Those touch and goes at El Toro California in 1958 and 1959 were especially important.  They had a new plane, the F4D.  They called it the Skyray--and it had never been aboard a carrier.  Ken was the safety officer for his squadron and also the LSO. (Landing Signal Officer.  Back then, they didn't use a green light to get on board, they had an LSO on a platform on the side of the 'boat' waving them aboard with paddles.  He had a chute--kind of like a water slide chute--behind him so that if a plane crashed, he could fall backwards and slide to the bottom of the ship.  And not get hit.)

So Ken was getting everyone ready to qualify in the F4D to land on the carrier.  The plane was built to go from ground to altitude in the shortest time possible.  He said that when you lit off the afterburner, it was like riding a rocket.  Problem was, it took so much gasoline that when you got up there, you didn't have much time left because you had burned all your fuel up getting there.

It was a super dangerous airplane.  They lost so many of them that they started calling the ocean off shore "Skyray bay."  I was at the squadron one day and a pilot came in holding his helmet, dripping water everywhere.  Nobody seemed surprised.  It must have been a regular occurrence.  They would have to eject and end up in the ocean.

The day came when Ken took them all aboard.  Twenty-seven of them.  (One million touch and goes on ground beforehand.)  In the two weeks it took them to qualify on board, they lost four planes.  Killed one pilot and broke another one's back.  It seemed normal by that time.

They took the planes and squadron to Japan one week later (for a year) and never had another accident.  Amazing.  They were running the Korean and Japan perimeters because the Migs were testing them.  Trying to see how fast they could scramble from ground to air.  It was the cold war and Russia was aggressive.

I had two babies in diapers when he left.  I was just glad he was alive.  And thankful for the chute.

Monday, my sister's husband Mark had triple bypass surgery.  (Everything went well)   All of us met at the hospital to wait with her as he was in surgery.  My brother Bill was there with his wife Janet.  They are the ones that were missionaries to China for thirty seven years.  He is a doctor.  He got his degree from OU by selling his soul to the Navy.  After he graduated, he owed the Navy four years so he went to flight school and became a flight surgeon for NASA and for a while he was the astronauts' doctor.  Gus Grissom, and Mercury project.  Yes, he was there when they were killed.  He has a million stories about airplanes and riding tandem with every yoo-hoo that needed a check.

My niece Lindsey was there as well, (her husband is in the Air Force in some aviation capacity).  The three of us got to telling stories about carrier landings.  Lindsey had wondered about why they did a million touch and goes, and Bill and I got started telling about carrier landings in stormy weather, at night, pitch black, on a deck that was pitching up and down while rolling side to side.

So many guys got killed because they couldn't land the aircraft correctly. You had to land at full power because  if the the tail hook boltered,  you would miss the wires, and had to have enough speed to go around again.  Thus, the touch and goes.  You practice landing a million times on the ground, trying to catch wire so that when you do it on the carrier, you get it right.

Ken said that the scariest thing he ever did for those twenty-one years of Marine Jet Aviation was night cat-shots off a carrier.  That superseded getting shot at every day in Korea and Viet Nam.  And if it was in a storm, you knew that when they blew you off the end of the carrier into the inky black soot of night that you were going to have to find your way back to the carrier and land.  He called it "Hours and hours of boredom followed by moments of sheer terror."

At El Toro, I used to get tired of the whine of the jets all day long as they practiced touch and goes, but was thankful they had done it when they went aboard the carrier.

There are three categories of sin. 1 John 2 :16 "For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world."

1.  Lust of the flesh.  All those sexual temptations that pull us away from God's plan for us.  He told Adam to be fruitful and multiply.  He made a man and a woman and blessed them.  Genesis 1:28 "And God blessed them, and said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply..."  A man.  A woman.  A partnership to "replenish the earth..."

2.  The lust of the eyes.  All the stuff that gets us into financial trouble.  We see it, we want it, we buy it and then struggle to pay for it.  You want it when you are twenty.  You charge it when you are thirty.  You pay it out when you are forty.  You are sick of it and wonder what in the world you were thinking of when you are fifty.  And finally, you get rid of it when you are sixty.  Stuff.  Keeping up with the Joneses.  If you don't go shopping, you won't buy things you don't need.

3.  The pride of life.  This one almost ruined me.  Ken was asked to go in with nine other friends of his to form a Federal Bank.  After thinking about it for weeks, he finally decided not to do it.   But I was enamored by the idea.  It sounded "ritzy" to me.  So I asked him, "Are you sure?  It sounds like a great opportunity to me."  So he did it.  Much like Eve taking the apple to Adam.  The bank went belly up five years later, and I ended up putting everything I made for the next five years toward paying off the loan.  Pride.  That's all it was.

Stupid.  We didn't need it.  It was purely pride.  I never made a mistake like that again.  God taught me a very, very, very painful lesson.  Who cares how much money you have.  Who cares how new your car is.  The thing that people are attracted to is your stories about how you failed and God took care of you.  People want hope.  Hope that there is life after mistakes.

In Genesis 2:17 God tells Adam not to eat from a certain tree.  (Eve did not exist at the time.)  In Chapter 3:1 she is asked a question by a beautiful winged creature, a serpent,  "You can't eat of every tree in the garden?"  Isaiah talks about the flying serpent in Isaiah 14:29 and 30:6.

