Icarus and Daedalus - Modern-Day

Icarus and Daedalus - Modern-Day Parable

You all know the story of Icarus and Daedalus. Crazy King Minos keeps Daedalus, the builder of the great labyrinth, trapped on the island of Crete. Along with his son Icarus, Daedalus and Icarus wait, plotting and praying for release until the great builder that confined the Minotaur gets a great and awe-inspiring idea -- I'll build wings of wax and bird feathers and my son and I can fly free. The father and son collect the feathers for years -- who knows how long, and finally aloft they go -- don't fly too close to the son, my boy, says the builder. But the boy gets drunk on freedom, gains in confidence, and dancing with the sight of the birds in the sky, he grows entranced by the light. The carefully constructed wings melt burning the wax and dead feathers, and the boy plummets to the ocean. Living on an island, dreaming of flight, Icarus never learned to swim, and he dies, choking on the salt water of the sea.

The moral, as you know is this: fly too close to the sun, dream too big, and you'll get burned. I remember reading about the boy who made wings out of wax and feathers with his dad when I was a little girl, ruining my eyes with reading by my Barbie bedroom light. I loved the picture of the boy and his father flying in my book. I loved reading about how the sun burned the wax, and Icarus plummeted to the ground, a bird only briefly. I always liked reading books like that, mythology and stuff. Knights in shining armor saving damsels in distress, fairy tales.

False flight. Dead flight. Man-made flight and pretend wings.

My father always said I'd never get rich with an English degree, and he was right. But I loved living in my head because it was easier than thinking too much about the environment where I grew up. Dead-end suburban land, my dad called it.

The thing you have to understand about my family is that my father is a gym teacher at a suburban high school. He played football in college, but he was a small man then, and he never made the pros. (He is still short, but weighs more than he did back then, although he is still in good shape, better than the gym teacher at my own high school, I can tell you). My dad can play any sport, or at least any sport that counts, which means baseball, football, hockey, and basketball, that's it. My brother can play them all, and he grew up with a football in hand. You can look through the family album and see a picture of him, sleeping in his crib, with the Nerf football my father gave him as his first birthday present right beside his tiny hand.

Then come the pictures of my brother growing up, toddling around, dressed in a little football helmet for Halloween, his hands buried in his treat bag. Oh, he's a growing boy, my mother said. My brother was always the kid who would grab for the second potato, two cheeseburgers when we went through the lunch line until he decided his Body was a Temple to football. It really didn't matter what he ate, he seemed to convert it all into muscle, and my father was proud, "he's filling out nicely," he'd say.

When the other parents complained that my brother was too rough at recess when he was in elementary school, my father would say that these other kids were weak. My father was very big on us being strong. We'd never take normal vacations to Disney World or England or Europe, like other families. Instead, we'd go skiing in the iciest of weather, or camping out in the stickiness and the heat. When I asked my mom why this was the case, why we couldn't see Cinderella's castle, or Buckingham Palace, or the Coliseum in Rome like my friends, she said we didn't have the money. But I wasn't sure about that. I knew my father was toughening my brother and me. No wimps allowed in the house. I learned how to kayak, how to set a fire with the sun, and my brother and I were lean and strong and brown, with rippling muscles like Thoroughbreds.

It is true that my father didn't make much money as a gym teacher, although it was a steady job. He painted houses during the summer for extra cash, and my mother worked part-time as a dentist's assistant. But our house always looked perfect. He was a great builder, and very handy. He could do things like refinish cabinets change the oil in the family car. Why pay someone to do a half-bad job when you can do a good one yourself, he'd ask. He built us a treehouse, a basketball court in the front yard, and my brother was always playing street hockey in front of our home. "Car!" he'd shout, and the kids would part, like Moses parting the Red Sea.

Growing up we both had chores. I'd help my mom make dinner, and my brother would help my dad outside. But as he grew older, and Little League and Pee Wee Hockey, and Pop Warner Football gradually grew more competitive, most of the afternoons before dinner saw the two of them catching a few pop flies, practicing a slap shot on the makeshift ice rink that my father created by spraying the lawn from the hose before it sank below freezing, and of course, sailing the old pigskin back and forth. Plenty of time, said my father, for chores, when you're trapped in suburbia -- but maybe not, maybe you have what it takes to get to the top, son.

