Let’s Go Fly a Kite
The old idiom “go fly a kite” is directed to someone who is annoying,
and the words are asking them to go away.
In other words, leave me alone!
But “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” invokes a totally different image. In the movie “Mary Poppins”, Dick Van Dyke
sings a lovely, jovial song about flying a kite, together with his family. My experience recently is certainly the
latter of the two sayings.
At the beach last week, my nearly two-year old granddaughter
was experiencing a trip of her lifetime.
She was enjoying playing in the sand and swimming in the tidepools at
Kiawah Island, SC. This is a fearless
little girl who will try everything yet cautiously. She is brave.
She firmly held a hermit crab but pointed to the jellyfishes lying on
the shore and shouted, “no touch”. Her
ability to comprehend is astounding, and she is just getting her own voice to
speak in sentences. I brought a kite
with us on this trip, specifically for her to watch it fly. The wind was strong and constantly blowing at
the spot we resided at the ocean. On the
second or third day of our trip, I remembered to bring out the kite. I struggled to put it together properly and
could not get it to fly at first attempt.
I put it aside, disappointed that the colorful butterfly kite was a
bust. She really wanted it to go “up,
up, up” and so did I. Her uncle came to
the rescue and corrected the mistake in the assembly. The kite promptly went sailing high into the
sky. My granddaughter was mesmerized. It certainly created the response I had hoped
for.
At some point, my son suggested allowing her to fly it on
her own. I was skeptical because the
wind was strong, and it tugged pretty hard on the string. He put the kite string holder in her hand and
her little fingers made a fist around it.
She hung onto it like a professional.
She did it all by herself for a very long time. It was
a proud moment for all of us. The joy
that she had flying it on her own was soaring, pun intended. It was the best $10 I had ever spent.
Tammy Harvey
5/23/2025
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