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I used to like to go up into the attic when I was a  young child. I was alone up there, away from authority, able to explore that dark quiet world at my leisure. My cousin Corky, he was 10 years older than me built model airplanes up there, by the light of two small windows. I remember him testing their engines in our yard. That wild screaming sound they made as they ran brought me more peace than any morning dove or nightingale ever did. He was gone now, in the service for a few years taking care of the country. Giving up a bit of himself for the privilege of being an American. I missed him dearly. I felt good when he was with me. Safe.

I saw the intricate frame of a large wing he built before he had left for his service. It hung from one of the rafters. A graceful curve of balsa wood crafted out of a set of plans that lay on his desk.  Pinned to another section of those plans, laid out on his workbench was the beginnings of a rudder. There were wood and paper, paint and pins, and glue neatly stacked everywhere. I couldn't wait to see him again, watch him finish yet another of those beautiful airplanes, and hear its engine roar. I thought about all the other planes he had built and wondered where they had gone.

Some time later, when he had returned after completing his service, I was with him in our yard. We were talking about all those models he had built over the years. He told me the story of that last plane. Of how he finished it and then proudly flew it.  And then how he had removed the control lines, its tether to earth, doused it in the last of his engine fuel, then watched it fly away in flames. 

I asked him why... how someone could put their heart and soul into something, create it with their own hands all the way from the very bounds of one's intellect, a thing of grace and beauty. Then watch it dissolve into the past.  As if there was some justification for its existence within its demise. I asked him again why he just didn't keep that plane but he only talked about seeing it fly away in flames. At that point in both our young lives neither of us really knew.

Francis J Grasso   ©2018.11.14
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