Stuck in my head since 8 a.m., entirely by accident but destined for infamy, was a song. It was "The Love Cats," by the Cure. Doubtless many of you know it -- an odd little number delivered in the unmistakable, effeminate whine of vocalist Robert Smith. As I'd stepped from the shower after breakfast, they were playing it on WFNX.

"The Love Cats" contains a line, an infectious, joyous refrain, that goes like this: "Into the sea, you and me..." And over and over and over I was humming those words, with all possible ironic happiness, as Dorothy and I zipped across Cape Cod Bay at 5,000 feet. Into the sea, you and me. If ever I'm to be dealt some tragic, premature demise, by all means let it be now! Just imagine us, spinning to the ocean below. Dorothy Meyer the death-rock debutante, sharing this most sublime of fates with Patrick Smith, aspiring aviator and delusional romantic, suffering for his art the whole way down.

"Hand-in-hand is the only way to land..."

On Nantucket we avoided the crowds of the cobblestoned harbor front, stopping instead at a grocery store near the airport. Then with no particular destination in mind, we took a long walk. We headed south on the road toward Surfside for at least a mile, then turned west up a long, unpaved trail snaking between clusters of scrub pine. Off to one side we discovered a clearing -- an isolated patch where the brush gave way to dunes, with the beach just beyond -- and decided to stop there. I could locate that very spot today if I needed to -- the small sandy field where almost 20 years ago the two of us spent the next three hours talking and sharing a packed lunch.

We stretched out on the ground. From over the dunes came the sound of breakers and the murmur of the outgoing tide. Dorothy, in full regalia, looked heavenly and preposterous amid all that nature and sunshine. Her pale gangly legs, glowing white through the torn fabric of her fishnets, appeared to be hewn from Ivory soap.

Spectacle or no spectacle, and for what it's worth, Dorothy was a bright and world-wise girl. She lived with her parents -- a teacher and an architect -- in a converted loft on the edge of South Boston, just around the corner from where the Channel, a longtime punk rock hangout, used to be. A student at one of Boston's prestigious "alternative" schools, she knew her authors and artists, physics and algebra. She was only 17, but erudite enough to intimidate the hell out of yours truly, a kid from working-class Revere who'd never set foot in the big city before his senior year in high school. There in the middle of our seaside picnic, Dorothy's precocious intellect and strange beauty were an agonizing mix, simmered by the July heat into one big exotic hard-on.

What did we talk about? In light of the often unbearable pretensions known to spew from the lips of a dreamy 17-year-old, it's probably a good thing that our precise topics of conversation have been lost to time. I vaguely remember Dorothy saying something about her "Calvinist disposition."

At the time, of course, I was smitten. And to my quiet amazement, so was she. Her coquettish smiles grew more earnest, her gaze more softly fixed. She briefly put her head on my shoulder. And as it happened, not once did the name Logan come up. Once a guy, always a guy, I had seen these looks and signals before and I understood exactly what she was thinking, even if I have a hard time believing it. The dialogue is mostly forgotten, but what I remember vividly is the crescendo of that day-long bonding -- the moment when Dorothy paused in a moment of sweet philosophical flirtation and said to me, "You know what? You and I have a lot in common."

In truth I had no idea what she was talking about, since really we had almost nothing in common. But who was I to argue, and if only life were made up entirely of moments like that. "I know," I said. And she fluttered her big blue eyes at me.

Then it was time to go. What I presumed to be a powerful, beckoning force of mutual attraction would need to wait for any official consecration. Tonight, tomorrow, in the days ahead? Who knew, but I welcomed the task ahead. As we walked toward the airport, I was wired with adrenaline.

It was on the return flight that we were almost killed.

Unlike airliners, private planes routinely operate under so-called VFR, or visual flight rules, and without the watchful guidance of air traffic control. There are safeguards in place -- radio and traffic pattern protocols, staggered cruising altitudes, and so on -- but avoiding airborne collisions is primarily a matter of old-fashioned see-and-avoid. I'll leave it at that, and it's best not to dwell on the fact that my distracted, love-addled state of mind may have contributed, but we came extraordinarily close to hitting another airplane, head-on, over the ocean about halfway between Nantucket and Hyannis.

We are cruising in silence. Glancing to the right, I see the smooth calm azure of the Atlantic. I bank sharply to give Dorothy a thrill. Glancing to the left there's smooth lemon, a gauzy curtain of cirrus deep in the distance. I bank again, showing off. Then I roll the wings level, casually adjusting my eyes straight ahead. And there, in front of me, as if somebody has splashed it onto the windshield, is another aircraft. It is so close that I can clearly see the pilot sitting in the left seat. It's a twin-engine propeller plane, a private plane not much bigger than ours, with a pointed black nose bearing down on us like a visible bullet.

I do not react. There isn't enough time to process any left, right, up or down resolution. Only luck -- the slightest difference in our respective altitudes and trajectories -- prevents the two machines from colliding. Before I can move the plane is gone, disappearing above and to the left by about 15 feet. I can clearly hear him over the noise of my own propeller -- the buzz of the engines as they pass.

"Into the sea, you and me..."

Head-on, our closure rate was about 250 miles per hour. The whole event, from when I saw the airplane until it was safely behind us, lasted probably two seconds.

And for both of those incomparable, heart-stopping, life-altering seconds, Dorothy Meyer was staring down at the water and saw absolutely nothing.

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