Flying Lessons
We dreamed we could fly, worked to make it happen. To this day, when I’m once again gathered with my two brothers and my sister on the concrete slab, poured and worked by our father decades ago, lumpy section by lumpy section, we point our fingers at the tree and we remember the day Clery, my younger brother, jumped from the tree with two boards and an old sheet strapped to his arms.
And he flew.
We see it still, and we grin and chatter and ignore all that presses in. We forget our father’s sagging face and drooping arm in those final years after a devastating stroke. We forget the screeching and uncertain sound of his wheelchair lifting and tugging against the buckling cement. We forget our mother’s arthritic and knotted back, made worse by all the lifting and tugging. We forget the yard and the eaves and all that insists we resist one another, and, together, we see possibility all over again, as ongoing and lasting as memory itself. Or, maybe, we see it just once more because we need it. And this simply must sustain us, like helium does a balloon, brief but beautiful.
Clery climbs the tree, shaking all over, teeth chattering despite the summer heat, nervous smile pulling at his lips. He has inched his way across the thickest branch, the one we’d selected earlier that day as the launch pad. Knees bent. Back hunched. Arms extended wide. He looks down at us, terrified but committed. Our best effort, ever. Each of us — Michael, the eldest; myself; and our little sister, Brenda, chomping on a pacifier, diaper wet and sagging — squinted up at him.
“This time we were really going to do it,” we said.
We’d been trying to fly in one way or another forever, or so it seemed. We fantasized an existence that kept us above the ground, made us into the characters we witnessed: Jonny Quest hovering around with a space pack on his back, investigating crimes and doing research with his father, George Jetson commuting to work in his flying car. Our toys were the space-age type. We each had a Major Matt Mason doll, five-inches of plastic astronaut with a tiny helmet that opened and closed and a space pack that contained a long piece of tightly wound thread. Dad gave us each a shiny, metal pulley he’d bought at the hardware store in town so we could suspend our astronauts from cabinet doors and end tables. They soared between floor lamps and dropped from curtain rods onto other planets.
Of course we would fly. There was never any question.
I don’t know how we got away with it. Behind the shed — we called it “the building” — we found the remains of an old, wooden flatbed trailer once used to haul gravel for the driveway, various types of debris to the dump, and frequent loads of fill dirt used in a never-ending effort to redirect the rising flood waters that plagued our yard and house. Dad had dismantled the trailer when it no longer gave way to further repairs, and the boards, black and splintery and rough, were piled behind the building. We helped ourselves.
Saws, hammers, nails. We took what was needed, creeping in and out of the building, ducking, motionless, whenever our mother’s head appeared in the kitchen window overlooking the yard, careful each time to close the door and reattach the rope hoop that served as a latch. No sign should give us away until we were ready to take flight. We should never hear Mom say, “Leave your father’s tools alone.” It would have been soul-crushing to hear such a pronouncement after we’d made the plan, after we’d discussed how we’d “really show’em this time,” after we’d come so very far. One small step after another.
It would’ve been Mom to say it, of course, because Dad was an inventor. He crafted shadow boxes from wood scraps and displayed the sea shells we’d collected from our one vacation to the beach. Dad single-handedly added an addition to our house when Brenda was born. Dad swapped out his own broken car engine by hoisting a rope and pulley over a tree branch, pulling and lifting until it was out and a “refurbished” one laid in its place.
How we procured the sheet is just beyond memory. It’s possible it was in the building, covering a lawn mower or an ancient set of webbed lawn chairs, though it would have been unusual to use a sheet for protection against bugs or spiders. Our family paid little attention to such intruders, settling for a broom to knock them away before unfolding one of the chairs. But the sheet looked like perfectly good wing material to sweep up the wind and suspend one of us in the air — so we helped ourselves to that, too.
I return to that day, to the shared feeling of a family mission whenever I’m back with my siblings. Our father has been gone for many years now, but the cement slab is still there, chipped and jagged, and not one of us can look at, sit a plastic chair on it, drink a Diet Coke on it without seeing the back-breaking efforts of our father, the hardest working person I’ve ever known, the man who gave his daughter an astronaut and a pulley too, along with her brothers. I think he taught me — taught us — how to have a vision. The concrete was never perfect, but it happened. Slowly, one bag of Sakrete at a time, it came to be. The backyard grill was an old washing machine Dad turned into an outdoor barbeque. You’d never know it had once churned our t-shirts and blue jeans, or our worn sheets that flapped on the clothesline once a week, not even on that one day, the day Clery flew.
SHAWNA GREEN is a senior lecturer in the English department for The Ohio State University.