The Old Blog in the Desert

One of my favorite things I did as a dad was taking my son Kyle to the open house during the Reno Air Races, back when they were still at Stead Airfield.

Kyle was three, a prime age for wonder. Everything was big, loud, shiny, and absolutely amazing, and for me, it was just good, uninterrupted dad-and-son time.

We were walking around the planes, and Kyle was being his usual happy, wound-up little self, bouncing, pointing, narrating his world in fragments.

“Airplane big!”

That was about the extent of his language back then. He could string together a sentence or two, but nothing complete.

We were walking along the flight line when we came up in front of a C-47. And that’s when everything changed.

Kyle stopped. Not slowed down, not paused for a second, but stopped, completely still.

He just stared at the plane. The way he locked onto it, it didn’t feel like a toddler moment at all.

I stepped back toward him and said, “What’s up, little dude?”

He didn’t look at me. His eyes were on the aircraft.

Then he said, very calmly, “I was in a plane like that a long time ago when I was older.”

I remember my stomach tightening.

Before I could even respond, he continued, “It was dark, scary, and loud. And I had a bird patch on my shoulder.”

I was frozen. Kyle had never said anything like that.

All I could manage was, “Oh, that sounds scary.”

Without missing a beat, he said, “Yeah. And the bad men tried to find me. But I was sneaky.”

And then, just like that, he snapped out of it.

He ran off toward another plane, talking about snacks and wheels and whatever else was occupying the mind of a normal three-year-old. I stood there for a second, staring at the C-47, trying to convince myself that I’d imagined the whole thing.

I managed to brush it off. I had to. But the thing is, it didn’t stop there.

Over the rest of that year, Kyle would randomly point out things that lined up way too closely with what he’d said that day.

One afternoon, we were in an Army–Navy surplus store. He looked around, squinted at a display, and said loudly, “That’s my bird patch. But mine was black, white, and yellow.”

I just stared at him and said, “Your bird patch?”

He nodded, like this was obvious. “Yeah, only mine was black, white, and yellow.”

About five months after that, we were in a gun store. Kyle wasn’t paying attention to anything until he suddenly stopped, locked his eyes onto an old M1 Garand on the wall, and said, “That’s the rifle I had in the plane.”

I felt that same cold rush I’d felt at Stead.

Then one night, we were watching a documentary on TV. Everything was fine until a Nazi soldier appeared on the screen.

Kyle immediately dove behind the couch.

I knelt and asked, “Hey, buddy, what’s wrong?”

He whispered, “That’s the bad man. I need to hide.”

At that point, I didn’t know what to think anymore.

It wasn’t something a three-year-old should even have a frame of reference for. Kyle shouldn’t have known this stuff. He didn’t have the vocabulary, the context, or the knowledge, yet he reacted as if he remembered.

Eventually, the comments faded and the moments stopped, and Kyle grew into a man. But now and then, I still think about that day at the Reno Air Races and that little boy standing in front of a C-47, staring at it as if an old ghost had just walked back into his life.

And I wonder.