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By SARAH SMILEY
Navy Pilot Catches Some Serious Air
My husband, Dustin, is a highly-trained Navy pilot with an engineering degree from the U.S. Naval Academy. I’ve told you about that before. But this highly trained pilot is surely not without his Clark Griswald moments. I’ve told you about that, too.In fact, it has been my experience that the smarter a man gets in his profession, the more likely he is to fall off a ladder at home, drive away with his coffee cup still on the roof of his car, or set fire to the kitchen.
Why do successful men often have trouble functioning at home? I'm not sure, but I think it has to do with an inability to multi-task. Or maybe they use up all their smart energy at work. These are only guesses.
Just the other day, Dustin was doing what he calls the "car carousel," when one car in the driveway blocks another and he has to put the back one forward, and vice versa. His only task was to move the cars. I assumed that he could handle it.
But when I looked from the front window, I saw him step out of one car – now "parked" at the front curb – and run to the next one in the driveway. Only, he hadn't put the first car in park yet. Soon he was chasing it down the street, probably cursing as he ran.
Once the crisis had been diverted, Dustin looked up to see if I had witnessed it. I had. I gave him a smile and a thumbs-up from the window. He spent an extra long time outside after that, presumably because he didn't want to come in and hear about it from me.
To be fair, however, men also tend to cause problems for themselves no matter how or where they've spent their smart energy. This seems to be part of their design. Their need to do all things fast, rough and with power tools only makes matters worse. And when two or more of these men get together, well, you’re likely to get all sorts of trouble.
When my family visited this Christmas, we went to a nearby hill to go sledding. The boys had just received brand new, state-of-the-art foam "sleds" that actually look more like the boogie boards we used to ride the waves in
The hill had a handmade ramp on it which had already proven to cause many people to catch serious air. The slope was also slick with ice.
Still, this wasn't enough danger for Dustin. No, he decided that going down the biggest hill – the one with the ramp – with the Radio Flyer was the way to go.
Off he went in his ski pants from 10 years ago that are about three inches too short, two sizes too small and flatten his rear end like a pancake. Dustin also wore a full face mask – he wasn't joking around.
At first, despite a running start and awkward belly flop technique to mount the sled, Dustin didn't go fast. His ride started painfully slow. Then the sled hit a patch of ice and picked up speed.
Dustin was going down the hill like a speeding arrow, his body covering the child-sized sled like an elephant standing on a beach ball. Everyone at the top of the hill turned to look. "Is that an old Radio Flyer?" someone said. I pretended not to know my husband.
When Dustin hit the ramp, he was catapulted into the air and did summersaults over the sled. All I could see was a ball of twisted navy blue ski pants tumbling faster through the snow. At the bottom of the hill, Dustin pierced the snow bank like a splinter. Only his feet and his too-short snow pants were visible. The crowd murmured a collective "Ohhhhh," then "Ouch," then "Oh no."
But Dustin finally stood up, shook off the snow and actually looked pleased with himself. I felt an urge to make apologies for him, to defend him to onlookers. "Really, my husband is usually very safe and smart… except for the time he left the keys in the car that wasn't in park… he probably looks smarter when he flies – maybe.”
It turns out that apologies and explanations weren't necessary. For all the shock expressed by the people on the hill toward this grown man careening down the slope on an old Radio Flyer made for children, when Dustin trudged back up the hill, some of the men nearby asked him, "Hey dude, can I have a turn now?"
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Sarah Smiley is the author of “Going Overboard: The Misadventures of a Military Wife” (Penguin/NAL) and “I’m Just Saying…” (Ballinger), and her syndicated column “Shore Duty” appears weekly in military and civilian newspapers across the country. She lives in
