When I turned fifteen, my father gave me the best birthday present any boy could get. He took me down to the local airfield, signed me up with a flying club, and paid for my ground school media and my introductory flight in a Cessna 152. When I came down, we went over to Dairy Queen and I got a job at five dollars per hour (apparently, very small companies don't need to pay minimum wage). From then on I scraped and scrounged, and every few weeks or months I would get a flying lesson.
It didn't work out, of course. Flying once a month or once every two months is no way to learn, and after this had been going on for a while my instructor quit for an airline job (he wasn't a great instructor, anyway; he told me that learning how to use rudder was unnecessary). At about that time, I had a regular doctor checkup, and the doctor informed me that my ears were bleeding inside. Obviously, I had to stop flying. Over the next four years or so, I went from doctor to doctor trying to figure out what the problem was. Eventually, I gave up; they weren't fixing the problem and I was wasting my time.
To this day my ears pain me from the smallest pressure change, even driving up and down the hundred-foot hills where I live. I recently tried once more to find out the cause of my pressure problem; this doctor's verdict was, "you're fine." It looks like I'm never going to fly again; even were my health perfect, I'm no longer a teenager with no expenses. I can't even afford an Aces High subscription, never mind flying lessons. But I will always remember that short time when I was fifteen - even with the emotional agony of high school looming over it - as the best time of my life. The exact number of hours I have I do not know; my memory tells me it was eight or so, but my logbook has only says three flights. I know at least two of my flights were not unrecorded, so I estimate that the actual number was six. It's not much, but those were easily the best six hours of my life.
