I Will Go Fly a Kite!

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180
degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together.
Voila - you have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a
topological form with some amazing characteristics.
For one thing, you will find that simple twist has
transformed your paper from a two-sided strip
into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don't
want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side.
But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different
angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.

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I am perhaps the least athletic person on the planet. And the most sedentary. I am an adherent of the Oscar Levant School of physical exercise. That famous pianist/raconteur once quipped that for exercise, he would “get up out of bed, stagger, then fall into a coma.” And I may not be even quite that energetic.

School gym classes were always pure torture for me. I never could perform at even mediocre levels in any sport. So I spent those class periods trying desperately to get to the end of the line, trying desperately to avoid taking my turn at bat. My fondest hope was that I could remain a benchwarmer.

But recently I saw these kites for sale in the grocery store. They were in a rack in the “seasonal” aisle in springtime. There was such a large, appealing selection of them. There were giant owl eyes and eagles and colorful geometric designs. I considered. It probably would be good to heed some of the medical advice being poured our way every day about staying active. Besides, kite-flying struck me as the kind of “sport” I could really endorse. It is nonviolent, non-competitive, certainly more my speed than the basketball or baseball games I was called on to try, and try, and try again in high school gym. Flying a kite can be like becoming part of a ballet with the wind – graceful, sublime.

So after riffling through the store’s assortment for a while, I finally chose the owl kite. It’s big brown eyes, looking down, didn’t seem threatening. The owl had a sort of benign, protective expression. It would almost be like having a guardian angel up there, hovering in goofy raptness over me. I took it off the rack and went to the check-out counter, ready to join the ranks of the physically active.

A lot of people in Chicago go down to the lakefront to fly kites. But I was scheduled to meet my friends for one of our semi-annual get-togethers in Canada soon, at “our” place in Ontario. Different Country; different Lake.

Our place is on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie. It is wonderfully windy there, an ideal spot for flying kites. Shirts hung on our clothesline furl out into the friendliest, most welcoming of arms. They wave with ceaseless good cheer to the fishermen far out on the rolling waters of Erie. Those fishermen, in their picturesque trawlers, must enjoy spotting our landlubber greeting through their binoculars sometimes. Usually three boats at a time make their way in solemn procession out from the Harbor every day, across the horizon, so early, often just past midnight. They stay fishing until early morning, their running lights twinkling through the night. They look like such fragile representatives of life, out there on the rough waters. Then when the boats have met their quotas, they trail back to shore to unload their day’s catch at the various fisheries on the town wharf. Yes, I’m sure the fishermen must sometimes enjoy seeing our dancing shirts and pants, waving, kickin’ it. It’s an earnest chorus line, if not quite as perfectly synchronized a one as the Rockettes.

Sometimes the shirts have oil rig workers to wave at as well. I’m not sure about the mechanics of the drilling, but oil rigs will appear temporarily out in Lake Erie. At night, a rig looks like a gleaming tiara floating out on the water. It’s an enchanting sight, belying the dangerous, polluting work that is going on beneath that bejeweled topside.

But day or night, there is usually wind at our place – or at least a bracing breeze. Our area has been designated one of the windiest stretches in Canada. It’s a natural for windmills. Many municipalities in the Province have subsidized the building of wind farms, or even private installations of single windmills. However our particular municipality has gotten bogged down in red tape and bureaucratic argumentation over the matter. Our neighbors in Ontario have a ninety-foot windmill trestle ready to go up on their lawn. But they haven’t been able to get governmental permission to proceed with setting up this alternative energy source. There’s some fear that a ninety-foot tower might pose a threat to neighbors - such as myself.

I’m not sure why the windmill trestle has to be as tall as ninety feet. The man who sold our neighbors this tower, talked about “laminar flow” and the need to clear air turbulence currents from trees. But even a little decorative lawn windmill will keep spinning at a giddy pace in these parts. I get the feeling you could run a TV, maybe even a dishwasher, off of one of those pieces of lawn kitsch. So why the need for a full ninety-feet of scaffolding to take advantage of the wind? I don’t know. And our neighbors are getting frustrated, with the pieces of that so-far languishing trestle sitting bundled besides their porch.

Meanwhile, the wind keeps blowing, going to waste. But I was going to put it to use flying the kite I was bringing. We planned the coming Sunday for our venture back into childhood. The weatherman predicted a clear and breezy day. And we would all be together then to “go fly a kite.”

