I Want to Come Back as a Boomerang
In a life rich in incident and serving up abundant opportunity to sit back, take note, and draw suitable conclusions I don’t think I ever saw a boomerang do what it was supposed to do.
What other device or tool or artifact can we say that so absolutely about?
We take for granted that fire extinguishers, jet airplanes, football stadiums, ladders, dishwashers, pianos, rivers, and the several members of the Periodic Table of the Elements all more or less deliver as advertised.
There likely is some leeway or cushion, written or unwritten, built into the system and into our expectations, but all in all they do what they are supposed to do.
Not so a boomerang.
Casting it into sporting terminology, boomerangs regularly bat zero for a trillion, for both a season and a lifetime batting average of 0.00000000000000000000000…and so on.
To describe this thing that a boomerang is supposed to do is child’s play.
The owner of the boomerang is to take the device in hand and using either a plain jane or arcane, nearly magical method of tossing or flinging or launching the thing, release it from his grip, and then stand in more or less the same spot secure in the knowledge that the damn thing would return to his hand.
Yes, that is what this device – actually I believe historically it developed as a weapon – was meant to do and never did.
By way of its shape and structure, the distribution of its weight along its axes, and the manner in which it aerodynamically interacted with the atmosphere of your back yard, it was supposed to reach some furthest distance away from you, reverse course in a ‘lazy arc’ as poetically described on the back of the boomerang package, and then return to your hand in the manner of a migrating animal coming back to its original stomping grounds after a round trip.
Which it never did.
You note that I don’t fault the thing for not coming precisely back to the thrower’s hand.
Even a boy works a little skepticism into his expectations in these matters after numerous purchases of devices from the back pages of comic magazines meant to ‘throw your voice,’ see around corners, write and decode messages in invisible ink, and attain a ‘mesmeric gaze’ that would bend people to your will.
There was so much wishful thinking in these categories that even a child could stop to think, ‘if these things are so easily ordered from the back pages of a comic book written for young idiots like me, why can’t every grownup do them all already?’
There were several pages there at the tail end of comic books in those days, and each page had its own flavor.
A step up the evolutionary ladder of the back pages from sneezing powder, x-ray goggles, and the evocatively named Stink Loads, were bodybuilding schemes of the Charles Atlas variety, residing next to various muscle strengthening powders on sale, for a single weekly dose, at a cost that amounted to the whole of your income for the next two decades straight, including proceeds from Christmases and birthdays.
“Maybe this works,” even a young person could say to himself upon review of the promised muscular transformation,“and maybe it doesn’t.”
In any event you could always experiment by lifting weights at the local Y or your high school gym to quickly convince you that there was nothing easy or quick about the muscle-building process, and who cared about something that didn’t come easy or quick?
More insidious were the headlines heralding isometric exercises.
In these arcane contortions there was a compelling case made that if you could only bring your muscles into exertion against immovable forces – say a brick wall or the unbending steel of the swing-set in your back yard – your muscles would not only grow as fast as they would under a traditional weight lifting system, they would grow even faster.
Those poor idiots tied to the shackles of the past and groaning on the various benches and platforms of the average gym, lifting weights that looked to have been cast in the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution? They could only improve by small increments as they first bicep curled five pounds, then ten, then fifteen, and so on.
The isometric enthusiast on the other hand turned the attention of his muscles to lifting cars, entire buildings, and when looked at the right way, the earth itself.
How much more rapid the development of muscles must be in those circumstances. Just think about it. It stands to reason. If you’re lifting the earth or at least the Empire State Building, you were bound to pack on layers of pure strength.
It was a special torment of the isometric enthusiast that in every of these exercises, and in every set of these exercises, and in every repetition in every set of these exercises, you were absolutely sworn to exert the maximum effort you could bring to the event.
It was always a question of what counted as maximum effort, and the only conclusion to draw when nothing at all seemed to happen to your body by way of these exercises was that you weren’t exerting your maximum effort.
Well, that had some sense to it too. People were always telling you in most arenas of your small existence that you weren’t exerting your maximum effort. Why should isometrics be any different?
I cannot say that scrawny teenage boys under ordinary circumstances looked particularly formidable or serious or intent or other adjectives meant to convey that the participant meant business and was going about a serious thing, but in any and all cases he looked measurably better than when he was doing isometrics.
You looked like a complete idiot while in the throes of an isometric exercise, placing your back against the wall of your school or church and straining mightily against it as though meaning to scoot it a couple inches to the southwest or heaving yourself under steel beams or low hanging tree branches and striving to stand up. All the while beset by the suspicion that you weren’t exerting your maximum effort.
But those items and systems and programs all had something false about them at the core that were often suspected and in any event quickly discovered upon purchase.
But a boomerang was supposed to depend on science.
The science of aerodynamics and the flow of air above and below its arms. Science was the magic word in those days, and it is worth noting that the next step up in standing in the categories in these back pages were images of backyard rockets, radio-controlled model airplanes that actually flew, and a host of other such devices. These you knew worked even if you never bought them. You had learned enough about propulsion and seen people flying the model airplanes at the park to believe that if you were willing to shell out the money, you’d get at least a decent product in return.
The boomerang dwelt in a shadowy underworld between sheer nonsense and reasonably accurate science.
Again, I don’t say that these boomerangs – oh, several of them, we bought them over and over again and asked for them at Christmas – didn’t fail to concuss a small animal in the distance and then return to the sender as I believe its original intent was among the aboriginal tribes of Australia.
No, what I’m saying is that it never ever returned at all.
Not three quarters of the way, not halfway, not a quarter of the way. I never once saw a boomerang do anything other than fly off in the distance and then drop to the ground.
Even an effort¸some visible show of trying to turn around would have been enough for the young soul. After all the whole point of the thing, the whole outcome behind which a formidable marketing effort had been concocted was centered on this ‘return to sender’ business.
In other lines of endeavor it would be as if a balloon did not rise in the air but landed on the ground with a thunk, if miniature boats did not float but immediately sank to the depths of the local Marinara Trench, if balsa wood airplanes painstakingly assembled and slotted together threw themselves to the ground upon release.
Wisely these boomerangs were always accompanied by a page of text and an image or two intent on instructing the new owner on the correct stance, direction, and particularly ‘grip’ so as to attain the best results.
The tone throughout was that of course the thing was going to fly back to you and snap back into your hands, but if you really wanted to show off to your friends, here were some advanced methods for the semi-professional.
Well these did no good at all, displaying hand positions that couldn’t be formed, stances that were impossible to assume, and various arrows marking direction, thrust, and point of release that no one human could execute.
“A mere flick of the wrist.” It is an embittering phrase to this day.
Best of all was the three part illustration, three panels in horizontal series. The first showed the serious-eyed young boomerang owner flinging the device into the distance off the limits of the panel to the right. The second showed him standing there, with an air of patient expectation. The third showed the boomerang again enter the panel, this time from the right, back into the young person’s hand.
This is the point I have been trying to make. This never ever happened, this third panel. The boomerang never returned. No, in a scene that seemed to prefigure some of the more bleak French existential plays, you only needed the two panels to tell the entire story, the hopeful fling and the perpetual wait for the return.
We’ll leave this image of the young person – I mean, he’s waiting there still, these many decades later – and let him serve as one of those iconic images meant to remind us of all that is unfair and futile in life, the whole emptiness of the entire endeavor.
I mean not once did I see a boomerang return in the air.
