Casting Off Cares With the Launch of a Kite

I had an opportunity recently to fly a kite with a 3-year-old boy. His mother wanted to bring him to the beach and let him “burn off some calories.” This was admittedly not on my Top 10 list of ways to spend a Sunday, but I like Tyler and his mom, Rita, so I said OK. They live in Riverside, so the beach isn’t an everyday pleasure for them.

Besides, I’d seen the kid “burn off some calories” around my house. Tyler can terrorize three dogs, get into five snake cages, find every pocketknife and sharp tool in a home and draw on your couch cushions with a pen in the blink of an eye. The beach sounded pretty good. And I realized I hadn’t been down to the sand in a couple of weeks myself, lost as I’ve been to work and obligation.

We went to the market and got a plastic kite with a dinosaur on it and a roll of string. It was a sunny, breezy day that promised to turn cool when the sun went down. The sidewalks in Laguna were crowded as we pressed through the throng outside the Marine Room, where the Missiles of October pack ‘em in on Sunday afternoons. I mused on the fact that I might well have been inside that inviting tavern if I hadn’t been with what Rita calls my “insta-family.”

The insta-family hit the sand and shed its shoes. Tyler chased the sea gulls and threw sticks at them, most of the sticks sailing back over his head due to the early-release method of throwing common to 3-year-olds. He zoomed into the volleyball court and miffed the players, which secretly pleased me because so many beach volleyballers are unbearably truculent and vain. The interrupted stud just stood there and glared at Tyler, waiting to serve a ball that looked quite a bit larger than his own head. I wondered about that. Tyler wandered around the court until his mother rounded him up.

Being part of an insta-family leads one to think about one’s real family. I mused that when he was my age, my father had three children. I thought of my friends, most of whom are fathers once or twice over by now.

Not for the first time I saw myself as an oddity, a fortysomething widower/bachelor non-father charging through his days head down, knees high, with all the contemplative wisdom of a halfback hitting the line on a draw play.

We tied the string to the kite and gave it to Tyler.

Tyler doesn’t believe in wind; he believes in legs. He thinks you let out, say, 10 feet of string and then haul ass down the waterline to keep the kite afloat. There he went.

“Tyler! Let some string out! Let it fly!”

“Forget it, Rita. That’s how he does it. Besides, he’s burning off calories, remember?”

*

While the kid vanished into the southern horizon and the mom took off after him, I had a while to gather my thoughts. What thoughts. A wonderful uncle hospitalized for another week because of a bad surgery. A friend with lupus. The Feds trying to scam ownership of El Toro Marine Base away from Orange County, which, one might assume, is because they think the Board of Supervisors can’t be trusted with it. Jimmy Garcia, the brave Colombian fading away in a Las Vegas hospital after being pounded down but not out. Oklahoma City.

A small green swatch appeared in the southern sky. It was the kite. Tyler and Rita came into sight a few moments later, leading the dinosaur my way. Tyler was soaked clear to his waist, and his mom was flushed from the run.

I explained to Tyler that I would now demonstrate how to fly a kite. I wrestled the ball of string from him, using superior strength and a headlock. While he wailed and gnashed teeth, I let out 20 feet of string, then tossed the kite into the stiff onshore breeze. It took to the air joyfully, zigzagging upward with a street-smart swagger until it reached the end of its tether and the dinosaur--some raptor-like character--could stare down at us in calm.

Tyler quit crying and ran away, bored. Mom followed. I stood there with the kite tugging from a nice distance, like a fish on the end of a long line. I fed out string and watched it rise. I let out more string. Pretty soon it was just a little plastic dot straining for release. I thought how nice it would be to just bring the string to my teeth, chew it off and watch the raptor fly to freedom. I knew that Tyler would mourn energetically if I “lost” his kite, but I’d bought the thing, hadn’t I?

*

Alone with the kite, I enjoyed myself. I brought it in and launched it again because the best part of flying a kite is watching it take off and feeling the eagerness of its rise in your hands. I got to wondering if this is what real fathers do with their weekends. I thought about the hours Dad spent with me at the Little League diamond, on Indian Guide camp-outs, in our Tustin garage where he would stand me beside his magnificently organized workbench and show me how to use a sander, a plane, a level--and how to put them back where they belonged.

Rita saved Tyler from drowning, so we went to the playground, where he could continue to burn off some calories. I sat on the shortened piers that border the play area and watched a generation of future adults. Tyler went down the slide 37 times, made a fishing line out of seaweed and a bird feather and “fished” off the raised planking of the slide, then demanded the swing. His mom plunked him down into the little leather saddle and got him going.

Tyler soared back and forth like a big clock pendulum. The other kids screamed and slid, laughed and bawled, fought, wailed, smiled. I decided they’d be successful adults someday. I tried to match offspring with parents, most of whom were sitting on the piers around me. I nodded to my fellows in parenthood, ersatz dad that I was. They didn’t know, did they? I carried on a brief conversation with a mom, trying hard to hit fatherly notes.

“And how old is your little girl?” I asked.

“Thirty-two months, almost 33,” she answered, with that peculiar specificity only mothers seem to possess.

“Cute,” I offered earnestly, though in fact the 32-month-old girl was plain as a K-car.

“And yours?”

“Well, ah . . . 3-ish.”

Her glance revealed that I had been busted as an insta-dad, though she seemed unconcerned. I moved my counterfeit genes over to the swing and took over for Rita.

“Higher, Deff,” squealed Tyler.

“Get ready, man, because you’re going really high now.”

A boy’s laughter.

Higher, higher, then higher still. A moment later he was just a bright T-shirt and shorts harnessed in a leather seating module at the end of two smoothly rusted chains, crisscrossing the late afternoon sky, pausing at the top of each rise before that little downjerk of the body as it starts the descending arc.