FLYING

I just wanna roll away boulders
That they said was impossible
Cause don’t you know that I’m an irrepressible optimist working with a fatal flaw

— Make A Picture, by Andrew Bird

As a young child, I was convinced there had been a time when I could fly.

One day, I simply remembered; I used to be able to fly. The memory came to me all at once, clicked on as though my brain had tuned into a station which had previously been static. It felt like a dream, yet there was a clarity to it I couldn’t deny. In my mind’s eye I could see the world floating beneath me. I couldn’t go very high or fast, and not outside of the house, details which made me believe firmly in the memory.

I was about five years old when the memory came to me. With the logic and earnestness of that age, I decided that to fly was a kind of magic only bequeathed to the very young, experienced for a short time and then forgotten as one grew up. The fact that I’d suddenly remembered? A special gift.

Confession: I’ve always believed in the possibility of magic. I understood as a child that stories such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny weren’t real, yet I couldn’t help but hope that maybe my toys came alive when I wasn’t looking, and maybe fairies danced in the garden before I woke up. This gentle and sweet kind of nursery magic, inspired by stories such as “The Velveteen Rabbit”, seemed like a fair enough thing to secretly hope existed. Part of me thought that if I believed hard enough then I would see the evidence. Yet, in a conflicted cross between knowing such things were just imaginative stories and feeling that I’d be dashed if I learned unequivocally they weren’t true, I’d then tell myself that to believe in any part was enough, no proof needed.

Gifted with this certainty that young children could fly but then forgot, I turned to my younger sister, excited to see if she was at the golden age.

“Can you do it? Try. I could when I was your age, I remember!”I told her. She couldn’t, of course, yet I simply surmised that either I wasn’t allowed to see the magic or she was just barely too old.

Fast forward thirty-two years. I sat at the dinner table, holding my infant son and having dinner with family. My father shared a story about how, when I was very little, he would pick me up and fly me around the room.
”Most evenings, I’d fly you around,” he said, a twinkle in his eye as he recalled those early days of new parenthood. He continued, “Then, a few years later, I heard you telling your sister about how you used to be able to fly. I tried to tell you that no, you couldn’t fly in the way you were thinking, but you got mad at me. You told me,’No Papa, I could fly!’ You were really mad and it surprised me, so I just said, ‘Okay, you could fly!’ I bet you somehow remembered when I use to fly you around.”

At the dinner table, everyone chuckled and said what a sweet story it was. I laughed too, yet there were tears in my eyes. In an instant, I was five years old again, and the magic I believed I’d glimpsed wasn’t there after all. The fervor with which I’d once believed felt slightly embarrassing, and perhaps it was this more than anything which caused the lump in my throat. How silly, I thought, three decades later, to feel ever so slightly crushed by the simple truth.

Yet, the feeling passed in a flash, replaced with wonder at having finally heard the story from my father’s perspective. How dear of him, all those years ago, to humor me in that moment. How loving to have flown me around the room with such frequency it became a dreamlike memory, resurfacing with an impossible delight which I would attribute to magic.

I will always have the memory of believing I could fly, and now I’ll have my father’s story, too. The two pieces of a whole, fitting together at last; how rare not only to have that happen but for the missing piece to be worth treasuring. Something like that? You could almost call it magic.