Hubris

The Lore of the World

At your sister’s birthday party, we brought back a menagerie of helium balloons from the local grocery store. One in the shape of a fat bee, another the shape of a smiling planet Earth, and also a pink number two, to mark her year. Of course, they were a hit, and much fought over. Weighty clips at the bottom of their dangling strings kept them within gravity’s well, and so if bounced upward, the balloons would sink back (at various points they were also clipped to the dog’s collar, as well as the robot vacuum, to great delight). The most pleasing part of such balloons is how their internal lightness is balanced by the bottom clip. Something inside everyone wishes that the whole apparatus would float down even slower; or better yet, not at all, and just hover in place between floor and ceiling, or dirt and sky.

Well, your father is a clever man, and filled with all sorts of clever ideas, and so that afternoon I took your younger sister and you out to the green summer world of our yard, under a blue sky where the puffy clouds printed on its surface scrolled by.

“Watch this,” I said with a wink, and removed the clip. Then the pink number two floated away, almost out of reach, before I grabbed it, repeating the pattern until both you and your sister were giggling. Your mother came to watch, arms folded across her chest.

I had taken out with me a roll of packing tape, which I began to wind around where the clip had been removed at the bottom of the string, and then I let it go. Not enough! The balloon tried to escape again. So more tape was wound around, in successive experiments, until the bottom of its string looked inhabited by a small wasp nest. Finally, when I let it go, the balloon did not go up or down. Instead, it floated pleasingly across the yard three feet above the ground, like an underwater mine.

This was demonstrated several times. Even if one gave it a slight nudge higher, it would then just drift in a long arc that spanned the whole back yard, with the weight coaxing it only ever so slowly back down.

Until it didn’t. Peacefully mid-drift, the force pulling the clouds past reached down and scooped up the balloon, and the pink two ascended, up, up, and a little “Oh!” was all I could muster before it disappeared over the roof of the house. Your sister too was distraught, but you understood the event completely and watched in utter horror the ascent—an image I remember as a flashed photograph on the lawn, with your eyes wide, and your mouth a perfect oval, all framed by the ringlets of your hair. You had coveted that balloon most of all, for, unspoken in your mind, you’d been next in line to play with its magical buoyancy. Instead, it had been stolen, as if an invisible giant had bent from the sky and plucked it forever from you.

I had started running to the front yard with your sister in tow, hoping to regain sight of it, while you hobbled behind, your face screwed up in the sensory deprivation of dismay (the degree of which I did not quite comprehend). So complete was the loss that you couldn’t make a sound, not a whisper, until you finally did get to the front yard, where you were able to break the gasping silence and get out the wail that had been building from your toes.

High in the air drifted the pink two, and I cannot lie—a part of me wished nothing more than that my mistake would fly into the blue sky and become, far out to sea, a fish’s problem. But instead it headed unerringly, as if carefully pulled betwixt invisible thumb and forefinger, to the top branches of the largest tree in our yard, where it caught fast and tangled in the uppermost branches. An old pine a hundred feet tall that looms head and shoulders above the rest had, after decades of growing solitude, been politely handed a balloon.

There the drooping bit of deflated plastic remains. Through wind. And rain. And snow. It has been bled of color, and looks much like a jellyfish beached by unknown means, miles inland, a hundred feet in the air. I am looking at it now.

---

This ongoing serialization of letters to a young child, “The Lore of the World,” can be read in any order.

For when you become a new parent, you must re-explain the world, and therefore see it afresh yourself.

A child starts with only ancestral memories of archetypes: mother, air, warmth, danger. But none of the specifics. For them, life is like beginning to read some grand fantasy trilogy, one filled with histories and intricate maps.

Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real. And it is a parent’s job to tell the lore of this world, and help the child fill up their codex of reality one entry at a time.

Above is one of the thousands of entries they must make.

Here is Part 1 (teeth, whales, germs, music on the radio), Part 2 (Walmart, cicadas, stubbornness), and Part 3 (snow). Further installments will crop up semi-regularly among other posts. It is secretly building toward the ultimate question: Why is there something rather than nothing?