The Kite

I love flying kites, and when I was a young I did a lot of flying them.

Our backyard used to be a small rice field. Every summer the farmers harvested the rice, cleared the area and gave the children the opportunity to use it for playground. Malls were virtually unknown then, and the only park that we knew of was the Luneta Park, which is too far. So the bukid was our park. This was where the people in our neighborhood gathered in the mornings to catch the invigorating morning sun and in the afternoons to talk, relax, and enjoy the cool summer breeze while the young played traditional Pinoy games like patintero, atsilandoy, luksong baka, and saranggola or kite flying.

I remember my father’s favorite tabloid the People’s Journal, and whenever he arrived home from work he always had a copy of the paper folded inside his clutch bag. My daily routine was to check his answers in the Tagalog crossword puzzle, and for every mistake that I uncovered I was given a five centavo coin. This I think helped improve my reading skill. I also loved reading the Tacio and the Dalmacio Armas comic strips in the paper. I never missed a single adventure of these two favorite komiks heroes of mine.

One day I asked my father to teach me how to make and fly a kite.

“Okay, get me those old papers and then get some rice from the pot,” he told me. “What’s the rice for,” I asked. “To glue the papers,” he replied. “I thought you’re going to eat them,” I said. “No, this is how we used to make kites for white glue was unknown then,” he smiled.

I brought him the rice and the old People’s Journal issue. I can still remember the banner headline: Marcos Lifts Martial Law. “Father, what is martial law?” I was pointing at the paper’s headline, “You’re too young to know those things,” he said. “Just hand me the paper and I’ll show you how to make a kite”.

It took my father fifteen minutes to make the kite.

We then went to the rice field. He showed me how to fly the kite. “First whistle to get the wind to blow, then hold the kite in the middle till it catches the breeze, then slowly release the kite,” he was squinting at the sun while slowly releasing the string. “Then pull the string back and forth to make it climb, see how it responds,” he was giving me the spool of the strings. We were silent for a few minutes watching the kite danced to the invisible rhythm of the wind. I felt respect for my father’s knowledge of kites. And I cherished the memory of my father and me flying that kite. It was one of the few moments that I really felt very close to my father. I was trying to tell my father that someday I would like to be a pilot and fly planes, he was about to say something, when a dark cloud and a strong gust of wind suddenly blew, breaking my kite’s string. We watched helplessly as the kite flew farther and farther away till it was gone.

“Don’t cry, I’ll help you make a new one,” my father consoled me. “Lets go back to the house for it might rain anytime now,” he pulled my hands and we ran home. But it did not rain. After a few seconds the weather cleared, and up to now I had never experience such a sudden shift in the weather. Strange.

My father has been dead for almost twenty years now. The rice field is now a squatter’s colony where you can’t even fly a paper plane. The traditional Pinoy games I grew up with are now extinct replaced by computer games and drugs.

I now had a daughter, and I am teaching her how to make and fly a kite just like the way my late father did. The difference is, today we now had to ride a tricycle to get to a rice field in Barangay Sta. Ana, Taytay. But despite the distance and the expense we tried to make it a point to go there regularly to fly kites. My heart warmed when I saw my daughter’s excitement in flying her first kite. I got a lump on my throat looking at her for she reminded me of me and my old man.

My nephew Bong was here for his annual vacation so we brought him along with us flying kite in Santa Ana. He was ecstatic for it was also his first time to fly a kite. And while I was teaching him how to maneuver it, our kite got tangled in a large tamarind tree, who’s had a lot of victim judging from the remains of mangled newspapers, sticks, and strings hanging from its branches. Not wanting to spoil the fun, I climbed the tree to retrieve the kite. I was on the branches trying to untangle it when a crumpled yellowed old kite caught my attention. It was a kite I knew. I was trying to remember where I have seen this kite before when the banner headline from the kite’s newspaper skin caught my attention, it read: Marcos Lifts Martial Law.

“Father, are you crying?” my daughter, Jesse Faith, asked me while we walked home. “No, I’m not crying, it’s the wind daughter, it’s just the wind” I replied. “It’s just the wind”.

(Of course it was not the same kite. I made up this part, but you know how it is with fathers and sons. I never outgrew my father. Who does?)