Judy Blume, Airplanes Falling Out of the Sky, and Me

Warning: This isn’t just a review of In the Unlikely Event, Judy Blume’s recently released adult novel. It’s about a whole lot more. 

However, if you don’t care to read all I have to share, I’ll make my qualified recommendation first. I really enjoyed this book a lot. It was like a young adult novel written for adults. A combination of historical fiction and coming of age.  It’s told from the perspective of 20 characters that gives it a depth that wouldn’t exist if we only heard the point of view of two or three of the characters. It makes it a bit more difficult to keep track of who is who and how the characters are all connected but it definitely enriches the story. If that sounds like something you might enjoy and you won’t be disturbed reading about airplanes falling out of the sky, this book could be for you.

I didn’t grow up reading Judy Blume novels. She didn’t publish her first book, The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo, in 1969. When Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret in 1970, I was probably the proper audience for that novel. I might not have been the most mature preteen but by 1970 my reading preferences were pretty advanced and that book slipped under my radar.

It wasn’t until I became of mom of three children that I was introduced to Judy Blume. The perfect gift for my middle child after the birth of her younger sister was The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo, Judy Blume’s first book! As my kids got older, I became acquainted with Fudge, Ramona and several other Judy Blume characters. Then, as I fifth grade teacher, I became a true fan of her middle grade novels. Iggie’s House was a favorite of mine.

When a student suggested we read Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret together, I was happy to do so. I loved the book and I especially loved the dialogue it opened up with my student. When I got to the ending of the book, when Margaret gets her period for the first time, some of the story seemed familiar. Had I read it before? In my memory, though, Margaret was outfitted with a sanitary belt and pads, not tampons. That just didn’t seem right. It didn’t match my personal experience. Newly menstruating girls in 1970 wore nasty belts and pads. They didn’t start of using tampons. I found an email address for Judy Blume, sent off a quick email asking her about it. I was delighted a few days later when I received a response directly from the author. Judy Blume told me that at some point, her publisher felt that the book needed to be updated for girls who were going to be reading the book. They would have had no idea what a sanitary belt was! Years later, I was so sorry I hadn’t somehow saved that email correspondence. I loved how approachable Judy Blume was. She was the first author that ever responded to any correspondence I had sent. And believe me, in all my years as a reader, I’ve sent off many fan letters, or letters asking questions of the author. To date, she’s still the only author who answered me directly, not through a publisher or an editor. Yay for Judy Blume!

Now about In the Unlikely Event. Don’t those words sound familiar to you? Hasn’t a flight attendant said that on nearly every flight you’ve ever been on? Between December 1951 and February 1952, there were three unlikely events. Yes, three. Three airplanes fell out of the sky, disturbing the peace of Elizabeth, New Jersey, a city in the flight path for Newark Airport. Newark Airport opened on October 1, 1928 and quickly became one of the world’s busiest commercial airports.  It was the first major airport servicing New York City. (LaGuardia Airport didn’t open until December 1939.) The Port Authority took over the airport in 1948. Yes, in less than three months, three passenger airplanes fell out of the sky, crashing in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Coincidence, conspiracy, UFOs? How? The three tragedies had a major impact on all those living in Elizabeth, New Jersey at that time. Including young Judith Sussman whom we now know as Judy Blume. It took over 40 years for Judy Blume to feel like this was a story she needed to tell. I can’t help but think that a big part of Miri’s story is Judy’s story.

I was shocked to learn about these plane crashes. I had been a travel agent in New Jersey for nearly 16 years. How had I never heard of this? When I was only about a quarter of the way through the book, which grabbed me right away, I had to put aside the book and do some research on these plane crashes. My research got me thinking about a whole lot of other pieces of my life that I haven’t really thought of lately.

My research informed me of the unsafety (relative to now) of air travel as recently as the late 1960s. I grew up flying back and forth between New York and Miami all the time. I was too young to realize how unsafe air travel was. But it makes me wonder if my parents knew what a big risk we were taking. (Two of the planes that fall out of the sky in the novel… in real life… were headed to Miami.) I started thinking about propeller planes, trying to recall when we started flying bigger airplanes, when we started flying jets. I remembered receiving airplane wings from the stewardesses. Always stewardesses. Who had ever heard of flight attendants? I remembered getting decks of cards on the plane that we never played with on the airplane but only after we’d reached our destination. I remembered flying late at night because it made the trip to Miami for our family of four more affordable. I also remembered how my mom, my brother and I would fly down to Miami first and then my dad, who still had to work, would fly down a few days later. (That part still shocks me. My dad was an assistant principal, later a principal and my mom was a teacher. If dad still had to be at work when I flew down to Miami, did that mean that school was still in session? Did my parents pull my brother and I out of school just so we could get a less expensive fare?)

