Asahel Church
1st Place Non-Fiction
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On Weight
Perhaps we were all born to fly. But gravity and mass make
for a formidable opponent. And the negative connotations of the word ‘weight’
surprise me. It conjures thoughts of excess and disability, Twinkies and
electric scooters. There’s also the seriousness that the word weight conveys.
It literally sits heavy on your tongue.
My relationship with weight has been mixed. I come from a
family of small people. Throughout my adolescence and early adulthood I was too
skinny. I used to sleep under a large heap of blankets, the steady pressure
from above keeping me safe and warm in our drafty attic. Much later in college,
sailing on blustery fall and spring afternoons through the daunting Lake
Michigan chop, I was always twice as cold and twice as bundled up. But I was
small for a reason. Small crew made for fast sailing and quick action in tight
spaces. I bailed water from the bottom of the boat furiously, fighting weight.
Miracles have always surrounded the successful defiance of
weight. The Egyptian pyramids, wonder bras, and airplanes. In the early 1700s,
Connecticut colonists traveled for miles to observe a “floating rock” –a
several ton boulder that inexplicably moved up
the slope of an embankment. I used to dream, re-occurringly, that I could fly.
Or float, to be more accurate. The dream seemed to be a combination of a
childhood aspiration for piloting, and the deep impression that a particular
“Diving Tony” left on me. He was a 2 inch plastic replica of Kellogg’s Tony the
Tiger mascot that due to some unknown physical (or metaphysical?) property
would dive to the bottom of a recycled two liter coke bottle when it was
squeezed. That squeezing action, combined with my desire to fly morphed into a
vivid dream that by squeezing the right muscles in my body, my rear end as I
remember, I could float up above the houses much the same way that Tony dove to
the bottom of the coke bottle. Weightlessness- that was what I dreamed about.
And it became so real that I more than once found myself testing out my new
found ability after waking.
Excess weight. Underweight. Dead weight. Large boxes that
tempt you to over pack. Large suitcases frantically re-configured at airports.
My friend Bryan bought a wood laminate boat last year. We
joke that the work involved in keeping up with it is worth it in exchange for
the misty looks and nostalgic complements of observers. We’re not likely to win
a lot of regattas with the old lady, but she is beautiful. It sits heavy on its
trailer and in a light breeze displaces the water sluggishly, the boom and
slack lines tangling and bumping into our heads as we crouch inboard trying to
keep the boat flat. But in a breeze, on the edge of a summer Chesapeake storm
or in a blow after, when the sky clears and the clouds are puffy, the dinghy
lifts up out of the water and fairly skims. Bryan clips in to the harness and
we hike out hard, abs and hamstrings screaming and souls thrumming. Then we
fly.
