All Together Now
July 1, 2009 by Jeff Stimpson
Filed under Health
Image world-war-2-airplane-model.com
The 1/48th Corsair fighter plane was going to be my comeback piece, the plastic model kit (”hobby kit,” now that I’m almost 50 and can afford the good kids) to prove that my eyes were as sharp and my hands as steady as when I was 16 and building the bargain kits.
I put it right up on top of the bookshelf, out of the way, with the now-empty boxes of the snap-together airplanes I did with the boys. “Airplane? Airplane?” Alex kept saying.
I had some computer work in the afternoon while Ned built a model on his own, and as I’m making dinner now that pretty took us to about 7:30, when the dishes were put away and I decided that Alex was owed some airplane time.
He didn’t help so much as watch: I felt a warmth to think that for Alex it enough just to be near me as we built a model airplane together. I do hope he wasn’t paying too much attention, after under my once-skilled fingers one piece went on crooked and then another went on slanted and then the tiny cockpit tinkled out of the half-finished fuselage and bounced across our floor.
Somewhere about the moment the Corsair’s canopy received a giant impression of my thumbprint in glue, it began to hit me that whatever skill I’d once had in this hobby had deterioriated. In the chair beside me, Alex drew his knees up inside his T shirt and sometimes watched me, sometimes stared off as I smeared glue along the inside of one wing and then the inside of another and mashed the two halves together. “Alex, wanna hold this together for a minute?”
He did. He slipped the propeller onto the front of the plane — right in front of the complete hash I’d made of the cowling assembly — and he took a tissue gently in his fingers to dab at the decals. I bent one of the “U.S. NAVY”s upon itself and I couldn’t line up the American stars on the wings (decals are my favorite part of building; they make the model).
I really meant to give this kit more love than this. Somewhere along this time, I decided to just do the landing gear and the missiles later, and just stick the damned wings on the damned plane — the part of the construction Alex seemed most keen on, anyway.
“There, Alex. Airplane. Let it dry a minute.”
He did. Then he took it over to the couch and methodically, wordlessly stripped off all the decals.
