Delayed Gratification
Thanks to iWOOT (I Want One Of Those,) Jon and I got bit by the gadget bug this week, and we've been eying the remote control planes since Saturday. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This story really starts about 15 years earlier, in the slightly musty basement of my Uncle Joe.
Uncle Joe was a wiry, pipe smoking man and a wicked sense of humor whose mouth opened diagonally in a funny (and slightly but wonderfully insane) way when he laughs. My impression of him as a kid was always mixed with a caricature of "old age." His skinniness, leathery skin, and fungus encrusted nails made him seem just about as old as anyone was supposed to get.
15 years later, he is still beating us all at horseshoes and swinging from the branches of our neighbors tree. Like many of the older generation of my family, he's seeming younger and younger as our age-difference ratio shrinks.
The world is a bit distorted when you're young, though, and almost universally, everyone has a "you didn't get me that pony" moment - the moment when (often irrationally) you felt the world was utterly unjust. Mine centers around Uncle Joe.
Uncle Joe made the most magnificent RC planes; giant wing-spanned models that looked as though they could fly 1000 feet, and hung them from the rafters in that musty basement. He showed them to us sometime around 1989, and I immediately asked what every 9 year old would.
"Can we fly them?"
Even then, I knew it was unfair and irrational to feel cheated when the answer was no. He'd put countless hours into building and perfecting these beautiful things, and explained that the two times that he'd taken them out, they'd crashed And been shattered to smithereens.
But I was 9, and it all seemed horribly unfair at the time. I would never get to know what it was like to be at the helm of a something that was flying effortlessly above.
So, 15 years later, when the prospect of getting an RC plane up in the air for under $50 became a possibility, it's easy to understand why I jumped at it.
Jon felt the same, and there was no time to order and have them delivered while he was here in NY, so we went out and made our purchase.
I
remembered seeing a shop wit all sorts of RC planes and boats in the
window somewhere near my work, and indeed we found one on 30th and
8th.
The proprietor was a bit brash, but after listening to his spiel for a
while, we walked out happy in our purchase of 2 MegaTech
Firefly's.
The color choices were green and orange. This is "always wearing at least some orange" Jon we're talking about here, so it's no surprise that I got the green one, and its neon glow appealed to my late nineties design sensibility.
We immediately took them up to central park and few them around in sheep meadow. Jon's transmitter was bad, so it would only fly about 20 feet before spiraling to the ground in "safe landing" mode, but mine climbed and climbed up into the sky.
They work much like the mini-RC cars, charging off the transmitter and making 4-6 minutes flights off of a 2 minute charge. They're amazing fun and I think I've got the RC bug. Even with their limited controls, there's something about the feeling of flying that's incredibly freeing, and there's no denying the satisfaction in realizing a childhood fantasy.
We exchanged Jon's faulty model right after going to the park, (American Hobby Center was slightly grumpy but ultimately very accommodating) and will probably break them out again tomorrow. I can't wait! Ahh the beauty of delayed gratification.
