Blogging, I've been told, functions best as a virtual stream-of-consciousness expression, with a low premium on edits. I'm a notoriously slow songwriter, with lots of editing and revising. But those who know me know it's hard to get me to stop talking once I start. So we'll see if I can write here more like I talk. I doubt it. I hope that Mark (Wingate, the other half of Kindling Stone) will chime in with his own posts too. However it goes, here it goes.
Melissa had her latest in a series of utopian holiday visions as Easter approached last week. It went like this: We pack a picnic, kites (do we have kites?), and the portable reed organ (yes, we have one of those) and we drive out to Bell’s Bend park for the day. I told her it didn’t seem right to take the organ unless Mark could come with his fiddle. And so he did, with his wife Sally, their son Brian, and his two kids. We also invited our friends Adele and John and their children. And a nice surprise – Travis Book had a break from the road and showed up with his bass violin in tow. But first…
Bell’s Bend is a Nashville city park, west out of town, past the landfill and the prison, near the end of a winding road, along farmland and the Cumberland River, at the place where they used to run Cleece’s Ferry. On the way, we passed a large field of mustard greens with their vibrating yellow blossoms stretching far and wide. That’s also where we had seen the whooping cranes a couple of months ago when the grass was brown. But spring is full-on here now – the pink and white dogwoods, azalea, iris, myrtle, annual beds brimming with cheer, and the trees above unfurling their tender leaves of green and red.
Easter Sunday was a bit chilly, but sunny, when Lorna (age ten) and I drove to Friends Meeting earlier that morning. In the car, we talked about Jesus and the resurrection, spring, Buddha, and the Quakers. Usual stuff. She said it was sometimes difficult at school to be around people who talked a lot about God. I asked her if she believed in God. “Half do, half don’t,” she said, adding “but that question doesn’t matter really. It’s how you treat other people that matters.” She had my attention.
To the kites. On Saturday evening, realizing that we couldn’t locate any of the half dozen kites we’ve owned at one time or another over the past 20 years, I did what any good American does when they don’t have something they want - I went to Target and bought two. During a recession no less. Now Nashville doesn’t have a kite store that I know of. They did in Portland (Maine, where I’m from) and the kite store would be the obvious place to go and buy your kite – designed by some fun-loving home inventor, or an MIT grad who’d lost focus. Today, however, Target was my only choice. But yikes - I wouldn’t be forced into some mylar crap with a Disney princess or Buzz Lightyear. I was lucky to find a couple of traditional nylon and plastic jobs on the clearance shelf – one with a tropical fish, the other a small turtle with a finger spool. $8 total. Good, made it out of Target for under ten bucks – victory!
After Friends Meeting, Lorna and I pulled into Bell’s Bend about one o’ clock, Melissa and James (14) were already there setting out food, making a fire, hiding eggs, soaking in the natural surroundings. We carried instruments from the parking area to the beautiful grove of trees with picnic tables and fire pits. The kids were immediately off and running, climbing the hay bales in the barn, circling the woodpile, running into the open field.
The sun was out, and there was nice breeze at my back. Good kite conditions! I grabbed the colorful fish kite, moved into the field, away from the trees and the barn, and let her loose. This nice little nylon kite with a long tail climbed straight up and I kept letting out line as it tugged and rose. Ah, that feeling, the pull at your hands, the sound of fabric in the wind. It’s like the crystal swish of fresh snow under your sled runners in the moonlight, or the buzzing of black rubber on new asphalt under your bike tires – these are the visceral mini-miracles of simple outdoor recreation. The smaller turtle kite took a little more effort, but finally found its lower place aloft, bobbing up and down, responding to each gust and shift of the wind – with an occasional nosedive into the ground below. I stood there rapt for an hour, giving the kids a turn, helping to reel in or give a tug when the breeze calmed. The birds sang, a hawk circled in the distant, upper currents. The sky was deep. Heaven on earth I thought.
It was about this time that the Wingate clan arrived, their small procession coming into view along the trail from the parking area. I was eager to share my enthusiasm and this blissful state I was in. But I need to stop here for a moment.
The day before, Mark had asked to come by the house to collect some dried bamboo stalks from our yard. He said he wanted to build his own kite. Now I know these people well, and I know that they’re always on the lookout for opportunities to teach the grandkids (who live in the house next door after all) something about something. Kites would definitely fall into this category. So I didn’t give it much thought. But what I didn’t know was this:
When he was a child, Mark’s father kept him home from school one day to build a kite. And this kite was made from the following materials: two sticks, newspaper, string, and a paste of flour and water. Now I did know that Mark’s father was born in 1913, was a minor league baseball pitcher in North Carolina who’d suffered an injury and was forced to leave baseball (his true love) to become a watch repairman. But I didn’t know about the kite.
So here they come, the Wingates, up the trail from the parking area, carrying this black and white newspaper kite glued onto a little cross of sticks. A little cross of sticks. And it’s Easter and I’m thinking, if this thing doesn’t fly, it’s going to be pretty disappointing. Maybe even symbolic. But Mark was on a mission, and he wasted no time trotting down into the field, clipped his spool of fishing line (rusty screwdriver through the hole as a handle) onto the string loop at the kite face. And there on the front of the newspaper kite was the Sudoku puzzle, unfinished, which I knew had to be driving Sally crazy because she likes Sudoku like Tennesseans like pork products. But the Sudoku sacrifice seemed appropriate even to her I think. In fact, everything suddenly seemed right about the situation.
And without a hitch, this small gray form, fashioned from materials that surely wouldn’t last for long, rose in the wind with a rare combination of majesty and humility. Light gray clouds had rolled in during the afternoon, and it was disarming to see this kite that matched the sky. The world was black and white. It was old-fashioned. It reminded me of the raisin spice cake that my mother makes, passed down from her grandmother – a depression-era cake without butter or eggs. “It’s not only good, it’s good enough,” a sound engineer I knew in Boston used to say. Why make do with more when we can make do with less?
But this wasn’t really about the frugality – it was about the tradition being passed across generations, it was about parents and children, ingenuity, sacrifice, simple beauty, acts of kindness, and good clean fun. This kite connected Mark to his father, to his wife and children and grandchildren, to his friends. You could see it in his face as he looked up at that object in the sky. And we felt it together with him.
Now it’s tempting to fill in the blanks by naming the directions these events echo from and point to. Believe me, I’ve thought about it plenty in the past week. Especially in light of what followed as the day went on - the kite grounding itself in a field of thorns, another flight in which Mark let out the fishing line so far that the kite was almost too small to see, followed by Mark actually cutting the line to let it sail free across the river, followed by the retrieval of the kite by Mark’s son Brian, brought back so it might fly again someday. I’ll also resist dwelling on some observations and comments that were made about why this was “the best kite,” or somehow superior in its simplicity, construction, etc. Instead, I’ll say that we gathered at the picnic tables beneath the trees by the fire. We ate some delicious food, and then played some music until it was time to go home. I will also say that it was a beautiful Easter.
