The Things We Build

It Was an Ad for a Toy Airplane

Some ingenious soul had figured out how to bolt a little electric motor onto a paper airplane and fly the whole contraption from a phone. For a modest sum, apparently, you can now accomplish what generations of fourth-grade boys attempted with notebook paper, a paper clip, and a profound ignorance of aerodynamics.

I looked at it for maybe three seconds.

And then I was standing on a playground with Lucas Lightbrow.

Not literally. I'm not quite that far gone. But the memory came so fast and so completely that I might as well have been there, squinting into the sun.

Lucas is a character in The Planemaker, a musical story written by Marvin Payne. I recorded myself performing it on New Year's Day, 1990, and I've recited it dozens of times since -- sometimes start to finish, sometimes in pieces, sometimes because a single passage said something I couldn't say on my own.

I know it well enough now that I can hear most of it without playing the tape.

And there on that playground was Lucas, watching the first paper airplane he'd ever made that actually flew.

For a few glorious seconds, the boy had the whole world by the tail.

Then the plane crashed, the girl he adored laughed, and Lucas began the long business of growing up.

I sat there looking at the ad.

Thirty-six years.

That's a long time to carry a little boy around in your head.

---

The Planes I've Built

I've built a few airplanes myself.

Mine tend to have keyboards attached, and their wings are made of ideas that seemed perfectly sensible at two in the morning.

I've spent most of my adult life building software. Some of it worked well. Some of it worked beautifully, which -- and I cannot stress this enough -- is not the same thing as making money.

The world turns out to be remarkably indifferent to the difference between a brilliant idea and a profitable one.

A man can spend months building something that solves a real problem, push it out into the world, and discover that the world had other appointments that day.

No laughter. No applause.

Not even the courtesy of a good, solid rejection.

Just silence.

I sometimes think Lucas had it easy. At least Amy Fletcher was watching.

There have been successes, I'll grant you. I'm not writing this from under a bridge -- though there were a couple of stretches when I wondered whether I ought to scout the available accommodations.

But I've never quite shaken the conviction that there's something important I haven't finished yet.

That's a troublesome thing to haul through life.

It's worse when you're old enough to know the difference between determination and stubbornness, and still not wise enough to tell which one you're practicing on any given Tuesday.

I have projects going right now. Things I believe ought to exist. Things that, if they worked the way I see them in my head, might make some small difference to somebody.

I don't expect everyone to understand them. Experience has cured me of that particular optimism.

But I still want them to fly.

God help me, I still want them to fly.

---

A Woman Who Needs Nothing

My wife tells me she doesn't need anything.

This is a deeply inconvenient thing to say to a man who wants to give you everything.

I don't mean she has no needs, or never wants anything. She's a perfectly normal woman in that respect -- though I suspect she'd object to normal.

I mean that when I start talking about what I hope to accomplish, the security I want to build, the life I'd like us to have, she seems entirely unimpressed by the necessity of any of it.

She loves me.

Apparently, that's supposed to be sufficient.

I find the proposition hard to argue with and even harder to accept.

I want to hand her a life with no worry in it. I want her to have the things she's gone without. I want to look back someday and say that all those hours, all those disappointments, all that stubborn refusal to quit added up to something you could actually hold.

Something I could put in her hands and say, There. That's what I was trying to do.

She'd probably look at it and ask whether I remembered to eat lunch.

There are times I suspect she understands life better than I do.

There are other times I'm certain she doesn't understand me at all.

Both can be true. I've checked.

---

Different Directions Toward Eternity

We don't even approach eternity from the same direction.

My faith is rooted in the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Hers is rooted in Judaism. These aren't competing preferences about where to spend a Sunday morning. They're different understandings of things I consider foundational -- who Jesus Christ is, what eternity means, and what's waiting on the other side of this life.

I believe marriage can be eternal.

I want that with her.

I can't make her want it the same way, and I certainly can't make her believe something just because I do.

Sometimes I wonder if that difference has made me careful with my own heart.

Which is a strange thing to admit after this many years of marriage.

I love her. That's not in question.

But I wonder whether I've kept one small room of myself locked -- not because she'd reject what she found in there, but because I don't know what to do with the possibility that we may never see certain things the same way.

Maybe I've confused being understood with being loved.

Maybe I've been standing around waiting for agreement while affection waited patiently beside me the whole time.

Or maybe there really is a kind of loneliness that lives between two people who love each other deeply.

I haven't settled that one.

I'm not going to settle it tonight.

---

The Passage I Can't Get Through

There's a moment in The Planemaker I've never learned to handle.

Lucas grows up. He marries Amy -- the same girl whose laughter once cut him to pieces. They're happy. Eventually, she's pregnant.

Then the doctor comes in with good news about their son and bad news about Amy.

That's all it takes.

I've performed that passage dozens of times, and I almost never get through it without crying.

I know what's coming. I know the words. I know the music. I know how the whole story ends.

Doesn't matter.

I can feel the tears coming before the doctor ever opens the door.

I've wondered about that.

I don't think it's just the sadness of a young woman dying. There are a thousand sad stories, and I don't come apart at all of them.

Something about Lucas losing Amy gets at a place in me that never did grow a callus.

Maybe it's how fast it happens.

One moment, everything that matters is right there. The next, it isn't.

Maybe it's the helplessness.

Lucas could build things. Fix things. He could work and sweat and aim all that ingenuity at whatever life set in front of him.

But there was nothing he could build that would bring Amy back.

I know a little about wanting to fix things.

When something breaks, my instinct is to find the mechanism responsible and correct it. If no mechanism exists, fine -- I'll invent one.

This has served me beautifully with computers.

It works less well with human beings.

Against mortality, it's worthless.

I look at my wife sometimes and realize how completely my life has grown into hers. The ordinary things. The conversations. The arguments. The small habits that would drive me up a wall in anyone else and occasionally drive me up a wall in her, too.

I don't want to picture the house without them.

Maybe that's why I keep trying to give her everything.

Maybe providing for her is something I can do with my hands while my heart looks the other way and tries not to think about what it can't control.

I don't know.

Here's what I do know. When Amy dies, I cry.

And when she and Lucas are reunited at the end -- when the story finally gives back what it took -- I may cry again, though not nearly as much.

Not from sorrow. From something closer to relief. From the stubborn, unreasonable hope that the ending is true.

That's the thing about paper airplanes. You throw them knowing perfectly well how it goes. Up, and then down. Almost every time.

You throw them anyway.