Kite Day
One breezy day in April, my school—Northington Elementary in Tuscaloosa—was having kite day. I must’ve been in the fourth or fifth grade, which dates this story to about 1991.
It’s the first time I remember being embarrassed.
Back in those days, before smartphones and TikTok, if you were a kid, you distinguished yourself by flaunting your holographic pencil collection, or by the precision of your paper football folding skills, or by sporting your concert-worn NKOTB t-shirt.
Kristin, the coolest girl in my class, had actually caught a towel Donnie (or was it Monty, Lonnie, Danny or Joey?) had used to wipe away his sweat before throwing it into the crowd at a New Kids on the Block show. She brought it to school the next day. For us kids, Kristin’s sweat rag was second only to the Shroud of Turin.
But the ultimate way the cool kids truly separated themselves from the perpetual losers was on kite day.
Cool kids flew box kites or Bat Signal kites or dragon kites. The King of Cool had a kite with two strings, and he flew it with the same seriousness and skill as if he was piloting a Beechcraft Bonanza.
But not me. My mom and dad sent me to school with a pitiful looking, itty bitty, crinkly ladybug kite. The only thing worse would’ve been to fly the ladybug while wearing Ralphie’s bunny suit from “A Christmas Story.”
“Trust me,” Dad said, “this will fly way better than anything else out there.”
Sure enough, while the Bat Signal was stuck in a tree and Bonanza boy’s kite crashed and burned, my ladybug was a speck in the sky. An embarrassing speck, but still a speck. And way up there, you couldn’t really tell it was a ladybug.
Turns out my dad was a kite-flying guru. I grew up hearing stories about Demon, a cat my parents had, who actually flew on a kite when he was a kitten. This was before the days of rapid-fire phone photography, so I’ll take Dad’s word on that.
Any time we went to the beach, kite flying was a must, just as much so as swimming in the ocean, playing putt putt golf or buying a floaty from Alvin’s Island. Dad would buy a kite (always a simple one, just like the aforementioned ladybug), plus two, three or four spools of kite string. Then he’d load all that string onto an oversized reel, which allowed us to let the kite out with more ease. No doubt Dad would load the kite string with the same precision as when he’d load line onto a fishing reel.
Once fully launched, the kite’s tail became more than just a stabilizer. It was like a flashing light atop a radio tower, since airplanes and helicopters now had to divert around it. Once the kite was in orbit, Dad would tie the string off on a chaise lounge. While we would swim, dig, build sand castles, go inside for a nap, swim again, go to supper, and finally go to bed, the kite flew on.
Sometimes the string would break overnight. Sometimes the next morning the kite was still soaring. Regardless, it was all part of our adventure together.
Another time when we were in Pass Christian, Miss., at the “Family Enrichment Week,” which Dad always called the Nerd Convention, we flew a kite from the balcony outside our room. True to form, we tied it off. The next morning, the kite had crashed, with the string laid over the train track. I remember worrying that it would cause a derailment. Dad chuckled at that.
This past week, Jen and the kids came with me to Orange Beach for a conference I covered for the magazine. We brought a kite we already had, and while I was in meetings, Jen picked up two extra spools of string. After supper Thursday, we played some more in the Gulf, then launched the kite.
We didn’t have any scissors on hand, so when we got to the end of the string that came with the kite, we tied the first long spool onto the plastic handle. As we let out the additional string, the handle disappeared into the twilight.Then, when we got to the end of that spool, we tied the second spool’s string onto it. That spool quickly disappeared into the gathering darkness. All the while, we could just barely see the kite, high in the dark sky, seemingly flying over our hotel. I’d planned to tie off the end of the second spool, but just as I reached the end, the string went slack.
Julian and I tracked the kite to a pit beside our hotel where a new building is going up. As I rolled up the string, the kite actually took off again in the wind, but the flight was short lived and the kite crashed back into the seagrass. Best I can tell, our Dollar Tree kite survived the crash unscathed. It’s in the back of the car now as we’re driving back home.
The execution wasn’t as precise as when my dad would fly kites on the beach, but it was perfectly fun and distinctly us. If Dad were alive, I would’ve called to tell him about it.
But since he’s not, I thought I’d tell you.
