Icarus

Like a scrawny referee wedged between two prize fighters, Catasauqua with its population of around 5,000 stands between the cities of Allentown and Bethlehem.  History lesson:  About 1910 Catasauqua had the highest per capita income in the United States.  This is a far cry from the working class town of my youth.  In fifty odd years the place had taken an economic nose-dive.  It was like the sled rides we took down the alleys near my home, riding high, only to reach the slushy cross street below. 

Catasauqua's own versions of robber barons had put it on the map with money from iron foundries and textile mills.  But the gothic mansion of iron magnate Mr. Thomas was by the 1960s an apartment building.  Mr Dery had an even greater abode several blocks up the street, adorned with Grecian columns (Ionic, Doric, Corinthian?  I can't remember.)  It was a Hearst kind of castle.  It too was fitted with apartments by the time I had come along.

When the silk industry failed due to the arrival of synthetics, Dery failed too, proving the classic cautionary tale about putting all of your eggs in one basket, even if they are golden.  Directly across the street from the mansion, there was a modest clapboard house painted gun metal gray, one that my parents could have afforded.  And in this typical working class house the broke Mr. Dery lived out his final days still able to look out across the street at the block-long edifice which he once owned.

In my youth there were certain iconic kids who led the rest of us around like so many grains of metal in an Etch-A-Sketch (a popular toy of that era operated by dragging metal filings around an enclosed screen using dials, which would... oh, hell, never mind.)  Jeff was one of those guys who didn't follow: he got followed.  He was one of five brothers whose dad managed the local movie theater.  Not he nor any of his siblings had decent teeth.  But Jeff's were the worst, with a couple of front ones missing and others blackened, only adding to his menacing appearance.  He had concurrent cupcake and pinball addictions which he nursed simultaneously at the local malt shop.  A couple of years later I saw Jeff get beaten to a bloody mess in a schoolyard skirmish.  So much for heroes, or even anti-heroes like Jeff. 

We would attend fights religiously like medieval townsfolk watching a beheading.  Not much soul searching would happen after one of these events, except the usual sour grapes if your guy lost.

As they say in today's parlance, it should have been a slam-dunk for Doc, the almighty Doc.  He was a few years older than our tribe and tall, taller than most guys his own age.  Some of us looked up to him, and his pronouncements were welcomed with a certain reverence.  I think a few of us, the Struss brothers for instance, saw him as a protector.  I guess we overlooked the gentler side of this giant, the one who raised rabbits in his backyard and did chores around the house.  What we saw was an overlord.  So it wasn't much of a stretch for us to back him one hundred percent in a fight with the smaller, younger Jake, someone from the othere side of town about whom we knew little.  We would have put money on Doc if we had any. 

So we trooped down the alley behind my house to a row of garages, a neutral territory of sorts where no homeowner would chase us off.  (We were accustomed to getting run off of properties, and we were wary of this.)  It was there behind the row of garages that we saw our future as Jake pummeled the stomach of the towering Goliath that was Doc.  And then we saw with dismay how Jake landed an upper-cut to Doc's face, drawing blood and reducing Doc to tears.

Those were real tears.  We couldn't believe it.  Then Doc pleaded for Jake to stop which he was reluctant to do.  We couldn't look away from this derailed train, and the jumbled wreckage stays with me over time and place.  On the way back up the alley afterwards there were the usual sour grapes.

When not dealing with these earthly matters, I looked to the skies.  A bunch of us would fly kites in the town's ball field.  On that day, I remember Tips was there, as was Jim S., his brother Johnny, etc.  The entire cast of five characters eludes me now.  We each had our own kite, vying for the title of whose went the highest and farthest.  We must have been at it for a good half hour with our necks bent backward, gazing at the air above, before Jim's kite began to falter, then swirl in widening spirals, finally hitting the ground awkwardly on the other side of the field.  Shortly thereafter, Tips felt an uncertain tug of his string and knew that the end was near.  His kite crashed too. 

One by one, kites looped, dipped, then kissed the earth as strings were reeled in and wreckage examined.  We stood over a crumpled kite, surveying the damage, murmuring to each other.  "It might have been the tail: it was too long."  "No, the frame is off kilter."  "The bow string could have been tighter."  We didn't know, but we were like CSI officials.  We were crazy serious.

We now had four kites on the ground, but mine was still aloft.  I hadn't had many crowning victories in those years, and flying a kite now seems rather pedestrian, but it was all I had on that afternoon.

With only one kite up there, our minds became one.  We all had a stake in this game now.  Tips tied the end of his string onto mine, and one by one, each comrade tied the end of his own string onto the previous one until the combined length of string released my kite to an unimaginable height and distance.  It became smaller and smaller in the atmosphere above as it became larger and larger in our imaginations. 

At times we wondered if the kite had somehow gone into the stratophere, breaking free of the string, but then we'd see the string still arced upward, and with a glint from the sun the kite would show itself once more.  It crossed my mind that this might be wrong, that we were defying the laws of science and the laws of our Roman Catholic God at the same time, that this wasn't meant to be.

The takeaway from this as I look back was the sense of teamwork on that day.  We were our own NASA crew there in the final stages, each one of us contributing to the whole experience.  You don't get many opportunities like this, not then, not now.

The inevitable was finally upon us, however, and reality brought us back down to earth.  I think it was Tips who noticed it first.  The string, it lagged, it went slack, it was becoming horizontal.  The kite, a mere dot, looked miles away, but not straight up now.  Then it was gone from sight.  It was down; there was no denying it. 

It was obviously not in the realm of the ball park anymore.  We followed the string, traipsing through town to find the fallen kite.  At times the string would go from the ground up over a power line then down again then over a rooftop.  It had been run over by cars on it's way, invading people's backyards, decorating their front stoops, until we found the broken and dismembered kite itself in the middle of Bridge Street.

  We knelt in reverence to delicately pick it up as though it were a wounded bird.  Oh, noble craft that had been to the heavens and back!  We paused for the proverbial moment of silence, or do I just remember it this way, all of us standing in a circle before turning to go, the onset of traffic breaking the silence.  Our day was done, and we all went home after that.  Our heads were filled with a feeling of accomplishment and the promise of even greater things to come.

Yet even such triumph had to come to an end. Why do I tell you all of this?  It may be instructive, but I don't know about that.  Things fall apart, and they will always fall apart.  Things come crashing down. We repeat history with a vengeance.  And there will always be Docs and Derys.  The mighty are falling all around us to this day:  Elliot Spitzer, Anthony Wiener, The News Of The World...  In the early sixties, we were no strangers to this same forboding, yet we tried to make the best of things as they were.  We were so hopeful, and I don't know why.  Maybe it was the kite flyer in all of us.