Stories for my grandchildren - Kites

I'm sitting on the balcony of our condo in Port A. (ours for the weekend, you understand) and I can see a dozen kites flying over the beach. Colorful, streamer-bedecked kites of a dozen different designs. There's a huge kite in the shape of a para-sail. There are wind-sock looking kites, kites that spin in the breeze, kites that look like prehistoric birds, a kite with a streamer tail many, many times longer than the kite itself. There's a kite that looks like Swimmy and a little bitty kite that looks like Nemo. Interestingly, none of the kites look like the kites I used to make and fly. You know, kite-shaped.

My father loved kites. He told of kites that he made as a boy, out of common materials, kites that in the Spring he would stake out on the plains near Cleburne where he grew up, and they would stay up for days and weeks in the breezes that never quit, even at night. He spoke of a mail-order kite that resembled an airplane, but the wings rotated to keep it aloft. We made kites together and flew them together. By that time you could buy 10-cent kites at Woolworth's; flimsy tissue paper wrapped around fragile sticks. If you didn't snap the cross-stick trying to fit the paper over it, and you scrounged some strips of cloth from an old bed sheet to make the tail, you were good to go.

But the best ones were the kites we made. From somewhere I  scrounged a length of bamboo, and if patient, I could cut wonderful stringers out of it. I tried lots of papers - even old newspapers. The Sunday Comics added color. Box kites were a challenge to make - there was ever-so-much more that could go wrong in the making and flying, but they flew ever-so-much better than the traditional deltoid shapes.

I remember organizing a kite contest at school in the 6th grade. There were "prizes" for highest flying, best decorated, and some other categories that I can't recall at the moment. The contest was held after school up at the South Ward Elementary playground, and as I recall, it was a great success. I know I enjoyed it.

I flew kites with my children as well. There was an empty field behind our first rental house in Austin, and we would go out there and fly kites. We would send "messages" up the string to the kite. We also went to the Zilker Kite Fest, where the air would fill with color and flutter. It was there I first saw kites so large they had to be attached to the back of trucks, flown with electric reels loaded with high-tensile fishing line.

There is a kite shop here in Port A., as you might imagine. There are more windsocks than kites on display. You can hang a windsock on a pole and forget it, but you have to go fly a kite. And you should take another kid with you.