Small, Weird, Cold World. The incident over which every single national news network fixated Wednesday involved someone I almost knew. Sort of.
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It turns out, not just bizarrely but also grotesquely, that the apartment into which Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle's airplane crashed belonged to Kathy Caronna, who gained fame/notoriety 9 years ago for almost being killed by part of a lamppost that fell on her when wind blew a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon into a streetlite. Someone I worked with at the time was a good friend of the victim of that initial bizarre incident, and is still friends with her, thru this second bizarre incident.
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I sent my former co-worker, who is still my friend, the following email;

A FRIEND sent me an item from the DAILY NEWS, that the apartment hit by the small plane Wednesday was that of Kathleen Caronna, the woman who was hit by a falling piece of lamppost at the Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1997. Didn't you say you knew her? Is she okay? What a horrible thing to have happen. Please advise. Cheers.

She replied:

Yes, it's my friend Kathy. She's fine although her bedroom was totally destroyed. She was told that the engine landed on her bed although she wasn't able to go in the bedroom. She was on her way home when it happened and if she would have been a few minutes earlier, she would have been in the apartment. As you can imagine, she is in shock. We (my sister and some friends) are taking her out for dinner and LOTS of drinks tonight. She will probably be staying with our friend Laura for a couple of nights until they can find a new place. The apartment is not liveable. It's unbelievable that after all she has been through, it would be her apartment. Crazy.

That poor woman. I responded:

AT least she can rest secure in the knowledge that millions of people sympathize with her. Cheers.

I was concerned earlier that I might have known someone who died in that accident, in that the plane that crashed was occupied by a Yankees pitcher and a flite instructor who took off from Teterboro Airport in northern New Jersey. I took a couple of flying lessons at Teterboro from a beautiful man from somewhere in Atlantic Canada (PEI?). My interest in learning to fly ended when another Yankees player, Thurman Munson, died when a jet he was piloting crashed in 1979. I then decided that perhaps flying one's own plane wasn't the best of things to do.
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It seems that the flite instructor who died with his student on the Upper East Side was from California, so the beautiful man from PEI that I flew with was not killed. Thank goodness. I did have another instructor at one point, who let me take control sooner than I expected on takeoff. Fortunately, I did not drive us into power lines or anything else on takeoff. I appreciate teachers giving students latitude, but I wasn't quite ready to take off when we took off!
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I must, however, try to express, for those who have never experienced it, how wondrous it is to fly a small plane. I am almost 62 years old, and very close to the top in memory of all my experiences is a few minutes when I flew my own small plane down the middle of the Hudson River over the George Washington Bridge on a spectacularly beautiful sunny day, with Upper Manhattan to my left and the Palisades to my right. It's a feeling of elation, such as Icarus might have experienced, that you never forget. Icarus got drunk on that elation, and died (altho the science of that Greek myth is exactly wrong: bizarrely, on planet Earth one gets COLDER as one climbs higher toward the sun).
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I'm not the only person to have seen parallels between Lidle's death and Munson's. Some people still hold it against Lidle that he worked to break the strike called by major league players against owners in 1995. I am very pro-labor, but a strike by millionaire baseball players against millionaire team owners is a complete fizzle in ideological terms. The whole thing leaves me cold.
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Speaking of leaving one cold, let's talk about the grotesque fact that Buffalo, New York, and other areas around the Great Lakes, had two feet of snow earlier than ever before in all the time that weather statistics have been gathered. The Chicago Tribune reports that "At least three deaths were blamed on the storm."
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This damned global warming is killing us.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:51 PM