It seemed as if he was taking a long time to get the Cessna ready.

"I haven't flown this one before," Brett said. He went behind the plane as Diane sat in the passenger seat. In front of her, the steering things turned right and then left, pushed in and then pulled out. She wondered what he was doing.

Finally they were ready for take-off. Brett smiled the way he always did right before a wisecrack.

"Federal law requires me to advise you to fasten your seat belt." 

Diane's seatbelt had been fastened for half an hour.

The little plane started to move. Diane heard the plane's speed in the loud noise the wheels made against the ground, saw its speed in the haze of the trees they were passing, tasted its speed in her own adrenaline rush.

She saw a tall, sturdy-looking building on the horizon. It came closer, then even closer. The plane's wheels were still on the ground; did Brett know what he was doing? Her arms could not help making an upward motion to help lift the plane in time.

Then everything was quiet and smooth. They had been on the ground a second ago and now, for some reason, they were in the air.

Brett glanced at Diane. She saw his pre-wisecrack smile again. "OK, Diane, --"

She loved his sense of humor. Her father was going to meet them at the destination airport. She knew that he was going to like Brett. The three of them would drive past the farmhouses to Brockport -- wooden houses, not like the adobe houses you see all over the southwest. Even in the ghettos of L.A. you rarely see broken buildings like the ones you see in the northeast. It was the wood, Diane was sure. If it was not painted it rotted within a few years. Even if it was painted the paint wore off fast enough, leaving the wood vulnerable, alternately cracking in the sun and softening in the rain and snow.

So in New York you see buildings too full of splinters to touch, unless you're a little girl who loves the attention you get from Dad while, calm and patient, he removes them. You look at the old, graying, wooden buildings and are reminded of babies crying for food; mothers plodding home from low-paying jobs without quite enough milk and with no meat; old men sitting on sagging porches, rocking.

But the adobe houses in L.A., even though they are probably the same age as their wooden counterparts in the northeast, still look sturdy and new. They remind you of pretty, 18-year-old Spanish girls; tanned, Aztec men slapping red clay on their naked thighs to make the tiles for the roofs; black-eyed mothers tending flower boxes while they wait for the chili and cornbread to bake.

"-- put out or jump!"

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