I remembered a trip with Jonathan O who flew down with our family rather than fly alone to visit his grandparents in Miami Beach. “Are you going to eat your roll?” Jonathan asked the gentleman sitting across the aisle from him. Yes, those were the days when eating an airplane meals was a lot of fun.

I brought back memories of really bad earaches as the unpressurized propjets came in for a landing. I remember being carried down the steps from the plane, down to the tarmac (this was way before the age of jetways), by someone in the crew. My mom sure did have her hands full, traveling with two small children, one shrieking her head off with an earache, the other who more often than not threw up as the plane was getting ready to land.

I thought about Eastern Airlines, about National Airlines, about Northeast Airlines (an airline I never would have remembered had my brother not mentioned it a week or so earlier – reminding me of listening to the Calypso song, Yellow Bird, playing over and over again). Airlines of my youth that no longer exist.

I remembered the heartbreaking moment where my mom would drop my cousin off at the airport, so she could fly back to Florida, leaving me fighting back tears in the car. I worried more about her flight being hijacked than about it falling out of the sky. There have always been so many worries associated with air travel.

Eventually, I felt as though my research was done and I got back to reading the novel.  I got to know the characters better. My amazement about the string of tragedies didn’t really diminish. I couldn’t put the book down. I finished it in the wee hours of the night. And then started thinking of all sorts of other things.

I thought about my very strange but very real fear of driving in my car under airplanes. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t afraid of a car dropping out of the sky onto my car with me in the driver’s seat. I knew that sometime in the 1970s an airplane had fallen out of the sky onto Rockaway Boulevard in Queens, a route I drove to work daily the summer of 1976. Back to Google. Rockaway Boulevard plane crash. I was surprised that the crash took place on June 24, 1975. The same week that I got my driver’s license.  That made me wonder if Judy Blume’s heart starts racing if she’s driving her car underneath a low flying airplane.

I thought about the crash of TWA 800, in the Atlantic Ocean in July 17, 1996 and about how just that afternoon, sitting in the Rockaways looking at the planes coming and going from JFK, I had a feeling. A feeling about a plane falling out of the sky into the ocean in front of my eyes. I felt a little terrorized when the TWA jet fell out of the sky just a few hours later. Was that a premonition? What was that all about?

A little more than 5 years later, in November of 2001, a year that had already been marked by great tragedy, another plane fell from the air, much closer to where I spent most of the summers of my life.

My final airplane association, specifically an airplane falling out of the sky association was with Malaysia Airlines flight 370 on March 8, 2014. Isn’t it bad enough when a flight falls out of the sky, but to have it fall over the sky and no one having an idea where the debris was scattered, is that worse than having a plane crash in your backyard? This catastrophe gave me something to wonder about, to try to get to the bottom of (no pun intended) as my mom lay in the hospital taking what would be her last breaths.

Back to In the Unlikely Event. Not only a historical fiction novel, this was a coming of age novel. It’s about family relationships. It’s about changes within families. It’s about banding together as a family and about falling apart. The characterizations were excellent, character development was straight on, and the fast-forward from 1952 to 1987 made total sense. This was a novel that I could sink my heart into.

I think my favorite character was Miri’s nana, Irene. I wonder if that’s because the nana character was 2 years younger than I am now? I certainly can’t relate to any of what Irene went through in her life.

While I was totally satisfied with the plot, it’s ups and downs and resolutions, it still left my mind reeling. About air travel, about wondering, as a little girl, what it would be like becoming a stewardess. About how I hope air travel is so much safer today.

I was drawn to do a little more research. Some of it was a review of what I’d researched before. I read about a change to zoning laws laws prohibiting hospitals, schools and houses of worship in a fan-shaped area beyond the runway safety zone so a situation like Newark Airport being “an umbrella a death” could never happen again. I was grateful for that, thinking back to the battles the parents at the school where my dad was principal trying to get the flight path away from their school which was just a stone’s throw from JFK.

I still wonder how Judy Blume kept this story inside her for all those years. Especially since as I read her story, all my stories came bursting forth from my brain. And not just to the extent that I lost a night of sleep, but to the point where I felt I needed to sit down and write about this and share with anyone who is interested in reading.

Finally, I wonder… Judy Blume, during your life, have you been like me. More afraid of a plane falling out of the sky on top of you while not nearly as afraid of being a passenger in the airplane?

Judy Blume, now 77, says this is the last book she plans to publish. Not because she doesn’t have any more stories inside of her. Because at 77 she’s too tired to have to go through promotional tours. That’s okay. Because I didn’t grow up with Judy Blume, I still have plenty of titles that I can add to my To Be Read List.