One summer a tropical storm was approaching Terry Town. As a kid I never let a good storm get away without enjoying the preliminaries. On this day, I went out in that storm to fly my kite. I unzipped my coat and let the wind catch it — I felt like a bird. I grabbed my kite from the garage and it went up in three seconds flat. Five hundred feet it flew before I yelled at my brother to get the other string roll. He ran inside, I tied it off, rolled out another five hundred feet. The red diamond shaped kite was a speck in the distant sky.
My dad taught me to build a tail — the most important part. Diamond-shaped paper or plastic kites with a stick in the middle were unstable without a tail. Dad would cut
Mama’s old sheets or rags into two-inch slices, twelve inches long, and tie them together. Depending on the wind, it was a two-tail day or three or four. If the kite wouldn’t lift, remove a piece. If it went wild, add another. The test was fifty feet up. None of us knew what the wind did at a thousand feet.
I always wanted mine to be a speck. Not to show off — I wanted the highest kite in the neighborhood. The problem was reeling it back in. Dad bought me a plastic reeler with a wind-up knob, like a spinning reel.
If the wind blew south over the powerlines, we’d go to the field behind the house. Dad would cut a path to the middle with the lawn mower, then we’d sit far away from the wires. Dad always brought Coke in a small ice chest. We’d sit and talk. I don’t remember the conversations. I remember how warm it felt. For me, it was fishing in the air — same concept, different tool.
Those were some of the best days I had with my dad.
He did this in Sicily with his dad. Even as a kid I thought: kite flying is universal. You don’t need a language to understand it. When my kids were seven years old I took them to Lafreniere Park. One kite, two kids, that’s the rule. The second kite stayed in the car as a back up if the first one got away. And that insurance nearly paid off.
In all the excitement with the two boys, we were in the middle of the biggest field at Lafreniere — no trees in view, other kids flying kites, everybody spread out a good safe distance. It was a cool and windy fall Saturday in November 2008.
The boys were excited as we unloaded the car. We got the kite up five hundred feet and Bobby, the youngest, was holding the spool. Then snap, I forgot the string was not tied to the spool. The kite literally flew right out of his fingers. His face looked shocked — mouth wide open. Johnny started running. I started running.
The kite hung five hundred feet in the air, while traveling south like a dog chasing the neighborhood cat. The string however, was just a few feet off the ground and we were trying to catch it. I’d never chased a kite before. It felt silly, fruitless — but the string was dangling four or five feet off the ground, and the wind was behaving itself. It would’ve been a miracle if it just sat there in front of Bobby’s face, but it took off. So I ran. Johnny ran too. This was our very first kite event and the whole thing slipped through our fingers before we could even sit down. I was like trying to catch a butterfly — it kept moving and we kept running. Other people were watching. It flew past a few teens and they tried to grab it. I was yelling “the kite, the kite!” We ran and ran. At one point I finally got my right hand on the dangling nylon string and grabbed it tight. The boys were so happy. I pulled it back and we walked a football field from where we started. Back on the spool the string went. This time I tied the knot properly.
Out of breath we sat and drank cokes, but in cans as the park suggested. It was never about just flying a kite. The real joy was sitting next to your dad, or kids drinking an ice-cold Coca-Cola and letting the breeze wash over your face, erasing whatever stress the week had created.
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