Above England, the moon rolls off the silver edge of the wing. Behind the tail lies the ends of the day in a brilliant smear of sky.  You sail the mirror of stars above and lights below. The RAF poet whispers, “I have slipped the surly bonds of earth.”

The spirits of those pilots live out there in that glimmering air, if only in your thoughts of them. If such things as ghosts exist, would they bring along their Spitfires or would they prefer the sensation of pure, unadorned flight? What would your father choose? Surely he joins them, his heroes who took to these skies as he himself was born.

Out of the window you imagine him, the grey man you last saw, curled like a baby, dressed in blue, rising higher and higher to something greater than himself, until he, too, “put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”

Poem: “High Flight,” by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Edited 11/9 to change the picture to the one that I took from the plane over England.