William's Words: The Three-peat

       As my airplane turned toward the runway only five hundred feet below me and a mile in front of me, 10,000 feet of illuminated asphalt stared straight back at me from the surrounding black abyss. All I had to do was land my tiny plane straight down the middle, with 10 knots of wind doing their hardest to push me off to the left. Who lets their son fly across the state in the middle of the night to land an airplane? This was my dream come true.      My love of flight came from family— my grandfather was a pilot in the Air Force during the Vietnam war and his father was an aerospace engineer during World War Two, and then obtained his license in the 60s. I hold on to the records of his work, including his logbook and the scraps of a crashed Japanese Zero he had helped analyze during the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. My family has been connected to aviation long before me. When my parents found a local flight school, I was elated to have the opportunit...

  Pixels. LED displays. Hundreds of thousands of points of light cycling on and off thousands of times a minute. Flashing, blinking, emitting. Informing, but deeply separating. A life unfulfilled, experienced through a screen. My introduction to modern electronics came early enough in my life that I can’t really remember the first time I realized “Hey, I’m watching a thing that isn’t really there. Isn’t that nifty?” I guess I was good with object non-permanence as a child. But I do remember when my dad got my younger brother and I an iPad (to share) when I was 6 or 7, which we were allowed to play Minecraft on and as long as we got adult permission and supervision. I didn’t quite understand the necessity of the rigamarole required to use the iPad at the time - I was just playing a silly block game after all. Were my parents really worried about me abusing that privilege?  When I was about 9, I acquired the luxury of my own iPad. This one was shiny and new, and came with ...

 I wish I could tell you about Hawaii, the way Hawaii actually was. It was bumpy hills, rocks chiseled by years of weather, beaches sloping towards the ocean at impossible angles, and the soft whisper of leaf on leaf as the ocean breeze circumnavigated the island. On top of mountains, nothing but sea for thousands of miles in any direction you looked. At the risk of sounding like an overly enthusiastic tourist romanticizing a place he had visited for a cumulative two weeks, I wish I could go back to Hawaii every time I think about it. I’d like to tell you about the last true moment of calm I had in my life — before the world shut down. My mother, father, younger brother, and I had left the hotel room that morning in fair spirits, despite an early departure time. As we drove from our hotel across the seat of Maui’s saddle-like form towards the island’s larger volcano, Haleakala, I was mesmerized by the round, pink, and almost fuzzy balls that were soon to become mature pineapples. E...