I wanted wings.

Real wings. Wings I could swoop with, wings I could touch the sky with. Wings that wouldn’t melt if I got too close to the sun. I wanted to be a winged man.

And I wanted to fly over the high school where so many kids had made fun of me for being too skinny, or having a funny name. I wanted them to see me, flying through the air, with a pair of wings.

I hit the library- no internet then, remember, Jane? Remember when the big ‘search engine’ was a card catalogue? Those were the days, days when a question a ten year old could have an answer to in seconds today might require a whole day, or even a week’s worth of digging, probing, looking, reading, sifting, you name it. I looked up how DaVinci tried to do it, how the birds did it, and what would be needed for a man to do it. My Physics teacher said it couldn’t be done- birds have light, hollow bones and special chest muscles so their wings could over them higher and higher. I asked- and got permission!- from my biology teacher to dissect a pigeon instead of a frog in class, just so’s I could see how those muscles worked. Not easy, but eventually I found the right books, the right men who could tell me what I needed to know.

The wings couldn’t be made of feathers- feathers only work when your bones are full of air instead of blood and marrow. I had to find some material that was light enough it could float on air, but tough enough it could push the air down, down hard enough to send me flying up, up to the skies…

I found a chemist who was just going to ditch a batch of plastic polymers, and he was happy to give ‘em to me to take them off his hands. I spent the better part of a month slicing them after school in my Pop’s workshop attached to the back of the house. I modelled them after feathers, though. Made ‘em just the right width- bent and gave a little, but you couldn’t break ‘em without a set of pliers and a hacksaw. Glued, then screwed ‘em in place with wood screws- better’n bolts any day, for what I was doing. When I made the first wing, I was so proud of myself. And then…the second wing didn’t look like the first. I had to knock it back and start over I dunno how many times, but I did it eventually. Three months, just to cut and bolt. The framework hadn’t been quite so hard. A local TV store had closed down, and a bunch of their stock- old TVs no one wanted to buy- black and whites were giving way to color by then – were just left out back of the place to junk themselves. All those nice, long, rabbit-ear antennae, asking for a guy like me to snip ‘em off, bind ‘em up, and turn them into a frame just as tough-yet-bendy.

And, once all that was said and done, and done. And Done over. And done over again…

I took it for a glide.

Now, you know it’s not the easiest thing in the world to try out a pair of wings. It’s not like there’s any safe place to use them, really; unless you’re high up enough to use a parachute, but that means going up really, really high, which means if the things don’t work you turn into a grease spot on the ground.

So I got a sack of flour, took it and the wing set out on a chilly Saturday morning, and did my first test run. Do I remember the day? Jane, honey, you know the game too well, doncha? Sure I do! Each of us remembers the day we took our first big plunge into the life, weather it was the first patrol, first fight, or first try with one of our gadgets.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

And was I glad that I strapped a sack of flour into that set of wings the first time, lemme tell ya! Thing dropped like a rock and hit the ground, sack went ‘ker-splat!’ and went everywhere. I mean, that coulda been me, all my guts at the bottom of the hill, and where would I’ve been then?

Well, I fiddled, diddled, tried and tweaked and pulled and welded. I added a pulley system to the wings too, so’s I could steer better and turn towards a good thermal if I needed to…if I could ever get the damn thing to fly, that is. I couldn’t seem to get it to catch the wind with wings that could really steer the way birds could. And I didn’t just want to strap an overgrown kite to my back like a hang glider. That didn’t have all the pull, the kick of really flying, you know?

And eventually I figured it out. I needed something that would make more lift, something that could pull something heavy, like a human body, up in the air more with better pull. Eventually with a slide rule and a lot of scrap paper calculations, I figured out that I needed what a plane needed- wings, but that extra muscle to pull me higher and forward. But you couldn’t just go to the local hardware store and buy a propeller, so…yep, you guessed it! I had to design and build those, too!

Yeah, those took a while. A lot of visits to a lot of junkyards. A lot more visits to libraries and a couple of airports where the security guards needed a dollar or two to be convinced I was a kid doing a science project and not some commie tryin’ to send information about our planes and airports back to Ivan in Russia. Another six months or more of work every day after school, in the workshop and on the hills trying those wings out over an’ over again.

Did my folks mind? Not on your life. They were just jim-dandy with me working on my little project. Mrs. Blanski’s kid down the street was handing out pamphlets for the Socialists, like they’d ever give a sixteen-year-old kid a fair shake if they got into power. And the Morris boy? Two streets over from us? Baseball star with a .425 batting average? He sent at least two girls I know of to the unwed mother’s home before he finished his junior year. And that’s not counting the other kids in our fairly poor neighborhood who were getting up to other kinds of mischief with reefer and booze every Saturday night. So if I wanted to spend all day tinkering in the shed, my folks were more’n happy to let me. My Pop, I could tell sometimes that he wished I was playing baseball more than trying to get one of those little turbines to spin. My mom, too, she’d ask me if there were any girls I’d like to take out on a Saturday night instead of trying to get the rigging system to pull and mesh, but she didn’t give me too much grief about it. How could I tell her that any girl who was halfway decent looking already had a crush on Tom Reichert, and was going out with either him or one of the toadies on his crew?

Oh, Jane, hon? You got a water or something for me? Couldja get a . . .

Jane, is that what I think it is?

Dangit, Girl, hide that flask! Here, hang on- there’s a coffee cup over there- no, don’t bother to wash it out! Someone’ll see, and you’ve never seen gossips like you get here in a nursing home! Puts the worst you ever saw in an all-girl’s school to shame! We’ll have the aides cruising down here like nobody’s business, even sweet little Meagan’ll try to take it away.

Ah, honey, that’s it…over the ice and…oh, that’s real good. Not the four-dollar Walmart stuff! Dang, it’s been a long, long time. Where’d you get this? Well, fine. I’ll finish if it means I can have another cup of that later! Where was I?

Oh yeah. Yeah, I tinkered. I tinkered a lot, until it was ready. Slaved over a year until it could fly a few feet without busting open the sandbag I kept strapping into it. Until one day… one fine sunny, Saturday morning, when the rest of the damn town were either sleeping in, throwing a baseball at the park or shoveling Fruity Pebbles in their mouths while watching some cartoon rot on the TV, I set up the wings with the lump and . . .

Presto!

It flew.