Delighter than Air

[rejectomorph]

scottobear posted a picture of a blimp, and now I've got airship nostalgia. One of my earliest memories is of standing in my front yard and looking up to find the source of a faint hum and seeing the Goodyear blimp slowly floating over my neighborhood. It was very close, and seemed huge, though it was actually much smaller than the immense dirigibles I had missed by several years, having been born after they had all crashed or been dismantled. There is something delightful about a blimp. I suppose I might have been frightened by seeing such a huge object defying gravity above me, but my only reactions were wonder and joy. These were increased when, as the blimp passed no more than half a block away, I saw someone inside the small gondola waving at me. I waved back and shouted, and watched in amazement as the big silver ship drifted south in the afternoon sunlight until its stately progression took it from view behind the trees up the block, and the soft purring of its engines faded. I think this happened when I was four years old. I remember having a great sense of happiness knowing that there were such lovely things in the world. Over the following years, that feeling always returned whenever I saw a blimp. Maybe it's the contrast between the great, ungainly bulk of the thing and its unexpected buoyancy and grace of movement, but whatever the reason, a blimp always brings me delight, though the one time I have seen one in all the years since I moved to this isolated community, (and seen then only from the distance as it moved down the valley several miles away) the delight was mixed with a touch of melancholy nostalgia, as though I were seeing it not only across the spatial distance, but back through a temporal distance, somehow reflected from a vanished and irrecoverable world.

Comments

[marseille.livejournal.com]

I always felt blimps were in a special category, as well. Over time their constant presence at sporting events has diminished this somewhat, but for at least half my life every sighting was amazing. Our family was lectured extensively on airships of every kind, since my father flew and was interested in every type of thing that could possibly fly--or had been reputed to fly, including some that probably never existed.
Also, for a child, having the occupant or operator of a plane, blimp, train, boat, truck, or even car wave was an event! I lived near the state barge canal where boats came through all summer, plus there was a train track on the other side. We had a bonus one day--a boat, train and plane all went past at once, and at least two of the three gave us a wave. Never could be sure about the plane. (My dad always waggled his wings when he flew over, though.)
One of the minor side effects of 9/11 was taking the joy out of flying. Those few days with no planes in the air felt very strange, though had I always wondered what it was like to have never seen anything flying in the sky in one's lifetime. Now we get to watch for the military jets patrolling the skies, I suppose.