She answers that they can't eat from the tree and they can't touch it.  Exaggeration.  God said nothing about touching the fruit.  She must have learned about the forbidden tree from Adam--since she didn't exist when God gave his instructions to Adam.

The winged creature then says, "You won't die!"  The devil always lies.  John 8:44 "You are of your father the devil...for he is a liar, and father of it."  He promises something good, and delivers something else.  The father of lies.  We don't take lies seriously enough.  God does.

So she ate the fruit and gave some to Adam--and Adam did what God had personally told him not to do.  Adam knew exactly what he was doing.  The Bible says that Eve was beguiled by this serpent.  He was beautiful and he seemed "in on" some information that she had not heard from her husband Adam.  But Adam heard the restriction on that tree straight from the mouth of God.

Later in Chapter 3:14, 15 and 17, God places curses all three of them because of what they had done. The serpent (winged creature) was cursed with having to crawl around on his belly in the dust from then on.  This is the verse that gives the notion that the serpent that temped Eve was  a snake.  But the Bible doesn't say that.   It says that the serpent became a snake.  The snake was what the serpent was doomed to be after God put a curse on him.  As a point of reference, the word 'snake' is never used.

There is no way Eve would have been temped by a snake.  The serpent is described as "subtle".  He was beautiful.  Isn't that always the case.  Wrap sin up in satin and tie it with a bow and we will open it every time.  That's what is wrong with humans.  Only God can help us.

God help us.

Proverbs 18:22 "Whosoever finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favor of the Lord."  That's good to know.

Proverbs 9:9 "Live joyfully with the wife that you love all the days of the life...which He has given you..."  

Ephesians 5: 33 "...let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband."

1 Peter 3:7  "Likewise, you husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel...being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered."

Ken made an "A" in  "Husbands 101."  It took a while--but he was a quick study and he aced the class.  I could live another hundred years and never find another one like him.  I wouldn't even try.

We didn't have a washing machine.  Much less a dryer.  I did the wash in the bathtub.  When there was a lot of it,  I stomped everything with my feet.  Like Lucy and Ethel stomping grapes.  It worked.  I would rinse the clothes and hang them on a line out back.  Half the time, the dirty Camp Pendleton wind blew the clothes dry, but they had to be washed again from the dust.  We didn't have wash and wear back then. Everything had to be starched and ironed.  I burned a few things before I got the hang of it.  My mom had done all the ironing.  One more thing I didn't know how to do.

Progress in the homemaking department was slow.  But just as I thought I was getting the hang of it, I found out I was pregnant.  (One more thing to learn how to do.)  The only baby I had ever held was my brother and I was five when he was born.

But the most wonderful thing happened.  I made a friend.  My very first friend since we got married.  Mary Lib.  Her husband was the air officer for another regiment as I recall.  She was ten years older than me and had just had her first child.  She took me under her wing.  It was heaven to have a friend.  I got to go through the first months of her little boy's life with her, and by the time I had Pat six months later, I had graduated from "Babies 101."  I didn't make a very good grade, but I learned enough to get by.

It is amazing to look back and see where God has interjected into your life and provided you with what you needed right when you needed it.  At the time, I never saw His hand in anything.  But in retrospect, He was with me all along.

I had never felt so alone in my entire life. But God was there.  And He provided what I needed to get through all the steps of becoming a new person.  A wife.  A mother.  Not a kid anymore.  I don't think anyone I ever knew was more ill prepared for the job than I was.

Marriages are funny things.  I don't know what a normal marriage is.  I do know that I didn't have one.  Ken was gone all the time.  To the desert, overseas, or in the air.   The Marine Corps' mantra was that if they had wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one.  I learned pretty quickly that if I was going to make it, I would have to learn to take care of myself.  I had never done that before.

 I came from a strong Christian family that didn't have very much, but that took care of my every need. I've told you before that my mom had a passion for reading and made a rule that if we were reading something on her "approved" list, we didn't have to do housework.  Needless to say, I read all the time.  She also didn't want anyone in the kitchen with her.  My life was pretty well charmed.

When I got married, all of that changed.  Ken brought the paycheck in and said, "That's what we make.  You have to learn how to spend it.  You'll have to pay the bills because I won't be here most of the time."  I had never written a check.  I didn't even know what you would write checks for.  My folks never talked about rent, electricity, water, garbage, car payments, gas or anything else to do with money.  I had never thought about those things.  But I could quote Hamlet.  I could sew pretty things.  I could sing, play the piano, marimba and drums.  I could memorize and quote poetry.  I entertained the Lions club, Rotary club and various women's organizations on a regular basis.

It wasn't like I couldn't do anything.  It was just that the things that I could do served no purpose in a marriage.  It's a good thing that a guy looks at the outside package when they marry because  I came in a nice package--which I didn't know at the time, because Seventeen Magazine came every month to tell me what was wrong with me.  And according to Seventeen, that was everything.   But looking back at old pictures I am amazed that I was a pretty girl.  I never knew that.  Probably a good thing.  Pretty is as pretty does and I couldn't do much of anything useful.