My son gave me a new car for Father’s Day. It’s sleek and black with gold trim. Lots of gold trim. T-tops. Gold honeycomb wheels. A huge decal of a fire-breathing bird, also gold, on the hood.
It’s about a foot long. Also it’s a time machine, because when I open the hood I can see an engine that I painted and assembled more than 30 years ago, and time stops.
Time stops again, I should say.
It had stopped in my grandparents’ basement. By the time I was old enough to explore it without direct supervision, my youngest aunts and uncles had moved on to adulthood. They’d left behind a trove of wonders. Old Treasure Chest comic books brought home from Catholic school in the ’50s and ’60s. Oversize issues of Boys’ Life full of scouting lore and even original fiction, like the Adventures of the Mad Scientists’ Club. Reels of kite string waiting to be untangled and reused. A poster classifying different types of clouds, no doubt an early indication of the interests of the uncle who went on to fly in hurricane hunters. Science fiction by authors widely known (Isaac Asimov) and mostly forgotten (Cordwainer Smith). Comic books opening a window to the Silver Age, when Batman had a whole Bat-family with Batwoman and Batgirl and Robin, and the Green Arrow had a trick arrow for every situation.
There was always something new to find. What better way to spend a rainy day than sorting out the snarled contents of a tackle box that hadn’t been opened in a decade?
What puzzled me were the models. Who quits halfway through putting together a model of some obscure post-WWII bomber? Who leaves the abandoned project on a shelf for years, rather than throwing it away? Why had time stopped?
It was harder to understand because I enjoyed models so much myself. I spent a lot of hours snapping or gluing cars and aircraft and the occasional spaceship together. In most cases I didn’t go to great lengths to make them perfect. To be honest, a lot of them later got shot to pieces with a BB gun. But on a couple, a Boss 429 Mustang and a ’69 Dodge 440 Six-Pack, I went the whole hog: perfectly spray-painted bodies, every part brushed in the specified shade from those little heavy glass Testors paint bottles, hours of exacting solitude.
I set my sights on bigger things, literally. One of the biggest boxes on the modeling shelves was MPC Ertl’s 1/16-scale Pontiac Firebird. It wasn’t quite the “Smokey and the Bandit” car, but it was close. (In fact it was the 1980-81 Turbo Trans Am, the “Smokey and the Bandit 2” car, but let’s not go there.)
I got started, painting up the engine block. Because of the bigger scale, it had more detail than most: The extra plumbing for the turbo, separate “wires” from the distributor to every spark plug. And all that gold trim, a master class in those pesky water-transfer decals.
And then … time stopped.
There’s a quote, whose source I haven’t been able to pin down, that goes around: “At some point in your childhood, you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and nobody knew it.” Life moves on. At some point, you get a driver license and running around replaces a lot of earlier activities. Beer turns out to have interesting properties that merit investigation. What it means to “like” somebody and to want to be with them undergoes a radical re-definition. A pile of half-assembled model parts, some painted and glued, some still on the sprues, goes back in the box for a while. Then the box goes somewhere out of the way and a while becomes forever.
The Firebird sat on a shelf in a closet in a bedroom in my parents’ basement for 30-odd years, until my son found it. He’d been building models too. I’m kind of surprised it’s still a thing kids do, in this digital age, but it is, and bless the stores that still carry kits and supplies. He wanted to know if it was okay to finish this one. Of course it was. He had his own ideas about some details, like the color scheme for the seats, and that’s fine. He did a good job.
So here is this strange artifact, which brings vivid memories of my grandparents’ basement and my own teen fascinations and my present as close together as three skips of a rock skipping across a creek.
Time stops. But it only stops for the things you leave behind, never for you. You get swept along, swept away, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.
But sometimes, if you’re lucky, the kids you have reminds you of the kid you were.
Happy Father’s Day.
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