One flew planes and the other swims with sharks.
One died at the age of 90 and the other is 62 with an ocean to cross.
Both are one more reason I gotta say, "We're not here for a long time but a good time."
Betty Haas Pfister was 19 when she paid a dollar at an air show to fly in a plane. Over the next decades of her life, Pfister made her home in the sky. Excerpt.
"It was the first of hundreds of flights that Betty Haas Pfister would make — dozens as a member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, during World War II, and many more as one of the nation’s most successful female competitive pilots. (And not counting those as a Pan Am stewardess in the days when women had a much harder time getting hired as pilots.)
Ms. Haas Pfister, a two-time winner of the All Women’s International Air Race, died on Nov. 17 at her home in Aspen, Colo., her daughter Suzanne said. She was 90."
Do you know what captivates me most? Two things: the photograph of Pfister sitting on the nose of her P-39 fighter, and then when WWII was done with her she found her way to live life her way. Excerpt.
"As one of 1,074 WASPs, Ms. Haas Pfister ferried planes from factories to domestic airfields or to ports for shipment overseas. WASPs also towed targets for aerial gunnery practice. Thirty-eight died in accidents. But by December 1944, with the war winding down, the women were deemed no longer needed and the unit was disbanded.
Ms. Haas Pfister found work as an aircraft mechanic and, very occasionally, flying cargo planes. In 1948, for Pan American, she became the first stewardess ever hired with more than 1,000 hours of flight time. “She got to travel all over the world,” her daughter said. “But she’d rather have been in the cockpit any day of the week.”
Several years earlier, Ms. Haas Pfister had paid $750 for an Army surplus P-39 fighter that she named Galloping Gertie. She flew in dozens of air shows and races around the country, and in 1950 she won the All Women’s International Air Race from Montreal to West Palm Beach, Fla. Two years later, she recaptured that title in a flight from St. Augustine, Fla., to Welland, Ontario."
Closer to ground is another woman who refuses to give up. I blogged about Diana Nyad just as she was getting ready to swim 103 miles of open ocean and then when she called it over. In her story recently told to Elizabeth Weil of the NYTimes, "62 And Life To Go," Nyad is going at it again. Call her crazy. Call her determined. Just don't call her quits. Excerpt.
"But as Nyad approached 60, she didn’t feel satisfied; she felt regret. Her 10-year relationship with the woman she calls the love of her life ended in 1994. Four years after that, Nyad sat outside a Los Angeles hospital while that woman had a baby with her new partner, Nyad needing to be there. Nyad’s father died the same year. Her mother died in 2007. Single and childless, she was a romantic without a lover, a striver without a goal. Shouldn’t her existence add up to more? “I wasn’t going to adopt a child, but I knew I needed something of that order,” Nyad said when we met early in November. “Something that would require everything in me. No time for neurotic meanderings about the past, no luxury of that. Got to be my best self.”
So Nyad started swimming again, training for Cuba, hoping to master the crossing that eluded her in her prime. Nyad suddenly seemed happier, secretive, tanned; her friends thought perhaps she had taken a lover. After five months of pool training, Nyad flew to Mexico to test herself in the open water. She did two long swims off Todos Santos — six hours and eight hours. “That’s when I knew I could do it,” Nyad says. “Endurance is not a young person’s game. I thought I might even be better at 60 than I was at 30. You have a body that’s almost as strong, but you have a much better mind.”
My hands are showing their age. Yet, if it truly is as Nyad says, "Endurance is not a young person's game," then count me in for another life! We're not here for a long time but a good time. If you can touch that dream, you can catch it. What's yours?
