, but I had a very understanding and often participating wife on our trips to the lake. Many is the night we slept in tents or friends cabins and would ski until darkness shut down our program and often we were the first ones on the lake in the morning. Doug had his own Ski Supreme and we skied with that for many years. When he moved to Atanta, I had to buy my own boat and this was the second boat we owned from 1991 until 2006. I sold this boat to friend Mickey Turner and he has completely gone through and restored it beautifully. I would love to see it. Before that, we had a black one just like this from 1986 to 1989. Doug has married and moved to near Loma Linda, CA, where Brad is now and he still skies with my son out there whenever they get a chance. In fact, just over a year ago, we all went out together and did a little skiing just before I left for India. As you can see from the water, this was a great place for skiing, if you timed it right. So many of our friends had cabins and boatslips at the marina. We chose to keep our boat in the garage and trailer it to the lake so that it stayed clean and because our boats often had idiosyncracies that meant they really shouldn't be kept in the water while we were away. My son Brad and I often joke about all the things you had to know in order to drive our boat all day without some big issues, but we always had a good time, even when we had to be rescued or had to paddle for 30 minutes to get back where we could get the boat out.

The way I saw it, if we had the boat, no matter how much trouble it was, the party was under our control, and that was a huge thing with two kids growing up in our house. The second picture is one of Brad and his best buddies at the lake just a few years ago. Now all those guys are married with their own children and are well on the way to their careers as professionals. Matt, on the left, is an orthopedic surgeon in Chattanooga, Nick is a nurse anesthetist in Naples, Florida, Scott is in the long term health care business in Cleveland, TN and Brad (my son) is an MBA working in Southern CA while his wife finishes her pediatric residency. I flew for Scott's grandfather for many years when we first moved to Tennessee. All of these guys are like my own kids and we often had skiing and wakeboarding outings when schedules and weather cooperated. Growing up together, wakeboarding together, going to the same schools, going to the lake, these are all great memories of these kids.

And, the first picture is one of my daughter Shayna and our little Bichon Friese, Lacey, her best friend growing up. Lacey loved the lake, as well, and would beg to get in and swim a few strokes when it was hot, but always came out in a hurry, as it was cool with her thin fur. I am currently in India to save up for my cabin on the lake for my retirement. I am always happiest when the water is lapping at the side of my boat and not far from where I sleep. Ideally, I would have a place on the lake that would be located on an airstrip. There is a place I am thinking about down in Milledgeville, Georgia. Too bad these people are so proud of these places, but maybe something will work out. You have to have dreams, right? Karen likes the Asheville/Hendersonville, NC area so I will maybe go looking for water there. Don't have your real-estate agent call me, I still hope to be working here for several more years. If I had all the money I spent on boat and car gas to get to the lake, I could have already retired, but then I wouldn't have these priceless memories, so this is a good tradeoff. Plus, now if I need an orthopedic doc, an anesthetist or a nursing home, I know some people!!

Hey, this had nothing to do with India and that was exactly the purpose for just a few minutes.

The rope is tight so "Hit it."

Dan

Big Boss at His own airport

That's Mr. Jindal in the brown shirt in the middle of this crowd as we arrived at the airport in Raigahr, India, where he owns the steel mill and the airport and lots of the town. As you can see from the photo, when he comes to town, he garners lots of attention. If you study the body language and position you notice that India has a way of showing true respect for the boss. The ex-pat that is the farthest away and facing back towards the camera in a white shirt is my friend from last summer at the guest house, named Jasper Marais, and he is from South Africa and is in charge of the construction of the coal-gasification power plant that is being built. Many of the other white shirts in this photo are either fixed-wing pilots or helicopter pilots. As we arrived, Mr. Jindal briefly instructed what was happening that day and then climbed into the waiting helicopter to take him onsite to another project that he is working on. I snapped this photo shortly after he climbed off the jet I was flying and before he got into the helicopter. I thought it was just an interesting snapshot of a day in the life of one of India's true industrialist's fueling the growth and positioning himself to benefit from the tremendous expansion of India's economy.

