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The wind beneath our family memories
Easter ritual started with grandparents, continues with son
By Deborah Taylor-Hollis
Each spring, my family Easter ritual began when my grandparents would make their annual migration back from the sunny banks of the Colorado River, where they spent the winter staying warm, playing cards, and making useless crochet toilet paper covers around plastic dolls.
They would drive on up, car filled with Easter greetings and new hats (invariably something garish with a brim for both), and the week of irresponsibility with the grandparents would commence.
High upon that list would be the annual attempt to make and fly a kite.
Grandpa and I would walk to the Kresge 5&10 cent store, a tumult of everything ever produced in Taiwan, and sort through the narrow isles for the perfect instrument of flight. Between the "Evening in Paris" perfume and the bins of penny candy--but before you got all the way to the back corner and the pet department where some poor gerbil seemed to always be spinning and the percentage of fish viewing the ceiling was abnormally high--we would find the cardboard display holding that year's collection of kites, a tall square box on the floor similar to an umbrella stand, marked on the outside with instructions on how to make the kite.
Yes, I said "make." This was not a sport of instant gratification.
Kites came in three basic patterns back then. You had your "diamond" shape (which came in a package that had no rudder--no "tail" to steer by), the "box" which was actually two boxes with an open portion in the center of equal size to the two boxed parts, and the "wing" variety that no one ever assembled properly without cheating.
So Grandpa and I would pick out a triangle and then buy some string as well from the hardware aisle, along with a bag of M&M's to munch on during the walk home.
Once at the house, we would gently tear open the long package, get out the scissors, and find the Elmer's white glue (always a disaster, since the previous time it had been used the cap was never put on properly, and the end was a blobby mess that had to be cut open), and some old sheet type rags that we could tear up.
Grandpa would spread out the newspaper. He usually picked some section that he had read and my dad had not, so that later on, when everything was covered in glue and fingerprints, dad could come home, storm around, and grunt unhappily. Since my father could never argue with his father, Grandpa took good advantage of that to torment him endlessly. Kite season marked the beginning of the yearlong "spoil the grandchild--drive the parents nuts" family games. Majongh and checkers could never compete.
So there we would be, he and I, with the glue and the colored tissue paper, fitting the ends of the thinly sliced plywood together to form a lopsided diamond with a cross in the middle. The cross was slightly larger than the diamond, to give the kite a very taut frame, and make assembly a nightmare. More often than not, at least one piece would break and need some kind of repair or replacement before we even got the tissue on it.
Then, carefully spreading out the colored paper, we would lay the thing face down, glue the edges around the wood, and wait for it to dry, occasionally speeding up the process by leaving it on top of the gas range while we shredded sheets for a perfectly wonderful tail rudder.
The following day, we would go to the schoolyard, and while Grandpa held on to the spool of string, I would run and run and run and run and run. He would yell at me "Let Go!" and the kite would skip up over my head, dance three times just about 15 feet in the air, and plow into the ground. Then, I would stop, and slowly walk back toward him with the stubborn kite while he rewound the string around the cardboard tube, and we would discuss just what went wrong.
The day would spin out with this scenario for about an hour before we would finally achieve a lift off, and then get to let the red triangle float ever upward into the sky, feeling the pull of the wind on our hands. The thrill of watching our kite disappear into the air seemed almost magical, and for a few brief moments, I would forget how tired and sore I was.
This year, my son and I bought a kite for just about the same price--a plastic pterodactyl with 200 feet of string that went up on the third try about five minutes after we opened the package. It did not seem quite as monumental, until I gave him the kite and started to yell "Run! Run!" I could feel my grandfather with us as it soared.
Please contact Deborah Taylor-Hollis at the end of the string or at DTHollis@svcn.com.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
