Chasing Estes Rockets

March 10th and it's snowing here. This one took a little time to get right.
Arguably it's a summer / youth piece, but with us returning to cold wet weather I could use a summer break.
Remember being 6?


Chasing Estes Rockets

 With bone white milky Elmer’s glue,
  stick balsa fins on cardboard tube,
Tie shock cord to the wood nose cone,
  glue cord to body tube, as shown,
Spray paint with any color you care,
  (which meant a color I had there)
  and
That’s how my Estes' rocket kit
Came from a bag and became IT!

  The WAC Corporal –
A flying scale model of the first US rocket,
  in space!

And it was painted gloss white because
Rust-o-leum was the only spray paint
  my Father had in the basement
Saturday Dad took us kids to
  the Pound Ridge Town Park,
I was looking at the light
  in the hand held rocketry ignition box,
  it was still unlit and dark,
Dad had to insert an ignition wire
  into a solid rocket engine,
Secure it in place by poking in
  asbestos toilet paper wadding, 
Insert the engine in the rocket,
  set the rocket on the plastic toy launch pad,
Clip wires from the ignition box
  to the ignition wire,

Then he said, "Put the key in the slot,"
  (did I tell you I was only six?)
I did; The light came on!
  "Ten, Nine, Eight…" I pressed the red button at six and
VOOO-OOSH! in a steak of gray smoke
  the WAC Corporal ascended at Mach speed to the sky,
It’s gloss white rust-o-leum paint indistinguishable from cloud,
  until with a puff an orange parachute appeared,

We watched it go sideways, sideways,
  it seemed to be going up, still up, over the trees,
We watched my WAC Corporal run away, carried off,
  absquatulated with a foot loose summer breeze,
I asked "Is it gone?"
Dad told me, "Don’t worry, it’ll come down, someone will find it"

That was 1967, it’s 2004 now

Not every memory of my Father is of him having Alzheimer's,
  what our grandparents kindly called ‘going sea-lion,’
Or in other circles, a ‘hardening of the arteries,’
  but yeah, this is one of those,

So time to time I’d drive back down
  to visit him, in our old town,
To care for him for a week or so,
  so his girlfriend could visit her friends,
And for our days, we’d drive around in my gloss white pick up truck,
  doing what ever it was that we’d think up,
Or I decided, ‘cause he wasn’t really decisive anymore

Including returning to the Pound Ridge Park,
  where baseballs were left on the old small diamond,
The broken bat halves, splintered during games,
  still stood hammered in the ground
As bat-pole tombstones in what we kids all called
  the ‘Broke-Bat Graveyard,’ behind the chain link fence

And then I noticed, high up there, where the trees meet the air,
  an orange plastic parachute, tattered as a trash bag in the trees,
I walked in toward it, stood below it under the breeze,
  and there on the damp leaf litter ground was…
Not my WAC Corporal, but it was a rocket!
  some other kids’ lost soggy cardboard Big Bertha

Back at the truck;
"Dad, look, I found my old rocket! You said it would come back,
  and it did! Here it is, it did!"
He turned slow, took the rocket remains in his foggy remembering hands, 
  and though he talked non-sequitors, he spoke directly to me,
"Well isn’t that something, I always knew he would,
they always do, you know, when they get hungry,
  comin’ home for food…"