The Airplane Diaries

This is the story of growing up Cajun in a family in love with aviation. It is a memoir that explores the unique perceptions of a family in which handicaps are about possibility not limitation. Where paraplegics fly airplanes and the blind can paint. Where aunts and uncles and cousins play parts as integral as the leads. It is the journal that glues together all the scraps of air shows, weather conditions, pilot's lounges and jet fuel -- all the family and their games of naming airplanes by the sound of their engines while swinging on the back porch.

The Airplane Diaries is beautifully illustrated by Ruby Meaux Fournet, the author's mother, who started painting when being legally blind began to steal more from her than she cared to lose. Her incredible paintings become the axis from which Adams spins her chatty vignettes of childhood and adolescence in the fifties and sixties into the poetic introspections of adulthood. Vacations abandoned to neighboring air bases, parachutes tied to telephone poles and flying to places where other people drove, become the ordinary beginnings of an extraordinary love affair with the sky.

The Airplane Diaries celebrates the Cajun tradition of family stories as the cultural rubbing that keeps its oral history shiny.