I had trouble sleeping the night before this big event though. I felt I might have been altogether too ambitious in this leap into physical activity. I had heard it could take quite some ingenuity to get a kite launched aloft. You have to snap your wrist just right in order to get the kite cast aloft. You have to orient yourself into the wind just right, and feed out the string at just the right rate. It was like fly fishing – only up into the air not down into a stream. There was an art to it. And I was afraid that here again, I would prove to be totally unequal to the task. I would never be able to get my kite up. I’d be as embarrassed as an old man at an orgy – caught short without his Viagra.

As I started to doze off into fitful sleep, other downsides to this precipitous venture loomed up out of the dark at me. Didn’t you have to run fairly fast in order to get the wind to catch the sail of the kite? I pictured myself tearing across the lawn. Watch out! A gopher hole! I pictured myself falling, breaking an ankle. They shoot wusses, don’t they? Or worse yet, I pictured myself hurtling pell-mell off the side of the bluff – rolling, falling, falling, hitting concussively on the rocks below. Oh, why had I chosen such a dangerous sport to inaugurate my more active lifestyle?

The next day after a late lunch, I blearily wished my friends might have forgotten about our venture. But woe betide – they hadn’t. “Kite time!” Ed proclaimed. He unwrapped the owl face from its plastic, pulled out the placard of twine at the ready, and handed the ensemble to me. “Here, it’s your kite. You do the honors. You start,” he knelled.

It plummeted me back into those bygone gym classes, desperately wanting to wedge myself away from the action to the end of the line again. I considered assuming a tone of generous deferral. I considered insisting that he should do the honors of launching the kite. But that would just be delaying the inevitable. It would be prolonging my anxiety. There was nothing for it but to brave this out. With my teeth clenched harder than anyone could possibly suspect, I held the kite to my bosom and stepped out of our French doors into the firing squad brightness of the arena of our back yard.

But an amazing thing happened. The moment I stepped out of those French doors, I felt a tugging at my chest - a gentle, but insistent beguiling. The breeze was taking the kite. It pulled it out of my hands and up and away. I quickly fed some twine – then some more twine. The kite was already over our chimney top, joyously released into the heavens. The owl was bobbing and weaving, ogling down at me. But its big, limpid eyes were getting smaller and smaller as the kite receded ever upward.

“Hurrah! You got it up!” my friends cheered from the back porch. I don’t think they realized how easy it had been.

I leisurely walked from one side of our half-acre to the other. The wind did all the work. I just had to be there beside. It was like walking an old dog on a leash, except my dog was up, not down. I strolled our property, master of all I surveyed. Then after fifteen or twenty minutes, I relinquished the twine to Ed. He did likewise. Then Sandy took her turn. We each walked the kite around our lawn. Since we hadn’t planted any trees yet, and since there were no wind mills allowed - there were no vertical structures we had to avoid. The kite could dance where it pleased.

After a while, Ed brought out some lawn chairs and we sat, passing the tag-end of string from one to the other. Then Sandy brought out a pitcher of sun tea. The one who had the kite at the moment would tie the twine around a finger, and proceed to sip iced tea from the glass in the other hand. Finally even that much involvement became a little too arduous. And we tied the end of the string around an arm of one of our lawn chairs.

And so we let the afternoon pass into dusk – sitting and sipping and flying a kite. Not much happened. Oh, a seagull swooped across the sky and seemed likely to collide with the kite. But at the last moment, it espied this UFO in its path and made a sharp right angle avoidance of it. We laughed. We had never seen a gull make a maneuver like that.

It was going to be a full moon that night. My friends and I often made a celebration of the rising of the moon when we were here. Since we had been out in the yard so long, we decided we might as well just sit on longer and let the day’s kite-flying blend into our night’s moon observation. And so we continued to sit and sip and chat – and the owl became a night owl, high up, watching over us. We couldn’t see it any longer in the dark, but we could feel its presence if we touched a finger to the string extended up from the lawn chair. We could feel the wind’s vibration along the lead. We knew it was still flying.

Then the moon rose up out of the water. It unfurled that breathtaking silver-gleaming carpet across the lapping waters, from moon to the base of our cliff. Oh, to walk that enchanted path!

And as the moon rose, I felt a corresponding beam of triumph rise secretly across my face. At last, I was succeeding at a sport! At last, I could feel that surge of self-confidence. “Yes,” I whispered to myself. “I can do this!”