A Pilot’s Son, Flying Solo

An excerpt from the new book The Magical Stranger. Rodrick was 12 when his pilot father died in a plane crash:

“A colleague once nicknamed me – half mocking – the ‘magical stranger’ because I get people to tell me things. But to me, the magical stranger has always been my father. He was brilliant and unknowable, holy but absent, a born leader who gave me little direction. Peter Rodrick was one of only around 4,000 men in the world qualified to land jets on a carrier after dark. And he was an apparition, gone 200 days of the year from when I was six until he died. He was such a ghost that I didn’t fully accept he was gone for years.

“Evidence of the actual man was harder to come by. His pictures hung on our walls, but Mom never talked about him. Most of my father was locked away in cruise boxes and crates in our basement: a framed picture from the Brockton Enterprise of a boy with a pole on the first day of fishing season; a long black leather sleeve holding a sword, and a small metal box containing envelopes with single dollar bills sent to him on his birthday by his father, the envelopes still coming for years after he died.”

Source: Men’s Journal
Published: May 9, 2013
Length: 29 minutes (7,374 words)
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