For his 40th birthday this year, my manager’s fiancée gave him something he’d always wanted: The chance to parachute out of a plane. So the two of them drove up to The Ranch with their friends Halley and Pin-Bo a few weeks back, and leapt out of an airplane. He says it was scarier than he’d imagined it would be to sit in an ascending airplane, looking at an open door, with a plan to jump out of that door. And Bill had no chute of his own; he was attached in four places to his tandem instructor, John. Here’s what they looked like a second or so before they rolled out:

And here’s what they looked like a few seconds later:

And a few seconds after that:

He says he had a blast, and felt a wave of gratitude and yes, even affection for his tandem instructor once they landed. After all, he had depended on this stranger for his life, and the stranger had taken good care of him.

He says it was an amazing experience to fall out of the sky for some 60 seconds, longer than he’d ever fallen before in his life.

I’ll take his word for it. If God wanted kidneys to fly, She’d have given us wings. — Kenny