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Spring is
in the Air!
Kids and Kites
By: Kenneth Lapointe, Ottawa • From Daytripping July-Aug 2009
When I was a kid, kites
were a neverending source
of fun. Every kid had a
kite in the neighbourhood
and kite-flying season
would begin on the first
warm, sunny, and windy
day in March or April. We
had the perfect place for
it. Our backyard bordered
on Superior Park, a very
large field area where we
also had our very own homemade ball
diamond.
Our kites were the triangle-shaped
ones. Yellow plastic with a spaceman on
the front, two wooden stick crosspieces
and a tail you created out of bits of
cloth and rags. It had to be just the right
amount to give it the proper weight. Too
much tail and the kite wouldn’t ‘get up’
into the air very well, too little and it
would just swoop around and around in
dizzying circles and eventually ‘bang!’,
into the ever present, ever waiting
ground below.
Someone had a ‘box kite’ once. To
me it seemed incomprehensible how
they could fly. I mean a couple of square
‘boxes’ of plastic on some long sticks?
But fly they did, though to me they were
simply weird and not ‘really’ a kite.
Having four brothers, each one with a
kite, made for some interesting and fun
launches into space.
My older brothers Jim and Gary got
the idea of putting somebody’s hamster
in an empty toilet paper cardboard
tube, sealing the ends and sending him
aloft. It worked! After the mission, kite
came back down to earth with hamster
emerging unscathed and victorious. Oh
the glory and fame!
Another time Gary decided to hook
up a couple of lightweight batteries to
some tiny bulbs around the edge of the
kite, and voila, a successful period of
night flying was born. Well, theoretically
anyway.
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I used to have a great
little red and white
striped plastic parachute,
about a foot in diameter,
with a 5” blue plastic
soldier attached to it. I
would fold it all up just
perfectly, insert it behind
the crosspieces of the
kite, and then when it
was way up high, yank
the string hard enough
to dislodge it and there he’d be, floating
happily and slowly through the air back
down to the ground. Sometimes for
pretty great distances too. I thought that
was the neatest thing in the world.
I put myself in that little man. I was
way up there in the limitless sky, then
floating, floating safely back down. And
no matter how ripped that parachute
became or how many strings came loose
from it, a little plastic and Scotch tape
fixed it right back up. It was one of the
most favorite toys.
One time I tried a much smaller
parachute and man version. But it was
so light that the wind simply carried it
up, up...up, and it never came down!
It simply drifted clear out of sight. Bye!
Have a nice voyage!
And of course being brothers we tried
to have ‘kite fights’ but being hard to
control, it was almost impossible to get
them to smash together. Besides, you
never wanted the dreaded ‘tangled-up
kite string’ scenario. That was death!
Another bad thing to happen when
kite-flying was if the string broke and
your kite was like WAY, WAY up there.
Then you had to run like blazes after it,
so scared you’d lose it or it might land on
someone’s roof or in a mean stranger’s
backyard.
Eventually I got a new ‘eagle’ kite that
was sort of fan-shaped with an eagle on
the front. But it never lived up to the fun
I had with just the regular old-fashioned
spaceman kites.
Welcome to ...
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THE Club
(M through P)
Maggit: A subscription card that falls from a magazine.
Maintenance-Free: When it breaks, it can't be fixed.
Meter Maid: Windshield viper.
Modesty: Being comfortable that others will discover your greatness.
Noise: Having a train yard 20 feet from your backyard.
Oxymoron: One who has used too much acne goo.
Paradox: Two physicians.
Paranoid: Someone who just figured out what's going on.
Parking Space: An area that vanishes as you make a U -Turn.
Pessimist: An optimist with experience.
Pharmacist: A helper on a farm.
Politics: From "poly" meaning many and "ticks,"
a small, annoying bloodsucker.
Positive: Being mistaken at the top of your voice.
Puritan: Someone deathly afraid that someone,
somewhere is having fun.
Pickle:
A cucumber
soured by a
jarring
experience.
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on,
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