USS Alden Avenue

So one weekend my brother Jesse, our friend Adam, and I are hanging out at the house playing with the G.I. Joes and Star Wars figures. My dad decides that it’s a perfect weekend to take on one of the major projects he’s been plotting around the house. No…not one of ‘those’ tasks that most men think of doing like fixing the leaky shower, or painting a room – my father didn’t do those things; he paid people to do those things. The chore I’m referring to is the construction of an aircraft carrier. Yes aircraft carrier. For the action figures! Ha, no, not a real one you silly!
See, a few months earlier Hasbro released their newest monstrosity-in-plastic: the G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier play set. To most kids, including my brother and me, this was the holy grail of G.I. Joe toys! It came with a full deck, command tower with flight center and navigation room. Radar dishes, elevators, and a plethora of other features that every 3.5 inch Joe figure needed to win the war against Cobra! To my father it came with all sorts of cool stuff like a big flat sheet of plastic as a deck, and a square box of plastic as a tower, and a few more pieces of plastic which moved a couple of inches to simulate various things.
That tone that you sense is sarcasm. In reality, to my father it was a triple-digit dollar slab of plastic. He had these funny rules about which toys were cool and worth buying and which were not. The Cobra Ninja was cool enough that all three of us needed one – me, Jesse, and my father. The Star Wars snow speeder was cool enough, but the twin-pod cloud car was not and I still don’t know why.
Back to the story. So he wasn’t going to buy it for us, but since our friend Matt Harper had one, he didn’t want us to be the only kids on the block with out our own aircraft carrier! His solution was to build us one using all of the cardboard prowess he had inherited from his father, and which I have since inherited from him (Jesse inherited the spelling gene, which is also quite useful). Yes, he was going to build us one in the basement out of the stacks of cardboard sheets that had been saved over the years from pressed shirts!
I don’t recall what time the construction began, but it took several hours to collect the materials, make measurements, and draw schematics. Several more hours of marking and cutting the great slabs of steel (cardboard). Sweat and blood were poured into the project as the basement turned into a navy yard at Newport News. Hammers clanged, rivets popped, and sparks flew from white-hot welders. Also a lot of tape, glue, and x-acto blades were used.
Late into the day the hull was finally laid – a 6 foot long teardrop of cardboard with expertly reinforced, crisscrossing bulkheads to hold the shape and support the deck that would lie atop it. I remember my father standing triumphantly over it, as proud as Henry Kaiser must have been of his liberty ships. This was to be his greatest gift to his children who were clearly deserving and waiting patiently and alertly to assist in the construction in anyway possible…
It was then that he must have asked me to hand him something, or look at something, or DO something, anything…and it was then that he realized that I, Jesse, and Adam had wandered from the project, as young boys with short attention spans are prone to do. I mean we were right there! But not there, too. So when he asked and I didn’t respond, and he asked again, and I still didn’t respond, and he may even have asked a third, fourth, or fifth time (I really don’t know!)…something inside him…snapped.
Yes snapped. As sometimes happed within my father. Like when you didn’t tell him you had a paper due Monday until Sunday night. Or like when you – what was it you didn’t used to do, Jesse, that made him pull your hair? Like that…
Now how do I explain what happened next? When I study historic events, like the Roman destruction of Carthage in which each stone of each building was crushed to dust so that Carthage could never rise again, or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, where for miles every person and structure were vaporized to black carbon ash…I can’t help but think of the image of my father and that aircraft carrier. Godzilla haphazardly tramping through a small city knocking over a few building here and there doesn’t even come close, but if Godzilla took giant strides and specifically crushed every building, house, sculpture, fountain, and monument on the entire island of Manhattan while screaming a deafening sound, shooting fire from his eyes, and smoke from his nostrils, than that would be like my father trampling back and fourth over the cardboard superstructure until each piece had been pulverized back into the earth from whence it came.
There are still nights were Jesse wakes up in the dark from nightmares of being taped and glued into a cardboard coffin and Adam shakes and sweats at the sight of a boat. As for me…I try to stay away from pressed shirts.