Special to The Star-Herald
My friend Adam told me a story once, about the first time that he met his girlfriend Sara’s little brother. They walked into her apartment on Blake Street to find her 4-year-old brother sitting in the middle of the living room floor with a bucket, some blocks of wood and a roll of tin foil. She tried to introduce Adam to him but he was so caught up in what he was doing that he took no notice of his visitors. “What are you doing?” Adam told me he had asked. Without looking up from his work the kid had answered, “Building an airplane.”
It was not the cuteness, or the cleverness, or even the absurdity of the answer that had stuck with Adam through the years between when this had all happened and when he told me this story, one sunny April day, with us sitting on the deck smelling the new grass as the world warmed up around us. What had made this one moment stick with Adam so concretely throughout those intervening years was the absolute certainty with which Sara’s little brother had stated that he was building an airplane. He was not experimenting, or trying something. He was still young enough to believe that when he was finished with what he was doing the end result would be that he had his own airplane. He hadn’t been around long enough for the world to teach him that he couldn’t fly, no matter how hard he tried.
Imagine if we could get back there, back to when we could build anything. Imagine.
When I was younger I was so positive that I would grow up to be something. This didn’t mean that I would be rich or famous, that I would be a movie star or a rock god. This meant that I would be something which left me with a sense of fulfillment. Something that those people most responsible for my upbringing would be proud of.
I always expected that this would someday happen, as if by chance. The thing is, it never did.
Time moved forward relatively unnoticed, as it has a tendancy to do, and I never really thought about whether or not I was becoming anything.
When you look in the mirror every day and the person looking back at you is only a day older than he was yesterday it is nearly impossible to recognize that he is a year older than he was the day before, or 10 years older than he was when he was supposed to start this process of becoming. The terrible thing is that when you start to take note of the fact that entropy is setting in, that time has occurred in some fundamentally irrevocable way, it is too late. You can’t become anything because there are too many responsibilities to heed. Too many bills to pay. Too many places to be. That’s what you tell yourself.
The reality is that none of these things is really the factor that’s keeping you from turning back. We have this idea that life is a road forward and you can never go back to take a fork that you’ve missed. If by some miracle we can open our eyes up enough to see that we are going to end up disappointing ourselves we continue to face forward, and the thing that keeps us from turning back is that somewhere along the way we have lost the ability to build. We can no longer build airplanes.
But what if we could get back? Back to when we could build anything? What would we do? Would we change ourselves? Go for those things which slipped through our fingers in the course of our quest for the things we’ve surrounded ourselves with? Would we take a look around us at the atrocities which are being perpetrated all over the world? Atrocities which are a result of greed and lust for power? Atrocities which perhaps we could put an end too if we only had the guts to stand up, if we only believed we could make a difference, or if we somehow came to understand that even if you can’t make a difference it’s still important to speak out, maybe it’s even more important?
Would we see the irrevocable damage being done to our world and somehow come to understand that maybe it isn’t our comfort or profit or luxury which is most important? Would we stand up and make a change. Or would we simply make efforts in our everyday lives to learn more, to understand more and to love more? Would that be enough?
It’s time for us to all understand that we can get back to that time and that place where we can build anything. It’s time for us to see that we never left, but only lost sight in the pursuit of things which somehow seemed more important. It’s time for us to build, and to become. It’s time for us to make a change.
“If we could only build airplanes,
like my brother can.
If we could only get back to when
We could build anything.
If we could only build airplanes,
We could build anything.”
From “Building Airplanes”
By Adam Umphrey
