Forget the Arrow of Time and the Grandfather Paradox
If I had a time machine, I’d head back in time to Southern California, arriving on February 20, 1944, at Burbank airport near of Los Angles, where a young Army Air Force pilot in the newly-minted 436th Fighter Squadron, is about to give a pretty girl a ride in a P-38. The pilot is my dad, Jim. The pretty girl is my mom, Liz (known then as Betty). And she is about to seal the deal on their engagement.
My folks met on the day my mother told my father where to go
In late January of 1944, my mother was a 21-year-old air traffic controller, volunteering in the Los Angeles air traffic center monitoring the flow of Army Air Force aircraft crisscrossing the SoCal skies on training flights along the coast and out over the Pacific. Pop, in a P-38 Lightning, was at 10,000-feet east of LA in the last phase of air-combat training prior to being shipped to England to fly in the European Theater of Operations.
After contacting the air traffic center to let them know he was transiting LA and returning to Palmdale, Pop heard a…
