A new radio piece about my earliest conspiracy.
In November, when my friend Jack and I were ten years old, we spent many precious daylight hours inside a cinder block school building. In the classroom, under buzzing tube lights, in rows of desks, all the kids sat until our seats were sore, turning textbook pages and filling blanks on worksheets that the teacher handed us. From time to time she called a few kids to the blackboard, where chalk in hand we’d show our peers who did and who did not understand the day’s math.
Each afternoon, when the bell rang at last, we might have run joyously from the building, but unbridled displays of any kind were forbidden. The chilly hand of discipline reached as far as the crosswalk at the property’s edge. In fact, that hand reached further, for in our school bags were a few extra worksheets to pencil in at the kitchen table after dinner. Kids who failed to finish those sheets, well, officially speaking, those were bad kids. Unofficially, maybe those kids had simply had enough. Some folks learn early when and where to draw a line.
In those days, before the Vietnam War heated up, America had nothing you might identify as a drone, but we had plenty of unidentified flying objects, plenty of UFOs. Some of them looked like tin pie plates, and they caused a stir when they zipped in from a cloud bank and made the evening news. Adults we knew had a very large appetite for distraction. Can’t blame them, though. They grew up during a World War and were raising families in a Cold one.
Jack and I liked the crazy social energy that churned in the wake of any disk that zig-zagged across our sky, so we concocted a little conspiracy. We would build a UFO. In our mundane world of chalk dust and worksheets, for three days this UFO project meant everything to us.
First, we spent almost all our cash buying parts at the Woolworths at the top of the hill. Back then, America held a very sour opinion of boys stepping into the makeup aisle of a store, but we slipped in and quickly found a small, disk-shaped plastic makeup case with the sleek aerodynamics required for galactic travel. We selected a 100-foot ball of twine, too. And up at the front of the store, there was a tank of helium and a selection of balloons. We chose the largest one, had the clerk fill it almost to bursting with helium, and then tuck it into a massive paper bag. Why the bag, you might ask? This was either to cloak our project in secrecy or to protect our image as manly young boys, you decide. We hustled our purchases home and scrounged up paint, a little light bulb, a battery, thin electrical wire, and a tiny circuit to make the bulb blink.
We planned to hang a lighted, steel-gray space ship on a long string beneath the balloon. And we would wait behind some bushes before bedtime for a passerby to spot a smooth disk blinking just below the stars. For two evenings our navy blue balloon idled up in the basement rafters as we painted and soldered and glued.
We hoped the little flying saucer had a real chance to appear on the evening news. And as long as nobody noticed the balloon, Jack and I expected that the true nature of our glorious conspiracy would never be known. That is, unless someone sworn to secrecy stepped forward later in life and told the tale.
But by the third evening, when construction ended, the balloon sagged on the floor in the corner, unable to lift its head. We were broke, and our project stalled. A failure, you say? Absolutely not. In a world of chalk dust and worksheets, it had been a thrilling test run, a proof of concept. At the age of ten, we were just getting started.