Spying on the Lindberghs

Those of you who know Ben well know of his love for building and flying RC planes, but I would say this hobby is more an offshoot of a general love of aviation history and technology. He enjoys books about the Wright Brothers, especially, but there are so many extraordinary figures in the early years of aviation. Arguably the most famous after the Wright Brothers would be Charles Lindbergh. He was an interesting man beyond his transatlantic and numerous other flight records, he seems to have had a somewhat stranger vocation working a Nobel laureate to develop medical devices, with the ultimate aim of prolonging life indefinately. This darker body of work is written about in David Friedman’s The Immortalists, which sounds very intriguing and may well be next on my reading list.

While we were in Italy, I read the classic Gift from the Sea, written by Charles Lindbergh's wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and found it to be a wonderful book for a new mother. The meditative quality of the book is not unlike scripture and other sacred texts in that you can come back months or years later and read the book anew, finding and taking new lessons that seem to fit the exact stage of motherhood and womanhood in which you find yourself.

So this famous couple had some presence in my thinking and reading for a while now, but quite by accident, I stumbled upon the writings of their daugther Reeve Lindbergh and have been delighted with her children's books for Luke. I first checked out The Circle of Days and Our Nest for Luke based solely on the titles and appealing covers from our local library. When we got them home and read them, I was moved by Circle of Days, a retelling of St. Francis' Canticle of the Sun. It is a beautiful book for children and even for adults, painting a picture of thankfulness at the most elemental level---it's as fresh and relevant now as in the 1200's when St. Francis first wrote it.

Our Nest carried on with the theme of the holistic nature of life; all things integrated and coexisting in various scales of home. Since loving these books with Luke, I requested and checked out for Luke Nobody Owns the Sky, a great mini-history of another amazing aviator Bessie Coleman and If I'd Known Then What I Know Now, about a bumbling but lovable father and all his mishaps in homemaking and farming. Again, no disappointments here; both are great books for children of any age.

For myself, I was pleased to see a nonfiction work called No More Words, a book written to be a type of memoir for her mother Anne Morrow Lindbergh as she found herself speechless and homebound after a series of strokes late in her life. I am enjoying this book very much given my love of both their written works and my interest in aging and care at the end of life.

In a strange way, though, I feel like I have been spying on the Lindberghs, this most famous of American families. Through the themes and diffusely spiritual material in many of the books, it's like watching them figure out what they believe and how to live it in their daily lives. This search and struggle is common to us all, but rarely do we get to learn about this experience in others through such eloquent and touching testimonies. They all led such colorful and accomplished lives, but at the end of the day and life, they all dealt with the same issues the more ordinary among us grapple with everyday.