Are you flying high?

I remember chastising my daughter when she became a teenager and she wanted Gloria Vanderbilt plastered across her back pocket. "You are buying a label, doing free advertising, and making that woman famous and richer. What has she done for you?"

"Mom, I am not wearing Garanimals mix and match; I want Gloria Vanderbilts."

I lost control. Feathered hair, funky fads and fun friends whose moms "let them do anything they wanted" won her over. I wasn't that mom! But I did buy her GVs for Christmas.

Last week I watched Gloria Vanderbilt, who is 87 years old, on her son's daytime talk show. Anderson Cooper is on Ch. 30 at 4:00 p.m. in St. Louis.

I've decided I like the classy old gal. I especially like a quote that Anderson attributed to his mother.

"We are not put on this earth to see through one another. We are put on this earth to see one another through." ~ Gloria Vanderbilt

I read Anderson Cooper's memoir, Dispatches from The Edge, and was astounded by his determination. He so wanted to be a reporter that he had a friend make up a fake press badge and he borrowed a video camera, hopped on a plane and went out to cover the war and news. His life story is amazing. His mother married her soul mate, his dad who was from Arkansas.

Imagine Anderson as a young man jetting all around the world with the guts to live his dream, not waiting for it to happen, but making it happen. That takes courage.

I imagine we have all had an experience or two on a plane that we could share. Here is an ongoing, online anthology call for submission, but it is not a paying venue.


Airplane Reading: Nonfiction about Flight
Airplane Reading (edited by Mark Yakich & Christopher Schaberg of Loyola University New Orleans) is an online, ongoing anthology dedicated to people's ordinary and extraordinary stories of air travel. The site features creative nonfiction, anecdotes, and observations about everyday experiences and misadventures of modern flight. Now accepting submissions at airplanereading.org

The 'smell' of a story

I've been reading Anderson Cooper's book, Dispatches from the Edge, a Memoir of Wars, Disasters and Survival. Back in the day when he couldn't get a job as a journalist, he boarded a plane with a cheap camera and the guts to make a name for himself. Now, he is a widely recognizable correspondent for CNN. His memoir is interesting. He is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt. He reveals some interesting personal information about his family.

In one chapter he tells about filming horrific images and discusses the sights, sounds, smells and feel of war and hurricane zones. On his flight home, although he had showered and had clean clothes on, he kept smelling those 'images'. He thought he was hallucinating, and then he realized he was wearing the same shoes that had stepped in the mud and the blood. He claims that for him, "every story has a smell."

I like that description. Most of our 'life stories' have a smell too. So I jotted a few down. Since fall is in the air, I'll share this one. I remember being a little girl sitting on my grandparents' front steps watching Pappy burn the pile of leaves in the gutter that my cousin and I had just tromped and crunched through. Kids today wouldn't recognize that smell, but my frame of reference is a vivid sensory experience.

Crisp autumn wind snarks up my five year old nose, mingles with the smell of burning leaves and rushes to the pleasure center in my brain; the promise of Halloween and a sack of candy to last me until Christmas, a day away.

Think of any incident or time of your life and write a sentence or two using sensory detail and please SHARE. I will share more another time. Right now, it is off to work I go.