Not Made for the Fair

Every year of grade school I built something.

Second grade was a papier-mâché earth, cut open to show the layers. Crust, mantle, core — the planet sliced like fruit so you could see what it was made of. I did not know it then, but it was the same move I was making on manila paper with my secret bases: the cross-section, the walls removed, the system visible.

Even the earth itself got the treatment.

I wanted to see inside the thing, and if I could not see inside it, I would build a version I could.

Fifth grade was model rockets, and that one belonged to Dad as much as to me. He helped me with the rockets, and they became my science fair project that year — astronomy and flight, the interest that kept orbiting back, finally taking a form you could ignite.

Sixth grade, I chose aviation, which I can now diagnose as way too big a topic. A whole science fair project on flight. Everything from feathers to jet engines, presumably. Birds, lift, wings, propellers, rockets, airplanes, the Wright brothers, maybe a badly copied diagram of a wing. I do not remember what the display looked like. I remember the feeling of a subject expanding faster than a kid could contain it — a feeling I have met many times since, standing in front of some project whose edges I refused to draw in close enough.

But third grade was the best one.

Third grade was the one they would not take.

I built a planetarium.

A huge wood box — something like four feet to a side — painted green on the outside and black on the inside. My own planetarium. A room for space, dark as space, that I could look into whenever I wanted.

I did not build it for any fair.

I built it because I wanted it to exist.

Because a kid who kept drawing the solar system eventually wants to hold it.

It lived on the kitchen table while I worked on it, and it stayed there for several days. To an eight-year-old, several days is not several days. It is an era. The planetarium occupied the center of family life like a visiting monument. Breakfast had to negotiate with the universe. Supper had to work around space.

I remember staring into it. I remember flying my little plastic spaceships through it. I remember the box becoming more than a project before it was even finished. It was a chamber. A stage. A toy. A model. A private cosmos with plywood walls.

The painting was where the real decisions were.

I picked out the foam balls that would stand in for the planets, and I wanted them to scale. Of course I wanted them to scale. Everything in me wanted the sizes true to one another. Jupiter should be Jupiter. Earth should know its place. Mercury should not get ideas above itself.

And I ran straight into the limits of time and tools and the foam-ball shelf, which offered the sizes it offered and nothing in between.

So I compromised: the closest ball to what each planet should be, and the frustration of knowing it was wrong.

And somewhere in that frustration, I gave myself a permission I have been using ever since: the model did not have to be perfect to be true. If Mars was a little too large, if Saturn was chosen from what the craft store had on hand, the universe still counted. The maker got to decide where accuracy ended and the world began.

The stars I painted with my favorite method of that era: white paint flicked from a toothbrush.

Today, it is the last technique I would reach for. Today I would fuss over temperature and opacity. I would paint each star individually, make some small and cold, some dim and yellow, some barely there. I would let the dark bloom with violet, pink, orange, nebulae and shimmer, so that from a distance the inside of the box might read more like deep space.

Our techniques advance as we age.

But nothing about the better method is as satisfying as that flick of the toothbrush.

I wonder what my sister thought of the monstrosity squatting on the kitchen table for her brother’s crafting pleasure. Though she had her large objects too. Dad built her a Barbie Condo, something like three feet by three by six, and it lived on in her bedroom long after my box was gone. That was the household we were: a father who would frame out a skyscraper for dolls, a kitchen table you could lose to a universe for a week.

Then the science fair came around, and I learned the box would not be going.

It was Ms. Ward’s class. I remember us sitting around a table while she told us about the science fair project, and I remember my eyes lighting up before I had any plan for what to say — because I already had the greatest project imaginable sitting at home.

And she knew it.

She knew about the planetarium. Everyone knew about the planetarium, or at least it felt that way to me. And I remember her seeing it.

Then, gently — almost mercifully — she read the next rule.

“And this project has to be specific for the fair, not created beforehand.”

She answered my question before I could ask it.

I have been turning that rule over for forty years.

Nobody involved was wrong, exactly. It was even a kindness, the way she did it. She spared me raising my hand and being told no out loud, in front of everyone. Rules like that exist for reasons. The fair needed boundaries. The teachers had to make the assignment fair. A project made earlier, at home, outside the frame, did not fit the frame.

