Adam Barr’s father comes through for him on grey cold day with a kite.
My 12-year-old son and I are in a snowy field, away from wires and too many branches, to try out the remote-control model helicopter he got for Christmas.
I know he is planning a snowball ambush as well (foolish child). His face beams in the light reflected from the snow. I smile. This puts me in mind of another story.
It was a blustery March Saturday, edgeless clouds shifting back and forth in about five shades of grey. Dampness penetrating every kind of coat. I was around four years old.
Somehow, I had come by a box kite. A windy day! Let’s fly the kite, Dad!
My Dad often spent the weekends puttering around his basement workbench, doing little jobs my Mother had set for him. And he was as generous as he could be with his time. But when he heard this request from the youngest of his three sons, he appeared to search for an out. The weather was what he liked to call raw, a niggling combination of cold, windy, and wet.
My Dad had used the GI Bill to become a mechanical engineer. He had built our family’s first little home. He general-contracted that house and did a lot of the work himself, the real dirt-under-the-fingernails work. After that, he worked hard all week in a suit and tie for a company that made zinc-coated steel sheeting and other industrial building products.
We had moved for better schools, but far from his office. So my Dad often got home after seven, had dinner, and soon dropped off into a doze in a big chair. I could see how he would be tired: my Dad was busy helping to build the world.
Not that he was unavailable. I saw him lots, and he did all his fatherly duties. But I don’t think he had much time to himself. So when I asked him, on this March Saturday, to go out into the raw afternoon to fly a kite, perhaps I was catching him just before a pleasant soldering job or picture-framing session. He relented and out we went in caps and jackets, he with the box kite in his hand, trying to hold it against the gusts.
There was no time to go to a big field, so we went down the hill to a part of our street that wasn’t busy, away from the overhead wires. There were a few young trees, but nothing that seemed menacing. I was too small to handle such a kite on my own, so Dad gingerly let out line until the wind lifted the vertical thing, really just four dowels wrapped in flimsy pinkish paper.
It ducked. It weaved. If the air were the ocean, the poor kite would have gotten seasick. Still my Dad urged it up, up…higher…higher…
The kite exploded, I cried and Dad strode up the hill.
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Until a sideways gust bashed the kite into a pointy branch of one of those young trees. In an explosion of paper and wood, it became trash on the wet ground.
And I exploded in tears. Suddenly, the pretty thing was gone, and we had hardly had a chance to enjoy it. How dare the wind! The bald injustice! I was inconsolable.
Seeing this, my Dad said, “Wait here.” I sat on the sidewalk near our neighbor’s house. He strode off up the hill and disappeared behind our hedge. I sat and wiped my stinging cheeks with the backs of my pudgy hands.
He was gone a long time. All waits seem long when you’re fourish. But after awhile, here he came, a broad silhouette against the grey sky. And in his hand, a diamond….
A diamond kite. As he got closer, I could see it was made of newspaper and scrap dowel rods, tied securely where they crossed, and trailing a tail of knotted rag pieces. The whole affair was strung and ready to go, a solid piece of western Pennsylvania engineering built to last.
You don’t recall things that were a matter of course, the things you did because your natural goodness took you there.
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I’m not sure how long it actually lasted. But we flew it, and I beamed. I suppose the weather did get raw after a time, and we went in. Memory has dulled the lesser details.
And perhaps it has enhanced others. Decades later, when I recounted the story to my Dad, he was dumbfounded. He does not have memory problems. But he disclaimed any memory of this story. He believed me when I told it, perhaps making allowances for the parts my memory had burnished—for he often throws off credit. He shook his head, as if chastising himself for forgetting something that was clearly so important to me.
I smiled and kissed his whitening hair. Why should he remember?
You don’t recall things that were a matter of course, the things you did because your natural goodness took you there. They weren’t special to you; they were special to the people you did them for. Give up an afternoon for your son and whip up a stand-in kite inside of 15 minutes? It’s what dads do. But he doesn’t remember.
I sure do.
The helicopter works great, by the way. I look at the horizon, at the line of bluish cloud presaging more snow. A snowball clobbers me in the back, bringing me back to myself. Matter of course. Maybe. I will try to remember, but if I don’t…
Well, I think someone will.