 They tell you, you know, you're cleared for takeoff and you wheel this thing out onto the runway and I mean and it's It's like a drag race. So instead of a drag search, you know Behemoth of a plane that weighs north of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds Push the throttles up and you just start barreling down this thing But instead of the drag race which ends at the quarter mile You pull back and just pull this whole thing You know off the runway and the neck all you see in the windscreen is sky And you're just becoming a rocket ship My grandparents used to always say when I was younger, you know, I want you to always act like I'm there You know, if I was standing in the room, would you do that? But now it's it's I mean, I guess it sunk in But I always, you know, I kind of picture that, you know, I want to I want to make myself proud But I want to make my dad proud too Watching Alex become a pilot is sort of getting to see my dream come true in somebody else And what better person to see it come true in than your own son He kind of has like a subdued Proudness, you know, he's not the kind of guy who's gonna come out and just burst into tears and hug you or anything You know, he kind of like looks like you know, I'm proud of you kid Stuff like that, you know, you did all right That's how that's how he but when he said something like that, it just it means the world to me Well, we went to Corpus Christi for his winging shortly before we made the trip Alex asked me to pin his wings on and I was It really choked me up when he asked me to do that. It really did and just like I was so incredibly honored that he Would ask me to do such an important thing Remember my hands were shaking a little bit and it's just I was almost overwhelmed with the emotion of it But we were so proud of him. When I was growing up. I remember playing in the water You know sitting on the dock like grandpa dad and they boys point out playing to me. Oh, there's the blue angels are in f-18s I remember I was Right near one of my last flights. It was sunset We took a southern route and I knew at some point we were gonna fly over Blackwater Bay, which is where my grandparents lived and The route that we took I kind of veered a little further south because I knew where I was I Looked down and I and I saw their house and it just kind of came full circle for me being that kid looking up and now being that flight student looking down and I Got choked up in the plane From all that I've been through to finally end up You know, I've been to another country. I've been doing the two other careers and I'm end up, you know 2000 feet above where I started