It never occurred to him that her family's annual pilgrimage to Barbershop jamborees had shown Sunny a drunken woman emerging from her hotel room dressed only in her pajama top, a snockered shirtless man strolling the sidewalk in his trousers and socks wearing a lampshade, a petite social butterfly dressed all in red leather slurringly inquiring of the girls if they'd seen her little red Mercedes, and a blithely plastered giggling couple who decided abruptly when walking in front of Sunny and Dinah to lay down and take a nap on the hedge beside the buildings. Sunny loved the jamboree, not just for the three days of music and play on the beach, but also for the sisters' night wanderings, when they'd escape while their parents played and sang with their fellows and prowl the event watching what to them were the hysterical escapades of supposedly grown up adults, amusing Sunny and shocking Dinah, who tagged along anyway out of compulsive fascination. It was their one opportunity to watch drunken people, for neither Jedd or Victory drank much at all other than champagne at weddings or their father's very rare beer after mowing the lawn, both parents having felt the effect of Cobb's alcoholism on the family and having agreed not to let it become a part of their lives too.
From there Sunny had grown to going to a variety of clubs during college - gay, straight, leather, biker, drag, sub/domme, sports pub, tea room, lowlife, upscale - whatever struck her fancy as she went on her own fact finding mission as to how adults behaved, using a fake ID she'd purchased from an older student. She subscribed to a number of brown-paper wrapped magazines, amusing herself that they were being delivered to a Baptist college, and read, viewed, and puzzled over the wide variety of sexuality of mankind. While nothing was sacred during an intellectual pursuit, terror took over when actually faced with it in person and she was a shy retiring belle in the night, completely the opposite of her knowledge and curiosity. Being with Mitchell repulsed her and she thought it was her fault, since he was a handsome, well experienced man who tried his best to please her, but over time, he grew discouraged and she welcomed the lapse in relations.
Back in Florida with Dinah finally back with Fred up in Georgia, Jedd had been working night hours too, but unfortunately not with Victory. He was working on parts for the moon launch, scheduled to finally take place this year, to his great excitement. It had been a banner year, he having landed a job with the defense plant as their chief engineer, to finally do nothing but invent things for a living. The hardware store was prospering back in Georgia under Gigi's intelligent management. Jedd had earned his 50th patent, for which the defense plant happily paid him his token dollar, as usual taking the patent in the corporate name and giving him a certificate to acknowledge his achievement. Greatest of all, Jedd won an Innovator's Award from the Society of Mechanical Engineers for his contribution to the moon mission. Of course, this accomplishment did not occur overnight; it occurred in a series of late night sprees of inspiration, in which Jedd worked through the clock trying to get all his ideas on paper before they escaped his busy mind.
The frantic work caught up to Jedd by the summer, suffering another coronary and being diagnosed while in the hospital of severe adult-onset diabetes. Sunny and Mitchell came down to help Victory while he was in the hospital, visiting him and regaling him with stories of the Canadian countryside. He recovered well from this turn, still on a high from his success, and returned home, needles and insulin in hand less than three weeks later, in time to watch the televised news of man landing on the moon, still kicking himself for not being able to be at work to see it from there, but glad he was with his family nonetheless. Sunny's eyes full of awe and wonder at the idea of a man walking on the moon made the entire medical leave worth it, and Jedd went to bed that night happy that he had actually accomplished something great. Oh, he'd helped get man to the moon, yes, but better still, he'd taught his deep-thinking child that dreams can come true, and for that, he felt like he had succeeded.
He knew he had when he casually flipped through her journal, which she always traveled with, writing in it nightly, and read her latest entry. He being the only other person in the world with complete permission from Sunny to read her writings.
- Launch
If you have never seen the Great Winged Ship
that turns midnight to orange dawn
false day that fades as its sun pulls away,
or felt the ground tremble under your feet
or the bath of golden heat upon your face,
that cools suddenly as the bird climbs high;
or seen the flash of birth
then waited, hush-breathed for the roar
to roll across in a wave then smooth away
leaving tears unbidden streaming, or felt
the tiny great bird struggle man's wings against god's gravity
and win;
or were stung by the awed primeval grief
as the fireball fades to a moon
as if something treasured pulled out of reach
escaped to find its own sun;
and remembered there are humen in that puff of light
and you are one...
held to them by a crackling thread of thought,
then you do not know what it is to fly.
No mountain's dizzying lifeless peak
is ever so high.
That next summer Jedd and Victory set out again to see Jacob and Dixie, meeting up with Sunny and Mitchell in Ohio, Fred and Dinah being too consumed by their lives to come along. Sunny could talk of nothing other than wanting to learn to fly, and Jacob and Jedd discussed the possibility of sending the grandchild to flight school. Mitchell listened to the discussions in simmering silence, wishing he was able to help his wife achieve her dream, but so far, her income as a horse trainer was carrying them, the royalties from his writing success having dwindled over the years, stymied for another book to write to renew that income.
Outwardly Jedd was both glad that Jacob offered to finance it and disconcerted, being a proud man who asked for no assistance, but sadly aware that his engineer's pay even supplemented by the store profits wasn't going to cover the cost of fuel and ground lessons and a flight instructor.
Inwardly, Jedd flew too, for he, his father, and his grandfather had all worked in the mission of helping man to fly, his grandfather having been involved in the hundreds of hours of testing the Wright brothers conducted at Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk, being an expert in gliders in his day, and his father having made his fortune holding the patents on critical parts of the first jet engines. Wanting what was best for Sunny, he gave in, and the following fall, Sunny began glider lessons, learning to soar.