Mr. Ballin

And so as Bruce is sitting there on the couch watching James for the millionth time smash his toy plane into the coffee table and pretend it was this plane crash he couldn't stop thinking about, Bruce decided he had to do something about this.

And so over the next couple of months, Bruce, instead of trying to figure out what was wrong with James that was causing him to fixate on this plane crash, you know, instead of doing that, he began sort of like leaning in and asking James to give him more information about whatever he was seeing in his nightmare.

Like, give me all the specifics you can possibly recall.

And James would eventually let on that it wasn't just the Japanese that shot him down, it was the Japanese military.

And

but also the type of plane that James was flying in apparently was a course airplane.

Bruce had never heard of that before.

And again, he's looking at his two-year-old son thinking, how do you even know what a course airplane is?

But nonetheless, that's what James said.

And so Bruce doesn't know what to do with this information, but again, he's just trying to learn.

And so in November of that year, Bruce found himself sitting in the living room and he had this World War II coffee table book that he'd actually purchased for his father, but he hadn't given it to him yet.

And he saw James playing with his plane, smashing it into the coffee table.

And Bruce, he grabs this coffee table book full of pictures of pilots and combat and war, and he flips two pictures of pilots from World War II.

Because now, you know, Bruce is thinking, maybe my son somehow is imagining a scene from World War II.

You know, a pilot has crashed in World War II.

The Japanese military shot them down.

I don't know.

No idea how he got this image, but that could be what he's thinking about.

And so he's like, well, maybe I'll just start looking at pictures from World War II of pilots.

And maybe somehow or another, James will look at this and something will click for him.