I have a love of romantic movies, but particularly when they are combined with an aviation slant… think Top Gun, Fly Boys and the one I watched last evening, Pearl Harbor.  There is something to be said for beautiful women, handsome men in their flying uniforms, and those very fast propellers.

I am known at times to be far too much of a sentimentalist, and it has also been said of me that my fixation with all things involving the male species and their flying machines (I chose my first school project to be about Orville and Wilbur Wright as I loved the idea of not one, but two aviation pioneers!) has, at times, bordered on the obsessive.  However, mid-life hormones aside, what I find so wonderful about these movies is the common thread – individuals with a love for speed, danger, excitement and of course, living on the edge – something history has shown to me that I am clearly far too fond of.

To digress slightly, I decided at the beginning of this year that it was time for me to return to the early morning, very traditional, said (not sung) Eucharist at the local church.  It had been so long since I had taken communion that if I were Catholic and had to state how much time has passed since my last confession, the priest would most certainly need some smelling salts in order to be revived.

On the back of the fact that the Pearl Harbor film is nearly three hours in length, and involved some tears on my part over the affairs of the heart involved for the characters, I arrived at church this morning at 06h55 looking red eyed and I dare say a touch disheveled. 

Amazingly, I was greeted with long lost hugs of affection by members of the parish I felt sure would never remember me, but, astoundingly, they all did.  They are wonderful people, and they have been attending the old stone house of worship for a long, long time.  It became apparent to me whilst I sat listening to the sermon, that I had most definitely brought the average age of the congregation down by about seventy four years.

Biological statistics aside, when I left, I was approached by a senior citizen and asked if I would consider being a “Sides Person” to help out with collections and directing the congregation towards the correct place for communion etc.  I did not want to be impolite, so I said I would “think about it.”  The very nice gentleman said to me, “but we need you!”  Suddenly Uncle Sam’s army poster flashed before my eyes, and I felt, for a Nano-second, like I was signing up to be one of the gorgeous nurses, like Kate Beckinsale, out of none other than Pearl Harbor.

I managed to escape without signing on a dotted line, but I remembered vividly a line in this very movie in which Alec Baldwin says of the war pilots that there “is no such dedicated a soul as that of a volunteer.”  It is so true isn’t it?  If one volunteers to do something, it means you really do want to help out in that particular area, and correspondingly, it means that as a soul, you must be so dedicated to the cause.

I am still sitting on the church fence trying to decide whether to sign up or not, so I shall sleep on it, without watching any lengthy movies, in order to make my final decision.

All this being said, two things that rest with me are:  decades may pass between visits to the local church, but in many instances, familiar, kind and welcoming faces remain where last you saw them; and secondly, I have decided to really go after that Kate Beckinsale look, and once I have it, it may be time to try and find my own Orville Wright.