Flying High

Whenever there's the slightest breeze, the kids start clamoring to go to the park. It is not uncommon in our house to hear, "Hey, I swear I just saw that tissue give the faintest of flutters. It's kite time!" Neither David nor I are thrilled with this development. We are not particularly fond of flying kites, although for vastly different reasons.

When I was a kid growing up in Oregon, my family would occasionally visit the coast. The grownups always seemed thrilled if our visit happened to coincide with the Yachats kite festival. Seeing all the many and varied kites up in the air together was indeed a wondrous site to behold, but it invariably inspired my parents to go to one of the many kite shops in town and buy us our very own kites. This led to standing on a windy beach eating either hair or sand, often both at the same time. When all is said and done, flying a kite is not much different than standing in a long, extremely slow-moving line, except you get to hold a string.

David on the other hand did not find flying a kite to be boring at all. He loved it. Until the time he and his friend decided to see how high they could actually fly their kite. Three hundred feet of spool was not enough for these kids, so they gathered ten of those bad boys and started splicing them together. They had fed out six spools, flying their kite on the side of a hill a couple hundred feet above the valley floor, feeling pretty pleased with themselves, when a small, single-engine airplane took off from the local airport a mile away. Their fascination turned quickly to anxiety and fear as the airplane flew closer. Suddenly the kite disappeared, leaving a trail of string a third of a mile long drifting gently down over houses, trees, and roads. The two guilty young sky-vandals fled the scene wondering if they had caused a headline-grabbing air disaster, in the aftermath of which forensic investigators would find remnants of a giant-size plastic bat kite and a few dozen yards of twine wrapped around a smoldering propeller amid a debris trail and swath of flaming residences, charred bodies, and havoc. I believe David has never touched a kite since.

And yet, despite our lackluster enthusiasm for this most innocent of pastimes, or perhaps because of it, our kids LOVE flying kites. You would think it would be easy to avoid this activity as you will never see David or me buy a kite. But our parents love to see us suffer as payback for all the pain we put them through when we were kids. They really want to enjoy watching us standing in a large field holding string for an hour at a turn, all the while yelling to our kids, "Come here, try this! It's fun! Really! No, I'm serious, get over here RIGHT NOW AND FLY THIS @#$!* KITE!" So our household never lacks for kites.

Yesterday when a leaf moved on a tree, the kids gathered their kites and stood staring wistfully out the window. We ignored them as long as possible, but eventually even my hard heart was not immune to the heavy sighs and the comments that went something along the lines of, "Looks like a great day for flying kites, huh?" or "I'd sure like to try this kite I just built with my bare hands." I drew the short stick, so off I went to the park.

It was better than I remembered from my own youth. For one, there was no sand. Unfortunately for the kids, there was also no wind. But that didn't stop them from enthusiastically running up and down the field. I wished I had brought our video camera for Calvin alone, his little legs pumping like mad, kite bumping and tumbling along the ground, and him screaming in ecstasy, "Look, Mom! Look at me fly my kite!!" as his kite caught a particularly big clump of grass and bounced up 18 inches in the air. Aircraft were not threatened. Sabrina spent a good portion of the time puzzled as to why her handmade kite -- heavy construction paper, yards of tape, branches for braces, and a three-pound tail of plastic beads dragging from four feet of string -- wouldn't fly. Rose just ran around in circles, giddy with glee, getting tangled in string and kite tail and loving every minute. It was hard to stay grumpy when I saw such joy on their faces. Maybe we'll have to plan a trip to Yachats soon.