Once upon a time there was a watercolor painter who thought he could invent a parachute.
This was in the early days of parachutes.
Out in the meadow, with his easel and his brushes, he saw an early parachutist dripping from the sky.
“How was it?” he cried, jogging up to the gathering crowd.
“Oh,” cried the parachutist, tangled in the parachute: “I feel sick.”
But this was in Paris, so they spoke in French.
Those days, parachutes had a design flaw: They did not float gently to the ground. They spun through the air at dizzying speed, and parachutists turned an olive green.
So the watercolor painter went home, and put up his feet for a coffee and a think. How can we stop these brave falling men from feeling sick? is what he thought.
After thirty-five years of thinking, he figured it out. He put down his coffee, picked up his sketchpad, and called to his wife. “Look,” he said, calm with pride as he tilted the sketch toward her.
His wife squinted, and her eyebrows bounced, for his parachute was upside down! Instead of being shaped like an n, it was shaped like a u.
“Will it work?” she mused.
“Of course!” he exclaimed. He made a parachute out of her handkerchief to prove it. The handkerchief flopped to the floor, but, as he pointed out, it didn’t spin.
So convinced was he that this was the solution to the spinning parachute, he decided to make one of his own. He ran it up on his wife’s sewing machine. Next, he persuaded a friend to let him try it, by jumping from the basket of the friend’s hot air balloon.
He was so excited that he didn’t test it first with a dummy (or a cat), which would have been the custom in those days; he just strapped himself in and jumped.
He plummeted straight to the ground—like a vase knocked from a shelf—and was killed.
When she first heard this story, Maude Sausalito (aged eleven at the time) felt a cold gust of sadness for the painter. Then she imagined (yearningly) the things he might have landed on which would have saved his life.
A haystack; a pond; a freshly turned garden bed.
A vat of mulberries!
A gigantic banana milkshake!
A stack of blueberry muffins!
(She was hungry.)
If only, she thought—and she still thinks this often, even now—if only the stupid, overexcited man could have caught an updraft in his useless parachute! If only the updraft could have carried him high into a zinging blue sky, over a hill of whipped butter, across a maple-syrup pond. And finally, gently, deposited him on a buttermilk-pancake bed.
Years later, after the terrible thing had happened, Maude lay in bed for several weeks. Loss and pain were put into context at that time: broken hearts, blisters, paper cuts, scaldings—all grains of sand pouring calmly through an hourglass. She was used to them. But this new thing was a sharp rock lodged in the neck of the hourglass, choking the flow. No time, no breath, just monolithic pain holding everything still. If only she could pick up the glass, shake it loose, throw away the pain as she had thrown away that life.
Sometimes she dreamt herself out of the hourglass and into the basket of a hot air balloon. But then she could only watch helplessly as an inverted parachute fell from the basket and crashed through the air to the ground.