Midair

 This text is about Frank Conroy's short story Midair (notice the brilliantly imaginative title of my post).

 
The story introduces its readers a few moments of Sean's life that are somehow connected to each other. All these moments take place in high places and involve similar kinds of feelings in a way that our dear dr. Siegmund Freud would have liked.
 All the strong feelings connected to heights (an unexplainably great urge to climb to a steep roof, being afraid of flights etc.) are linked to an incident that took place in Sean's childhood. What caused this life long trauma was that Sean's father, who had some kind of mental disease or disorder, used him as a human shield by clinging him outside the window of of the fifth floor so that the doctor and the nurses of the asylum wouldn't take him back there. Though the incident was lifethreatening, nobody mentioned or explained it to Sean and he forgot it completely.
 Though Sean had no clue of what had happened, the experience of being held dangerously midair  had a tremendous effect on the way he used to behave and react to situations in his adult life. When Sean hears that a child of someone he doesn't personally know has fallen from the window of the eight floor he rushes home to his own children to protect them.
 The psychoanalytic tone isn't there only to claim that an unhappy childhood ruins one's whole life. Sean has had an unbalanced father-son-relationship but it doesn't make him a bad parent: on the contrary he feels great love towards his children and wants to protect them from what he himself fears. He also feels protective and fatherly towards the young man with whom he is stuck in an elevator. He is able to calm the man down because he has faced his own fears first.

 Only when he has handled the things on which the incident in his childhood had an effect on can he clearly remember what had happened.