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When Fredrick Diederich went to school for engineering, he dreamt of building rocket ships. He dreamt of puzzles put to him by kings that only he could solve. He dreamt of building and of becoming, of using his creations to become something better than human (such is the hubris of youth).
Now he looks at Isaac, sixteen and pure energy and flying, and he sighs; for something in him knows that skateboards are as close as he will ever come to rocket ships.
Things happened between university and Isaac, you see, as is their habit: the NASA Goddard Institute rejected his internship application after college, and his treacherous professor pointed towards Schweizer Industrial Engineering. And he took the job at Schweizer Industrial Engineering, and he stayed at the job at Schweizer Industrial Engineering, and he decayed at the job at Schweizer Industrial Engineering. And he met Marnie, with her quick lips and her kind eyebrows; and she loved him, so he married her. And they had Isaac, and she had cancer, and then she died. And Isaac had no mother, and Fredrick had no schematic for raising a child.
He was relieved when Isaac found skateboarding; coming home to an empty house, for whatever reason, felt less lonely than coming home to a lonely child. He tried to bond, but at thirteen Isaac was more concerned with the pattern on the underside of his board than the steel alloy of his axels. Fredrick let it be. He would still patch up his son's scrapes, and remind him to wear a helmet, but Isaac existed largely outside of his father, and Fredrick was somewhat relieved for it.
When Isaac was nearly fifteen, Fredrick made one more try. Isaac came home one Thursday afternoon, walked right up to his father, and presented to him the two halves of his broken board.
'I need a new one', Isaac said.
Frederick, stirred in part by his professional horror at the shoddy board and part by some paternal guilt, saw his chance.
'I will not buy you a new one,' he told his son. 'But we will make you one.'
He stole a small sheet of fiberglass from the canoe manufacturing company he was consulting with. He cut it, he heated it and shaped it, and Isaac would look over his should and tell him, 'It needs to be shorter; it curves like /that/; the ends should be more round.' And Fredrick would adjust it accordingly. He bought axels online, measured them against the broken board (He scoffed at the cheap aluminum alloy-- his board would have better); Isaac corrected him when the axels he chose were too heavy; Isaac chose the color of the wheels.
When the axels were assembled, their anchoring holes drilled, and all that remained was to screw them in, Fredrick stopped his son.
'What are you going to name it?' he asked.
Isaac scoffed. 'It's a skateboard, not a boat.’
'Still,' Fredrick said of their creation, 'it needs a name.'
When his son only shrugged, Fredrick picked up a permanent marker off the workbench. In careful, black boxy capital letters, he wrote DAIDALA across the bottom. Isaac, impatient to have the final product, failed to ask the question his father wanted; he got the answer anyway.
'It means 'finely crafted'. It's Greek.' And, with all the patience in the world, he screwed in the axel plates.
-
Fredrick began to visit the local skate park. It was also an ordinary park, so he was not entirely out of place. For a long time, he thought Isaac hadn't noticed him, which was as he wanted. One day, though, he caught his son’s eyes on him, and though they said nothing of it, the acknowledgment was there.
Fredrick's reasons for sitting in the skate park each afternoon were not entirely paternal; watching these children soar in impossible trajectories brought back half-petrified memories of dreams of impossible inventions. And watching his son among them, he felt a sort of proxy accomplishment. My boy, he thought.
There was a gingerness to all his thoughts of his son, as if Isaac, like his mother, would disappear some day; as if someone so full of life and daring surely could not exist in a cowardly world. Watching him skate, though, brought such satisfaction as to wash away his world of greys and fear. Watching Isaac skate was watching a man with wings; beautifully, impossibly soaring, wheeling in a world he could not hope to touch. And not the sun in the sky could smite him down.