When I was a child, I invested considerable time and effort into learning to fly.
No, seriously. I grew up with Superman cartoons, and was nurtured by the Batmania of the sixties, and I saw little or no reason why, under the proper circumstances, manned nonmechanical flight should not be achievable. I mean, we were trying to put men on the moon, for potato’s sake. Why, then, should I not be able to soar with the birdies by sheer force of personality?
First, there was the matter of a cape. I was certain a cape had something to do with it. Other kids used tablecloths, towels, whatever was at hand. I felt I had a bit of an edge, there – my grandmother had bought me a towel with Batman on it. MY towel had an actual superhero on it. Certainly, this counted for something.
I used a folding chair for a launch pad, feeling that the couple of feet between me and the ground would help. When my initial experiments yielded no results, I attempted verbal encouragement, of various types… “Up, up, and away!” “Up!” “Go!” “Flame on!” “Shazam!”
Years later, during a similar scene in the “Spider-Man” movie, I laughed. But at the time, all it did was get me banished to the outdoors, chair and all, if I was going to be shouting in the house.
Later, in kindergarten class, I expressed my disappointment to a chum, and we commiserated over cookies and milk. “Y’know,” he said, “maybe the problem is that you aren’t starting out high enough. Does your house have a second story? Or can you, maybe, get onto your roof, or something?”
“Are you nuts?” I replied. “If it doesn’t work – again – I’m looking at a broken leg. Or worse.”
“Well… y’gotta have faith,” he replied, philosophically. “If you don’t believe, it won’t work.” We’d had “Peter Pan” read aloud to us the previous month, complete with the scene where you gotta believe in fairies and clap or Tinkerbell will die, and he, in particular, had taken that very seriously.
I, on the other hand, was more pragmatic. If I DIDN’T believe, the worst that could happen in the story was that somebody else died. If, on the other hand, I took a flying leap off the garage, I was taking my OWN life in my hands. Furthermore, my old man had warned me about getting on the roof of the garage, more than once. I was, by then, quite certain that if he caught me up there again, my only hope of salvation was BEING able to fly. And damn fast, too.
When I arrived home that day, I looked speculatively at the garage. It didn’t look promising. When you’re six years old, a garage roof looks about a hundred feet high, and it didn’t help that the ground around it was paved on two sides. By then, I’d tried maybe a hundred experiments on the folding chair. Did I really wanna up the stakes? Especially when I hadn’t had ONE flicker of success so far?
No. I’d had a hundred successful flights, but only in one direction: down.
Flight was, perhaps, the first of childhood’s dreams to die, for me. In time, I put the towel away, and moved on to other things.
Years later, I heard that quite a few kids got broken legs and/or broken necks because they hadn’t thought out their experiments as far as I had. I understand that actor Adam “Batman” West even went on to film a little thingy, shown on British television, explaining how he COULD NOT FLY, and don’t try it, cape or no cape.
Made sense to me. I mean, I really wanted to fly. I’d looked at that garage roof, and THOUGHT about it… and if I’d had a bit more faith… a bit more desire… I might have tried it.
But I felt very clever for not having made the mistake.
In time, I grew up, got married, and became a parent. In time, Batman came back, too. And with Batman, there came a flurry of other heroes, same as last time, just in time for my little girl to be enthralled with them all.
And durned if her Gramma didn’t buy her a towel. This one had Catwoman on it. My little girl loved it. In time, it became a cape, of course, tied round her neck, for the practice of swirls, flourishes, and draculonian poses.
There is nothing, I think, more cute than a tiny little girl making Dracula poses in a Catwoman towel.
But it troubled me, a little. Sooner or later, she was going to try to fly. She was the right age, and had the same media encouragement I did, but with better special effects. She was a treeclimber, too. How easy was it to get onto the roof of THIS house? Would she try it indoors with chairs, first? Or would she say the hell with it, and go straight for the full tilt boogie?
I decided to head the situation off.
“Y’know, when I was your age, I had a Batman towel.”
“Really?” she said.
“Yup. Used to tie it around my neck like a cape, same as you’re doing now.”
“Yeah?” she said. She then fell silent and waited for the inevitable funny story.
“Um,” I said. I didn’t have a funny story. “So, have you ever tried to fly?”
“Huh?” she said, and looked at me funny.
"When I was that age, and I put on my Batman towel, see, I figured that if I had a cape, I could fly. So, I’d jump off a chair in the living room, yelling, ‘Up, up, and away.’ "
My child looked at me like I was insane. “Batman can’t fly,” she said. “He uses wires and grappling hooks to swing around.”
“Well, yeah,” I said. My child was looking at me like I was an idiot. “Y’see, BATMAN can’t fly, but SUPERMAN can, and…”
“So why didn’t you get a towel with Superman on it?”
“Because I was six years old. I don’t think I even knew where towels were sold, then. I thought mommies and grandmas just made them magically appear, or something.”
My child looked at me like I was an insane idiot. “Probably just as well,” she said. “You could have gotten hurt.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Jumping off of high places can cause severe injury–”
“No kidding,” she said. “Superman is an adult, and completely understands the use of his powers. You were a child, and didn’t. And keep in mind Superman can fly fast enough to literally alter the planet’s rotation. What if you’d taken off at Mach 4 or something? The theory of cape flight is that a cape permits flight, but does not necessarily imbue the wearer with other super-powers, like heat vision or invulnerability. And how, pray tell, do you control your flight speed? Sure, SUPERMAN can, but he’s been doing it for years. What happens if you take off indoors at the speed of sound? Superman would just punch through the wall. You would have, too, but I bet you wouldn’t have looked much like a little boy when you hit the open air. More like a bloody wad wrapped in a Batman towel, most likely. And that’s not even considering the matter of air friction, or being able to breathe while moving at transsonic speeds. You were very lucky, Daddy.”
I sat there with my mouth open. My child looked at me like I was an idiot, but there was love in her eyes. “Best to leave these matters to the experts,” she said. And she climbed off my lap, and ran off through the house, Catwoman cape trailing behind her.
I sat there with my mouth open some more. Well, at least the conversation had been a success. She wasn’t going to go take a flying leap off the garage, or anything…