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it has been Howie s responsibility to match the names with the
A Final Arc of Sky 227
faces of people in public life: in politics, in movies, and on TV. If
Howie s memory goes, we ll be a couple of clueless elders, adrift
on the cultural sea. But he can t help me with people he doesn t
know, people who are unique to my sphere, and my memory
wasn t much better back in  96. At our first meeting, Lois intro-
duced herself and reported off to me at 7:00 p.m. on our mutual
patient. But by the following morning, when it was my turn to
report to her, I had forgotten her name. I called her some other
name, some wrong name, and she was annoyed.
 It s Lois, she hissed, gesturing to her name tag.
Years later, my friend and mentor Tia who is Korean by
birth and was adopted by a family from Idaho, where, as she
puts it,  I was about the only Asian in the state, for chrissake 
informed me that if you re an Asian woman, a surprising num-
ber of white people assume your name is Susie or Kim.
 Like there are no other possible names for us, Tia said,
laughing outright at the idiocy of it. And then I flashed on Lois
pointing at her ID badge, her irritation a little out of propor-
tion in my opinion for my transgression, and I have to admit, it
might be true. I might have called her Susie. Or Kim.
But I remembered her name from then on, and she got over
it. At that time, I lived four miles from work, a verdant, traffic-
free four miles toward the sea, along the foggy paths of Golden
Gate Park, and I ran home most days. It was a perfect distance
for a workout and for mental decompression, and once I d run
the first mile it felt great. But inertia is hard to overcome, par-
ticularly when you ve been up all night, and I sometimes whined
as I changed into shorts and stuffed a few things in my fanny
pack at the nurses station. Lois egged me on every morning,
one of those pleasant little social exchanges that you begin to
rely on as part of the fabric of the day. But then her assignment
was over, and she disappeared.
We surfaced together again in Seattle in another PICU, and
228 Jennifer Culkin
I was happy to meet up with her, a familiar face in a new city.
Before long, a year ahead of me, she moved on to flight nurs-
ing, and I d see her whenever she brought a patient to us. She
encouraged me to apply to the flight program.
I never once flew with Lois. We were both pediatric flight
nurses; we were not scheduled together as partners. But she
was a source of support as I negotiated the learning curve. Her
approach to the job was calm, considered, devoid of ego. After
I d joined the flight program, during the classroom training but
before I ever set foot in an aircraft, she gave me a piece of advice.
 For the first two weeks, she said, laughing,  you ll be do-
ing well if you can manage to buckle yourself in correctly. Just
worry about that. Buckling your seat belt.
At the time I oriented to the job, the procedure was for a
new flight nurse to go along for the first few shifts as a supernu-
merary observer. A regular crew was scheduled, and I was extra
for a total of four flights, which were all that came our way on
those particular shifts in early spring. It was the lull before sum-
mer, better known as trauma season. After those shifts, for the
next three months, I was considered a trainee, but the crew on
each flight was composed of my preceptor and me. It was like
having one and a quarter brains in the aircraft. It was hardest
on my two main preceptors, Brenda and Tia, who had to think
on the fly of everything I might not know and who were forced
to make up for my shortcomings. But of course the pressure
was also on me to become a full, problem-solving, contributing
partner as soon as I possibly could. On most of those early days,
it felt like an impossible prospect.
Just buckle your seat belt became my wry internal mantra,
shorthand for Don t take yourself too seriously. It provided that
elusive thing, perspective. Sometimes I still hear an echo of that
phrase when some species of shit is hitting the fan. I hear it in
her voice, with her wacky laugh: kind of a loud bark at the onset
then nasal bursts as it trailed off.
A Final Arc of Sky 229
Lois was good at perspective, and she had a patient, dispas-
sionate ear. When I voiced my early concern about my lack of
emergency and trauma experience and how inadequate I felt at
scene responses, she shrugged and said,  Yeah, well, you do ten
traumas, you get the idea. It turned out to be true. I did ten
prehospital traumas and got the idea.
Years passed. We worked on committees together, hung out
in the office between flights. After I stopped running, she urged
me on as a cyclist. We went out to dinner and the theater every
few months. She lived in downtown Seattle, and whenever we
went out, she picked me up at the downtown ferry dock in her
little black Acura. She spent my July 22 birthday with me one
year we were almost the same age and we went to Salty s in [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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