Gone With the Wind

In turn, two of my brothers and I worked for the same grocery store as teenagers (the other brother worked for the other grocery store in town). Originally an old wooden floored, two aisled grocery store, the place was run by sons of fathers, and the checkout clerk was the same woman for decades -- my oldest brother worked there when the son of the original owner was still around, working with his own son. I worked for the grandson of the founding owner, Bob. The original store grew up, taking over a very large space with shiny new services and the addition of Bob's own son -- who expanded the store into the ground. The building stands vacant still today in my dying small town.

Bob was famous for his exclamations: "Lord love a duck!" was among his favourite, all purpose (although usually in frustrated anger) barks. He also had a remarkable talent for stringing out the word Jesus such that it would last 15 or 20 seconds. A pipe smoker Bob was always striking matches, and tossing them on the store floor, to try to keep the damn thing lit. Ironically, it was not uncommon for Bob to stuff the pipe in a pocket when he needed both hands free and couldn't leave the pipe dangling from his mouth. Ironic, because every once in a while the pipe would still be lit and one would be treated to a frenetic dance by Bob, accompanied by Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeezzzzzzzzzaaaaaaawwwwsssss and Bob yanking the pipe from his pocket and slapping his leg to snuff the smouldering fire fuelled by his leg and pants fabric.

Anyway, in the years my older brother worked for Bob and his dad, occasional boxes of Sunkist oranges came with paper, diamond shaped kites, including a couple of pieces of dowelling to frame the kite. They were meant to be display items to sell oranges, but my brother would bring them home and I and my friends would try to fly them. They didn't work worth hell and any wind would shred them.

We eventually graduated to plastic kites, years after the paper kites were nothing more than a shimmer in some Florida orange grower's marketing executive's mind. Those warrior-shield shaped kites with their plastic frames and decals of fierce eyes and lightning rods or licks of flames were remarkably efficient. You could launch one of those kites until they were but a speck in the sky -- even though most of the distance was horizontal, the vertical height was enough that we would feign real fear that passing airplanes (the noise of which would always get our old Scottish collie dog, Laddie, howling) would snag our kite lines.

My brother had a paper route and thus was rich at the time. He bought three spools of kite string (most certainly from the Co-op's hardware section and strung them all together on one of the spools.

On a kite flying day when the wind was such a fellow didn't even need to have a little brother run like hell with the kite in one direction while the fellow ran in the opposite direction before the little brother tossed the kite into the air, my brother planned to send his kite to the moon. As was our usual practice my brother had a stick through the spool and once the kite was airborne it was free to consume its string as it got dragged powerfully skyward by the wind; the spool spinning wildly around its stick axle.

Four or five boys (and likely the girl next door, Wendy) squealed with excitement and yard after yard after yard after yard of string was spun off the spool. We literally lost sight of the kite, but the string continued its exodus -- until it neared its full length, when, untied at the end to the spool, we watched with some initial delight and then horror as the string made a grand exit and my brother was left with an empty cardboard spool. We watched the end of the line begin to disappear in the direction of the yards that had gone before it.

We chased madly trying to capture the end of the string, so it could be tamed and reeled back in, the kite reclaimed. It was a fruitless exercise as the end was almost immediately pulled well above our height and soon was lost to our sight.

My memory fades here, but I know we did not find the string that day. We wandered a lot of pasture expecting, assuming, the kite had finally fallen when the line tangled on a fence or in a tree. Either the kite or a bunch of the line was eventually come across (a very, very long way from where we had stood flying the kite--as measured by a 7 year old), but months later, if I recall correctly.

What does stand out in my mind was the look on my brother's face as he was left with that empty spool, the kite liberated. In the here and now, I interpret it as the expression of someone who has set someone or something free. The kite was gone, gone with the wind. Where it was meant to be.

I was thinking all this as I viewed this picture of a kite in Tibet, which appeared in at globeandmail.com today.