The Case of The Returned Kite

A reverse-mystery story for your reading pleasure: two Saturdays ago, which was as blustery a day as they come, my kids and I went down to the park with a gigantic jet-plane kite-- a kite created to familiarize children with profanity, as building it required a fair amount of swearing and flying it was extraordinarily intense and required a steady stream of expletives; this kite didn't just rise into the sky and stay there-- this kite liked to swoop and dive, and it came with a special "Tri-Wheel" string spool which stripped off string faster than a fishing reel (and resulted in me getting an extremely painful friction burn on my finger) but we finally got it airborne and it did look really cool as it swooped and dove and Alex actually got some control of it, but he had to keep running back and pulling, then running back, then pulling, until finally he was so far away and the kite was over the patch of woods at the edge of the park and then the kite did the inevitable, it swooped in to a tree, and I will be the first to admit that I wasn't so sad that it got stuck because it was a dangerous kite that required far too much skill and effort to fly, but still, I did my best to get it out of the tree (my wife was angrier that we lost it, but she wasn't there for the entire time and didn't know the dangers inherent in this particular kite) but the string snapped, and so I left the scene-- rather pleased that the devil-kite was at the top of a very tall tree and we went over to a friend's house for drinks before a dinner outing, but then we had to stop back at home to get jackets and the kite was sitting on our front porch and we live near the park and it's a small town, but still, it was pretty odd that someone knew where to return the kite . . . and it was also a bit ironic, since I was happy that this particular kite was lost in a tree because it was a danger to my family, but it turns out my lovely neighbor saw us walking home from the park with a spool of string and no kite, so when the wind blew it out of the tree she knew just where to return it, and so I am sorry to say that we will have to fly it again.
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9 comments:

  1. zmanOctober 26, 2011 at 9:10 AM

    My father and I had several similarly poor kite flying attempts, so he moved on and bought a gigantic styrofoam airplane, it must have had a 6 foot wingspan and weighed about 5 pounds, and you could adjust the rake of the wings and the tail to make it turn or do loops, and my dad is an engineer so he put a gigantic nail in the front of the plane to add nose-weight which apparently will make it fly longer and faster, and he set it to do a loop-de-loop, and the first time we ever launched it it did one perfect giant loop up, rolled onto its back, and then looped back down to earth, and we both stood there with gape-mouthed smiles watching it come back to us, and I swear this next part is true -- the plane, complete with railroad stake in the nose, crashed down onto my father's head right between his eyes with sufficient speed and force to leave a big round mark on his forehead and make his eyes water. I was about 6 or 7 and I convulsed with laughter on the floor. It was like a Three Stooges bit with only two stooges.

    So if you move onto foam airplanes, don't put a giant nail in the nose.

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  2. DaveOctober 26, 2011 at 11:42 AM

    i think you told me this story on an obft-- because we had such a plane, and we lost it in the same stretch of woods that we temporarily lost the swooping death kite-- but i appreciate your comment, as all will get to enjoy it-- and it's also a magnificent sentence . . .

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  3. DaveOctober 26, 2011 at 11:44 AM

    holy shit . . . go to the comments on 4/20/10.

    zman, please tell me you remember writing that.

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  4. zmanOctober 26, 2011 at 12:25 PM

    I do not.

    ReplyDelete
  5. ClarenceOctober 26, 2011 at 9:07 PM

    Dave, do you know it was your neighbor, or is this perhaps the first chapter of Kite Sematary or some other Stephen King story with a very horrible ending for you?

    ReplyDelete
  6. robOctober 26, 2011 at 9:41 PM

    i like this version of z's story better - it's more lyrical

    ReplyDelete
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