Illusions II: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student (Kindle Single) by Richard Bach Page B

to end this lifetime higher than we began, we can expect an uphill road.
     
       The next day, my friend Geoff, a pilot and a mechanic, stopped by the hospital.
       “Hi, Richard. You’re OK, I guess.”
       “I’m fine, except for all these tubes in me.” My voice was better, now, still broken. “I’ve got to get them out, today.”
       “Hope so.”
       “What’s this about a crash? You picked Puff up? Took her home?”
       “I did.”
       “She have any scratch, from the landing?”
       He thought about that, laughed. “A scratch or two.”
       “What could have scratched her?” I remembered my image of landing. So smooth.
       He looked at me. “Looks to me as if you hit the wires, way over the ground. The right wheel caught the wires. Things got worse after that.”
       “Not true. I never saw any wires, never saw any crash. I remember, before it went black. I was just skimming the grass, about to land…”
       “Some other landing, maybe. Not this one, Richard. Puff was out of control from forty feet up.”
       “You’re kidding.”
       “Don’t I wish. I took pictures, afterward. When the wheel caught the wires, Puff pitched upside down, dragged a couple of power poles over, there were fires from the sparks, little fires in the dry grass. She hit the ground with her right wing, then the tail, inverted. Puff took most of the force of the crash, a couple seconds. Not much of the impact left for you.”
       “I think I remember...”
       “I’m surprised you remember anything. It was an incredible crash.”
       “Nothing hurt, Geoff. I was dreaming, not flying. I couldn’t see for a while, and then I was…somewhere else.”
       “I hope so. Was no fun being where you were, after the crash. A man pulled you out of the cockpit. Then a helicopter came, took you to the hospital. You were here thirty minutes after the crash.”
       “Did…” her name suddenly, “…Sabryna hear about it?”
       “Yep. We flew right away, to Seattle. You were somewhere else, you stayed gone for quite a while. Some folks thought you were going to die.”
       “I decided not to.”
       “Good decision. Saw any little angels, did you?”
       “Not a one, that I can remember.”
       “They probably figured you were OK.”
       “I would have liked it if they said something. ‘ Have a nice day …””
       “They must have said something. You were gone for a week.”
       “I’ll remember later.”
       Before he left, I said good-bye. Gone again.

Chapter 4
     
    In every disaster, in every blessing, ask, "Why me?" 
    There's a reason, of course, there’s an answer.
     
       The problem with the little rooms in hospitals is that they don’t much expect that you’ll be traveling. I had a narrow bed there, one with no room to move except for lying on my back awake, or lying on my back, sleeping.
       I closed my eyes in the daytime, the gray of the room shifting seamless into the gray of sleep. Once in a while the dark behind my eyes was spangled with action and colors.
       A dream? It was misty. A place away from the hospital? Either way, dream or far away, far away was OK with me.
       The mist lifted. The field was dry hay, just been cut in the midst of a golden summer.
       There was Donald Shimoda’s Travel Air biplane, pure white and gold, quiet in the morning, and my little Fleet biplane. When I walked around the engine, there he was, sitting in the hay, leaning against the airplane’s tire, waiting for me.
       It wasn’t as if there had been forty years gone…not one day had changed. Something had happened to time.
       The same young karate-master as he had ever been in my mind, black hair, dark eyes, flash of his split-second smile, old memories, happening now.
       “Hi, Don. What are you doing here? I thought… you’d be far away.”
       “You thought there’s a ‘far away?’” he said. “Your belief of time and