But the lesson landed anyway, sideways, the way lessons do.

School had a category for work performed on assignment, and no category at all for the thing you built at home because your hands could not leave the idea alone.

The best thing I made in grade school was disqualified because I had made it for love instead of for credit.

The fair could not see the planetarium.

The planetarium did not need the fair.

I have made a lot of things since that no fair asked for.

Behind all of it — the papier-mâché earth, the black box, the rockets, the too-big aviation board, the Barbie Condo — was my father.

I credit him for all of this crafting, which I loved. He was the reason a kid in rural Wisconsin assumed that if you wanted a thing, you built it. He fixed the TVs. He built the barn, the fences, the Christmas-gift barn for my toys, the doll tower for my sister. He kept a workshop where materials existed and tools were real and a boy could watch a competent man make something stand.

That matters.

A child who grows up around making does not first experience it as magic, or talent, or rare artistic lightning. He experiences it as weather. Boards get cut. Wires get joined. Hinges get replaced. Motors get repaired. Something broken is not finished; it is only waiting for someone to understand it.

Dad helped with the rockets directly, but his deeper help was atmospheric.

In our house, making was simply what you did.

Not a talent.

Not an event.

A default.

A few years after the planetarium got turned away, he sent me to the seventh-grade fair with his own oscilloscope, and I stood there half-understanding waveforms, proud and fraudulent at once. That is its own story. But it belongs to this same lineage: a father keeping a boy supplied with reasons to build.

And I know what happened to the box, which is better than anything I could invent.

The planetarium quietly became the cat house.

No announcement. No consultation. One day — probably not that long after by my older-man sense of time, though a child’s calendar would have called it ages — it was simply in the pump house, upside down.

My father had turned it over and made it a home for our outdoor cats. He cut a small hole for a door and set it inside the pump house: two layers of shelter, a box inside a building. My mother put in a blanket and pillows so the cats could stay warm through the winter.

The painted cosmos faced the floor.

It was not my first lesson in the farm’s law of reuse, and it would not be the last. A thing that has finished being one object becomes a new and different thing, useful in another way. Nothing well-made on that farm stayed idle.

Even the universe got repurposed.

One of the cats gave birth to a litter in there, and it fell to me to reach through the little hole and bring the kittens out.

My mother had taught me — or my imagination had; the two worked closely in those years — that a mother cat is fiercely protective of her newborns, and the warning stuck. She would bite me. She would scratch me. The moment I stole one of her babies, the mother would become all teeth and claws in the dark.

And under that worry sat a smaller one, a few percent of one.

What else might live in a box like that?

A rat, maybe. A rat that would bite. Except the cats would catch or scare off any rat, so that was unlikely.

But if a rat could live in there, then maybe something else could. A strange little monster creature, snuggled down in the blankets and pillows, waiting in the warm dark while my hand pushed and snaked through the bedding, feeling for fur.

I remember it exactly: my arm in past the elbow, the darkness total. The old planetarium turned upside down around my arm. Somewhere above my hand, the hidden stars. Somewhere in front of me, the kittens. Somewhere in the dark behind them, the creature I had invented because a dark box requires a resident.

But my parents were right there.

So I was not really worried.

That is the part I notice now: the fear was half real and half furnished. I had built the dark box, and imagination did what imagination does. It moved something in. And I could afford the creature — could enjoy him, even — because my parents were standing behind me, making the dark safe enough to imagine into.

There is a whole education in that, if I stand back far enough.

I built a dark box so I could look into it.

My father flipped it over so something could live in it.

Two halves of one inheritance: the room for imaginary worlds, and the shelter made from it. Vision and use. Wonder and practicality. The cosmos and the pump house. A child’s model of the heavens turned into a winter den for farm cats.

And the strange little creature in the blankets — the one that was never there and absolutely was — never really left.

I have been building dark boxes for him ever since.

I notice what I became: a man who builds rooms for imaginary worlds, who paints the inside of the box dark and hangs the planets himself, mostly for no fair at all, and who still hopes the things he builds might become shelter for somebody.

Third grade already knew.