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If you watched the Balloon Boy saga as it happened, if you saw that silver Jiffy Pop pan zoom through the Colorado sky - with, we thought, a 6-year-old boy inside - you might have had two feelings circling inside you.
Surely you felt terror thinking a child might die right in front of us.
But maybe you also felt a touch of envy.
Maybe a part of you wished you were up there.
Set aside for now what really happened. It could be that Falcon Heene (yes, the name is perfect) really did hide from his parents, making them think he was in the balloon. It could also be that the family loves being on camera so much that they pulled some kind of hoax. Authorities said Saturday night that charges will be filed, but it's still not clear where things go from here.
For now just filter out everything but that soaring balloon.
If you hadn't heard the somber TV anchors, if you hadn't seen the URGENT bulletins scrolling across the ticker, if all you had seen was the pictures ... didn't that look like the best ride ever?
Drifting away, above it all, uncatchable. Cut loose, floating free, not knowing where you're going to land.
Some of the news coverage talked about it as a kid's fantasy, but I think it's more of a grown-up dream. Kids don't have a full sense of the things that can pull on us like gravity. In a lot of ways, adulthood is all about the tension between what holds us down and what sets us free.
Most of us float in the middle, sometimes straining at the tethers, sometimes slumped in a chair in a dark room, listening to the air leak out.
To live a balanced life means you have to spend some time on the ground. But it also means that now and then you have to climb in the basket and saw through the ropes. Yes, you might crash. But it's the only way to get the best view.
The wisest people among us know that. They're the ones who give money to the poor, work on inventions in the garage, write songs no one might ever hear, take a year off to drive around the country, raise their kids to discover their own dreams. They take risks with no obvious rewards, except for the ride itself.
And if your best ride is nothing but thin sheets of plywood and tenpenny nails - well, you go with what you've got.
Falcon Heene, for whatever reason, hid in the attic while the family's experimental balloon took off like a real-life UFO. In this case, he was a lot better off in the attic.
But I worry that too many of us, once we get to a comfortable place in life, run and hide instead of heading for the sky. It's easy to come up with reasons why it's too dangerous, or it's too much trouble, or it's better to wait for tomorrow. It's easy to point out all those people who do nothing but hang out in the clouds, and don't care who gets hurt when they land.
It's also easy to forget what it feels like to let yourself go.
The whole country wouldn't have paid so much attention if Falcon had been just a boy lost in the woods. It's how he did - or how we thought he lost himself - that mattered.
I'm glad he's safe, and the responsible adult in me is glad he was never aloft in that rickety thing.
But part of me wishes he had done it. Just so he could tell the rest of us what the ride was like.
