Model Day

Early on Father’s Day Alex held up his hand toward the top of the bookcase and kept saying “Airplane? Airplane?” He wanted the plastic model kits I keep up there, since my current apartment is a lifetime removed from the private basement bedroom I had in in high school, with its permanent card table splashed with enamel and covered with plastic parts of models under construction.

Image: upload.wikimedia.org

I’ve stored boxes up there of models the boys and I have built. Some months ago, I began buying plastic models, mostly planes, for the boys and me to do together. (I’m not the most experienced parent in the world, but I do think that if you’re going to try to ensnare your sons in one of your retrospective hobbies, you’d better get to it before they’re 16.) For Alex I’ve bought simpler kits, snap-togethers of jets, and one tiny snap-together Fokker Triplane. It was wicked cool!

“Alex, you want to build an airplane?” I asked him. “Airplane?” I had a few things to do but am always up for a 1/48th scale fighter plane, so I pulled down the box containing the parts of the Corsair I figured would be done by now in my unemployment, and the empty box of the snap-tight Spitfire the boys and I did a while ago. Alex opened the Spitfire box, and his face seemed to fall at seeing it empty.

“Alex, you want to build a plane?”

“Build a plane?” This caught me a little by surprise. I was missing a lot of chances here as a dad of a child with autism, most notably the chance to get him to speak and write a full sentence motivated by a deep desire to do something at that moment. He grabbed my still-unbuilt Unemployment Corsair and twisted a fuselage half off the running. “Oh, Alex, wait!” Every chance he could break it that way. But of course that’s what I bought all these models for: not display, but to play with. The Spitfire is all busted up in their toybox right now, and that’s great.

My mind was just running toward the glue and the paints when Alex wandered away. He’ll be back. I’m hope I’m more ready when he is.

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