Of Crumpled Wings and Little Girls

My daughter is seven years old. She does not fly airplanes. She does ride a bicycle. This won’t land her in any record book. Still, for her it represents a sweet victory over gravity, fear and the sting of skinned knees. As she speeds along, yellow hair streaming from a pink crash helmet, her face invariably will light up with the most wonderful smile. To her it feels almost like flying.

As I write this now, I am thinking of another 7-year-old. I am thinking of Jessica Dubroff, the little California girl who crashed in her airplane Thursday in Cheyenne, Wyo. She was attempting to establish a record as a pilot prodigy. It was her father’s idea. He died, too, along with a flight instructor.

The television footage shot just before the crash is haunting. Jessica’s lopsided grin. The furtive glance she sneaked at the coming storm even as she told an interviewer she was not afraid. The last image of her scampering through a deluge toward the Cessna, a cellular telephone stuck in her ear. She was talking to her mother.

“Do you hear the rain?” she asked.

When the skies cut loose like that where I live, my daughter and her younger brother come running to their parents’ bed. They tell us with wide eyes they are not afraid, just a little lonely or something. They are kids. When Jessica Dubroff heard the thunder, felt the rain, she ran into an airplane, took off into the storm and died. Seven years old.

*

While her death provoked much anger--what were the parents thinking of, letting her fly in that weather, letting her fly at all?--the intent here is not to join that outraged jury. Rather, it is to suggest that Jessica’s tragedy presents an example, albeit the most extreme one imaginable, of something at work across this country: Somewhere, somehow, faith in the eternal rhythms of childhood has been lost.

Kids now are pushed into sports by the age of five. Barely out of diapers, they’re shuttled to computer classes, karate lessons, enrolled in kindergarten prep schools. Summer vacation is dead, the victim of parental dread that time spent barefoot in pursuit of polliwogs or pop flies is time wasted. Gotta keep up, the parents preach, either explicitly or through their own manic example. Gotta get ahead.

The instinct is innocent enough. Children are an unfolding story; parents can’t help feeling the urge to skip forward to the final chapter, to see how things work out. And who wants a child to achieve less than possible? Still, there seems an almost desperate edge to the pushing. Perhaps it is entwined with that watershed poll of a decade ago, the survey which found that, for the first time, most Americans no longer expect their children’s future to be brighter than their own.

If tomorrow promises a fight for fewer and fewer crumbs, the thinking goes, today is not too soon to start sharpening children’s elbows, padding their resumes, molding them into little adults. “As she flies,” Jessica’s father had said, “she is learning math, physics, navigation, geography and weather--plus she will have a lifetime ticket to a certain social strata she can use or not.”

A lifetime ticket.

*

When my daughter started school, she was thrown into competition with older children who’d been redshirted by their parents in order to gain academic advantage. It was a tough time, and I turned to a woman I know as “Miss Pat.” Pat Hedlund runs a Pasadena preschool where my daughter once did time. She knows children--and parents. With a patient smile, she gave me a passage from “Zorba the Greek” to ponder:

I discovered a cocoon in the bark of a tree, just as the butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited a while, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life. The case opened, the butterfly started slowly crawling out and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled. . . .

I tried to help it with my breath. In vain. It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear, all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and, a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand.

This, so sadly, is the parting image of Jessica, a little girl lost amid an airplane’s crumpled wings.