Soundbytes 10.16
Flying Is Easy
BEST I CAN REMEMBER, I was six going on seven when I began to suspect that I possessed certain abilities. Powers, let’s say. Uncanny speed and strength, the obvious ones, but also the ability to move things with my mind—for instance the cobwebs at the edge of the window by my bed. I never managed to coax the dryer to turn on by itself, but I was pretty sure I was able to shorten the cycle.
Best power of all: flying. In fact, I sometimes felt that some effort was required just to stay on the ground.
I needed only belief, nerve, and a few accoutrements—blue tee shirt, red cowboy boots, and cape. Strictly speaking, it was not so much a red cape as a checkered red and white table cloth. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a picnic! My buddy Gary Haines attached it to the back of my shirt with clothes pins, gave me the thumbs up, and saluted.
Now, I was realistic enough to doubt that I could initially swoop up into the sky and do barrel rolls like the Man of Steel, but I thought I could certainly manage a fairly modest trajectory from the roof of our garage to the gazebo in the Fink’s back yard. This turned out to be wrong. It ended in a crushed rose arbor, a fractured collar bone and, on the positive side, my first bloody nose, of which I was rather proud.
My mother wrenched it from side to side to satisfy herself that it wasn’t broken, then stuffed toilet paper up both nostrils.
She stood back a step, squinted critically, and attempted to straighten my shoulders the way you might straighten an off-kilter picture on the wall, but shook her head.
And they tell me the middle child is supposed to be the easy one, she said. Also, why are there clothes pins on your back?
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It turns out that my bones are fairly tough or flexible or both. That, or I’ve just led a cautious life. In any case, I never jumped off another garage and never broke another bone, not a one. If it’s not too sappy to say it, I’ve found other ways to fly. It’s easy, once you know how.
This little tune, Flying Is Easy, was written here in Virginia recently.
Flying Is Easy (click to play)
Flying is easy once you know how Just get the wind under your wings Some old gray day when clouds are in my way I grab this old guitar of mine and sing Cause I sing to fly best I can I sing to fly I sing to fly best I can I sing to fly Flying’s so easy ‘till I look down At my big feet here on the ground When I remember all that’s holding me down I grab this old guitar of mine and sing Easy for you to say Ought to know better Go on and dawdle your life away Is this the way to use the days you’re given You gonna fritter it all away? No, I sing to fly best I can I sing to fly I sing to fly best I can I sing to fly
Philip Singer’s first chapbook, Natives (Chowder Press, Madison, WI) was followed by See Rock City (Gallimaufry Press, Bethesda, MD), poems first published in North American Review, Poetry Magazine, Swanee Review, Yale Review, Southern Poetry Review and other publications too obscure for even the author to remember. He also co-edited the regrettably short-lived New River Review (Radford, Virginia), with poet Charles L. Hayes, and Poetryfish (Norwich, Vermont), an online journal of poetry and fiction. Sun Tea, a serialized memoir first published here on Substack, appeared in 2022, with a couple of afterwords (Hey, kids, wait up!) in the years since.
Singer lives in Virginia with his wife Briah and their little gray wonder-dog, Maisie
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