My wife tells me that I have two problems: I don’t listen to her, and, uh, something else.
The one time I DID listen to her recently, she suggested a great idea.
See, I’m a nerd. I get all excited about dopey stuff that doesn’t mean anything, and then I have to do something with it.
Enter California Air Museums, a site dedicated to inspiring young parents to bring their kids to California’s many air museums by presenting video tours and stories about the museums themselves.
All good and well, but the Holidays and the wintry weather have rather put a hitch in my museum-visiting git-along, so to speak. What to do?
“You’re a nerd,” she tells me. “You get all wrapped up in weird little pieces of information and details. Write about that.”
Enter One Motor, Many Planes, the first blog post in the new Stories feature on the website’s front page.
Casting the article as a story rather than a blog post gives it more gravity – more bottom. That’s a sailing term. See, sailing ships have a presence in the water, and the deeper the hull the more bottom she presents… eh.
I digress.
A funny side note to Motor story: the museum’s historian told me two entirely different aircraft, a hot combat bomber and a lumbering transport made use of the same engine. Isn’t that fascinating?
I began writing the story with that fact as my premise, only to find out in doing the research that he was not correct. Much digging and figuring out resulted in proving that he was correct, but not in the way he thought, and a much more interesting story.
Anyway, now I have to go try and remember what else my wife told me. Something about a fire…
John D Reinhart 