If you went to high school with my brother, you could pick him out in a second. He was the one who would waltz into class late, puffed up in his varsity jacket. "Glad you could join us," the teacher would say, and my brother would always laugh, even if there was an edge to the teacher's voice.

He'd date of course, he always had somewhere to go, something to do after a game, but never anything serious. He seemed to rise above all of the concerns of everyone else, so sure that he would get a scholarship, that the world would be his, and his future would be served up on a platter. The recruiters would come. Then the girls would come, my father and mother stressed to him -- first the recruitment, the offers from the college, the scholarship, and he could maybe, maybe get more serious. During the off-season.

Once he fixed me up with a freshman guy on the football team, and I practically fell asleep, the date was so boring -- all this talk about pushing around the field, how this team sucked, that team didn't. To be on the football team at my high school, you had to live and breathe the game, it had to be your sun and moon.

Some of the teachers were snippier: "One day, you'll go too far, Brad" his eleventh-grade history teacher said.

Who do you think you are?" his algebra teacher said.

And once, his English teacher said (English was his worst subject, my best): "Where would you be without football, young man?"

Didn't they see that my brother walked on the clouds, on water, that he was above the normal laws of man? He didn't need to get a 4.0, only make touchdowns. So long as he made the minimum requirement the NCAA stipulated for the SATs, he didn't need to memorize vocabulary words and formulas, and agonize over drilling multiple-choice questions or the five-paragraph essay format for standardized exams. Instead of figuring out how to fill out college applications online his senior year, college recruiters would be calling our house, practically drooling over him, like a hungry dog over a bone.

Not that he didn't work hard. Sure he did. Just not in school. Out in the field. Grunting and sweating, trying to get out of the labyrinth of suburban hell and stasis, which my father railed against, whenever my dad was angry, after a long, hot day, working out in the yard while our neighbors had groundskeepers to groom the grass. Slaving to the man, my father said, the 'man' representing our four walls with a leaky roof he couldn't afford to replace on a teacher's salary, and all of the overweight, chubby kids he had to coach during regular P.E., when he'd rather be out, coaching a real team, or better yet, playing himself.

I know my father's anger, words, and resentment fueled every rep my brother lifted in the weight room at school. Like building a pair of wings, feather by feather, adding to his ever-bulking body, sinew by sinew, tendon by tendon, muscle by muscle. Sometimes I swear could see him growing more muscular, as he tore into a Powerbar with his teeth, swilling down whole milk from the red and white carton in the morning.

A toasted my favorite strawberry Pop Tarts, carefully cut them into quarters like my precision would protect me from something, and sipped regular Coke.

Garbage in, garbage out, sis," said my brother. "Carrie, girl, your energy is going to totally crap out halfway through practice, if you eat like that." I didn't care that much. Yeah, I'd probably have half a snack bag of corn chips for lunch, throw the rest away and say I was fat, try to pretend I was fashionably dieting like the pretty girls, and then feel like wet rag after doing wind sprints with my hockey stick after school. But I never saw my body as a carefully sculpted, inhuman machine, capable of perfection like my brother. My legs were just a vehicle to get my life to Point a and Point B, as best as it could. I think deep inside, I had learned the lessons my father taught me about the female body, the way he never encouraged me to excel in sports like he did my brother -- there were limits to female size and strength, and your body and fate could betray you. So you had to chill.

Screw you Brad," I'd say, and feel my Pop Tart singe the inside of my carefully glossed lips, swing my heavy backpack, and leave.

Yeah, my backpack was heavy. I had to work hard, unlike my brother in school. Yeah, I played field hockey, my knees growing tan beneath the shining fall sun, but I was always earthbound about my athletic ambitions. My father reminded me that there was no money in women's sports, no matter how high the heavy softball sailed across the field with a crack of my bat. I was always better at books, anyway. I knew that was the only way I could get out of my home, the school where I wasn't popular, just my brother's little sister, was following a string, step by carefully wrought step. Intellect was my way out of the labyrinth I lived within, and patience.

There I would be, cheering my brother on at the games, every night he played, even though he never came to my games. I was still my father's daughter, and he was the quarterback. I was his cheerleader in spirit, even though I wasn't like the pretty girls making pyramids in the school colors of Kelly green and gold.