"Okay, Fritz, why don't you fly her for a while," Hal said. He took his hands off the yoke and held them up in the air like he was being arrested. "No, not me!", I said, happy to be a neck-craning passenger. "You're doing just great." "I refuse to take 'no' for an answer," he insisted. "Fly this thing!"

Gulp. It had been way too long since I'd flown an airplane. In spite of my love for flying, I am not by nature an airborne person. I'm very grounded. I'm out of my element in the air. And this airplane was nothing like the one I had flown twenty years ago. This one held four people, for goodness' sake, and I was seated to the right of the pilot instead of behind him. It felt weird. I was accustomed to tandem seating, where the center of gravity was right in front of me. It was hard to figure out where the CG was in this airplane. (I was probably sitting right in it.) There was no stick, either - just a little steering-wheel kind of object in which I had absolutely no trust.

But here was a Hallowe'en Scorpio telling me to grab the controls of his airplane, so there was nothing to do but comply. I reached out, taking the yoke gingerly between my fingertips, absolutely certain that the airplane would fall right out of the sky the moment it was firmly in my grasp.

Hal is one of two Hallowe'en Scorpios I've known in my life. Hallowe'en Scorpios are kinda special to me, like folks born on Friday the 13th and Leap Day. I got married once on Hallowe'en just because it's such a groovy day. But I digress. As I sat there in the cockpit of his Grumman Cheetah, hands oh-so-tentative on the controls, I knew that once again a Scorpio was pushing me past my self-imposed limitations, making me grow. (That is, after all, their purpose in my life.)

It was a beautiful day for flying in spite of the fact that the sky was a bit hazy, bordered by a layer of brown pollution blanketing the horizon. It's hard to see that stuff when you're on the ground. I checked the instruments as Hal talked me through them. "This is your altimeter", he said, tapping on an instrument cover. Yep, that looked familiar. "We're still close enough to Hobby Airport that we have to stay under 2,000 feet. Keep your altimeter steady at about 1800 and you'll be fine."

The Cheetah purred under my hesitant guidance, her engine strong and reliant, reminding me that I was in good hands. She, at least, knew what she was doing. I began to relax just a little. Not much, mind you, but a little. Hal talked about the Global Positioning System and showed me how it worked. Cool gadget, the GPS. You turn it on and it starts searching for satellites. When it connects with three of 'em, you're in business. It tells you your exact heading and also which heading you should be on if you plan to arrive at your intended destination.

"Navigate by the GPS," Hal said, pointing to the digital display. "Look right there. Remember we plugged Galveston in as our destination? This number right here is telling you that you're about 10 degrees off course. Correct for that. Fly it by the GPS readout." Riiiight. "Turn left a little until you reach the proper heading. You'll have to stop turning a second or two before you get there, though, or you'll overshoot the mark." No joke. Okay, so I overcompensated just a tad. Now we were off course five degrees in the other direction. But it was cool. We had a visual on Galveston, dead ahead.

Before long I was banking, turning, climbing, and fooling around with the best of 'em. Hal kept watch for other planes while I played pilot. We found Galveston, in spite of my inability to fly the heading, and had a great time spotting familiar landmarks from the air. Bishop's Palace, Moody Gardens, Hotel Galvez, the courthouse, the jail. And we saw a wonderful old building right smack dab in the middle of the UTMB Medical Center that we didn't know was there. You can't see it on the ground because it's surrounded by modern medical buildings. I made a mental note to check it out on foot one day. Then we flew to Tiki Island and buzzed his son's house.

On the return leg, we slipped her in at Houston Gulf Airport for a pit stop and a round of tire-kicking. It was fun hanging out in an airport again, listening to the pilots, checking out the aircraft in the hangar. The memories simply flooded back. This is happening now, I kept telling myself, but the feelings were strong of yesteryear - of other airports, other travels, other travails.

We stopped to admire a little Pitts Special and Hal told me about how that little plane was one of three painted exactly alike, owned by an aerobatic team that had flown in air shows for over twenty years. He said those three guys would take off in formation and then do a snap roll as soon as they became airborne and were at least a couple of wing spans off the ground. It always blew his mind to see it, he said. Hard to believe, but they never experienced an accident or a casualty. Twenty some-odd years of doing snap rolls on takeoff says a lot for those pilots. It made me shiver just thinking about it.

We climbed back in the Cheetah and buckled up. I donned my headset as Hal primed the engine and yelled, "Clear!" She fired and the prop engaged. We were off! But the flight back to Clover Field took place pretty much without me. I was drifting in time, propelled backward by the memory of another Scorpio, another airplane, and other lessons learned.