During this week I have had in the back of my mind that while I was looking at the Himilayas out the window of my jet from 41,000 feet and thinking that this is the time of year for Mt. Everest climbs, I wondered what kind of year it was. On May 24th, 2004, a personal friend of mine from Chattanooga, TN, Scott Graham, an attorney and pilot for a development and construction company, took a few months out and at age 44, climbed Mt. Everest successfully that year. I really enjoyed my time flying with and talking to Scott, and so became more than casually interested in the stories from that mountain. Sadly, I see from the news this year that a great, young man from Scotland, 28 years old, fulfilled his lifelong dream to climb Everest this year and then died while descending the mountain on May 26 of this year. It gives me a strange feeling to know that I was looking out my window at that very area on that very day and this man was there. I looked up some of the statistics about Everest and I saw that a 69 year old man tried and died climbing the mountain recently. I will content myself to look out the window and see it. I hope to travel to Katmandu while living here and even go up to Base camp just to see it. Scott, my friend from Chattanooga, is well on his way to climbing all of the tallest peaks on the 7 continents in his lifetime. When I last visited with him he had done South America, Africa, Everest and was in pursuit of the others. Nice legacy, expensive hobby, interesting life. Interestingly, Scott lives on Lookout Mountain, TN, USA and his friends and neighbors own the Rock City tourist attraction that has advertising signs all over the country. They offered Scott 10,000 USD to carry a silk flag to the top of Everest and unfurl it for a picture at the top of the world (See Rock City). He took and successfully completed that challenge. I was impressed, after all, do you know anyone who has climbed Everest? 29,029 feet above sea level, I cannot believe when I am flying at FL290 that I am even with the top of the mountain. Just to keep Scott's head screwed on straight, he has a lady who climbs every mountain that he does and they complete these climbs at the same time. So, it's not a power thing, it's an adjustment to high altitude and lack of oxygen and acclimatizing your body to such conditions, plus having luck with weather and conditions at the top of the mountain. I still remember Scott saying that his brain felt like mush for almost 6 months after he came down off the mountain. It really does affect you.

Karen is traveling to the USA as I write this. She left the apartment this morning at 2 a.m. in order to be on time and processed for her flight which left Delhi around 5 a.m. Three hours seems like a lot of time but when you are going international, time just flies while you are going through customs, processing your boarding and being scanned for the 3rd time. At least this time she will enjoy the benefits of business class. I can't wait to talk with her when she gets to America. I know it's a horribly long trip. She will be nearly 15 hours in flight from Abu Dhabi to Chicago and has 3 hour layovers in Abu Dhabi and Chicago. Sometimes, with international travel those 3 hour layovers can evaporate in a hurry if there is some kind of delay. She has been in the air for hours and it will be 10 more before she lands.

My brother had his birthday yesterday, my son has his birthday and anniversary in the next week and some friends here have their birthdays soon. My friend Ulyana, from Ukraine, has her baby due this week so I hope it's born on Brad's bday, on the 8th. We had a big thunderstorm blow by here about 30 minutes ago so summer and monsoon season might be a little bit early this year. Last year I arrived simultaneously with the monsoons on June 29th. They were late and weak last year, hopefully, they will get plenty of rain this year.

We had an unexpected visitor at the apartment yesterday in the form of a small lizard. It fell to the floor and our smallest kittie cat promptly ate it. Karen and I were both shocked, as the other cats pretty much ignored this little guy. Poppy wasted no time in making an extra meal out of this one. We know Jupy, our white cat from Pennsylvania, would have done the same thing. He wasted no time in trying to get any bug or rodent that dared to intrude in his territory. Poppy still is very small and probably doesn't weigh a pound yet, so it was kind of surprising.

Hope you are all doing well. Thanks for your notes and letters. Karen returns on July 15th, so I will be counting the days. She actually told me that coming back to India to see me and the kitties would be the favorite part of her trip to America and back. I asked her yesterday and was pleased with the reply, since she seems to be adjusting so well.

My contract is renewed and we have our visas extended for now. I am working on the paper work for extending my India pilot's licenses and adding the new plane. That should be done within a month and my license from last year is good until July 15 so we have a little time.

Take care,

Dan