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. -
- rejectomorph (flying_blind) wrote,
rejectomorph
flying_blind
Delighter than Air
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. -
Reset Forty-Eight, Day Thirty-One
Sunday became another day I didn't feel like cooking or eating an actual meal, so I snacked on chips in the afternoon, and later I microwaved a…
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Reset Forty-Eight, Day Thirty
Saturday I plagued myself with a large dinner, and it was done earlier than I'd expected, and was not as good as I'd hoped, but I still overate and…
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Reset Forty-Eight, Day Thirty-Nine
There was some napping Friday, and some being awake, but I recall little of either. Most likely I didn't pay attention while awake, preferring to…
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