Out of Your Reach

 Some kids dreamed of the toy inside the wrapping. I dreamed of the wrapping itself. Well, not the wrapping. The box. The glorious cardboard box.

There is a family story they love to tell about me. Birthday morning. Shredded paper everywhere. Adults watching to see the look on my face when I see the gift. Instead, I light up and shout, “Another box, another box!”

To me, cardboard was possibility shaped into a rectangle. I did not see packaging. I saw cockpits. Helicopter instrument panels. The pilot’s seat of a DC-3 I had once glimpsed on a runway. My scissors were design tools. My marker pens were avionics. A flap of cardboard taped upright became a control yoke. A cut-out side became a windshield on the Serengeti.

My brothers played with toys.
I flew aircraft.

Toys were static. They came with rules printed on thin paper. Boxes had no rules. They held engines and altitude, and sound effects my imagination supplied with precision only a child can claim as fact.

Nothing was out of reach because everything could be built. A boy without an airplane is not deprived. A boy with a box is already airborne.

There is a little cosmic humor in how life circles back around. Today the courier knocks at the door and drops off a parcel. My kids focus on the gadget inside. I catch myself turning the box over in my hands, calculating how I once would have transformed it into a Sikorsky cockpit.

Amazon packaging is basically my childhood dream delivered six times a week. If only the contents could compete.

Some desires never outgrow us. They just learn new vocabulary. The boy who flew cardboard cockpits became the man who worked in actual hangars, who trained pilots and technicians, and who still looks up every time a jet carves its path overhead.

There was never any toy out of my reach. Everything I needed to fly came delivered in cardboard. The box was the machine. The dream came built-in.

Now, for the sparring question:
Did the box feed your imagination because you lacked the toy, or did the toy pale in comparison because imagination was always the real gift?

I write

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