Helicopter

Wyatt's face grew tight, and I could see him trying to hold his bottom lip steady.  An impossible task for him as he began to shed his first tears of the evening.  

"I left my remote control on," he sputtered as his chest began to convulse as well.

"Hold on, Wyatt ... It's okay," I said in hopes of stemming the coming breakdown.  "Let's talk about it.  What did you leave on?"

"My remote control for my heli-" Helicopter he was going to say.  But, he never got there.  The mere utterance brought on a rush of convulsions.  My son's emotional state was quickly devolving.  We had been here before.  Many times.  Some small instance in his day, some matter that did not fit the perfect script in his mind, that came back ten-fold at the end of the day.  And off he went.  Like a helicopter off kilter and spinning wildly towards the ground.

"It's okay.  It's okay."  I offered up the assurance mostly for myself, preparing for the journey through this descent, knowing I'd be picking up the pieces the rest of the night.  This would not be a quiet evening.

Forty minutes earlier I had reached into the makeshift closet in the kids' bedroom - pulling out a cardboard copier paper box.  It was full of our family's history captured before the era of digital photographs.  Nine albums of 4x6 photos dating back to college and through our first two years in Pasadena.  

I returned to the living room intending to prove to Wyatt and Elise that their mother and me once drove from Indiana to California in a rent-a-truck.  And those pictures were there.  But, before we found them, we were flipping through staged pictures from fraternity parties and memories from the old lake house up on Wawasee.  I had unearthed a trove of mysteries and stories, unleashing questions and quandaries for Wyatt:  every picture filled with new information, new landscapes, new possibilities, which - in turn - ignited Wyatt's avaricious mind.  Unwittingly, I was setting the stage for the later meltdown, navigating my son away from his nightly rhythms and routines and into space that would be too spacious for him to begin a steady march towards quietness of spirit and mind, and - eventually - sleep.  Instead, I descended into the photographs myself - pulled into the names gone by, unlocking memories buried deep.  So I flipped through page after page.

It's funny how our mind re-imagines and re-shapes our past, building its own narrative of joy or frustration depending on what images and memories we hold onto.  My mind grows content when I thumb through pictures of our days in California, as if the golden rays of sunset in Los Angeles stand as a permanent filter for those days.  There was a lot of freedom in those days, and my future was beautifully undetermined.  That is why I was ambivalent towards Wyatt as he began to ask me questions.  He desired information about the large float dominating Colorado Avenue with its ridiculously bright colors.  I, meanwhile, began to enter back into that scene - recalling the fresh air and warm sun on my skin even on the first day of January.  He wanted names for faces.  I found myself recalling conversations and meals and long hikes in the scrub-brush canyons of Ojai.  Memories don't mean anything if they aren't yours.  So we gravitated apart.  I began to drift further into the past while Wyatt came back to events closer and connected to his own life and experience.  At some point, he must have remembered the fluorescent orange helicopter lying on the television room floor; it's power mostly drained and only sufficient to spin its blades for a few seconds before ceasing.  There was not even enough juice to lift it off the floor.

The synapses and connections in his own mind made the dramatic conclusion that the helicopter's failure was his own failure - having already learned at too young of an age how to lay too heavy of a burden of blame and guilt upon his tiny shoulders.  

"I forgot to turn it off," he cried softly.  It would grow into a lament that would last another hour.

What is it in our nature that gravitates towards our shortcomings, seizing upon them and refusing to let them go even at the urgings of those who love us?  Is this our fate?  What it means to be bound to our depraved nature?  Surely, we cannot help but descend at times.

Thankfully, though, time tempers the harsher critic within us.  As an old friend told me, the sharpness of the day is dulled by time and years, the corners of particular disappointments wear down and we are left with memories where we can laugh where we once cried and relax where we once felt impossibly constrained.  And we pick up the pictures of our past and remember - for the first time - that life is so wonderfully rich and blessed.  Even the failures.  Even the rough nights that I will one day remember with an ache of joy in my heart.

~Wes