Editor’s note: This op-ed is by award-winning journalist Telly Halkias. It first appeared in the Bennington Banner.
On a recent Monday I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in well over a year, and she was distressed. She’s been trying to sell her home and move closer to her four grandchildren for the past several years, with little success. Her frustration boiled over when reviewing a plan to make drastic and wholesale life changes to force the issue.
I shook my head and said: “Go fly a kite.” My apparent flippancy seemed out of place until I explained. As it was, Monday was a religious holiday in my ancestral Greece. Known there as “Clean Monday,” it’s the first day of Lent, seven weeks prior to Easter Sunday. The day is marked by the custom of kite flying, and is meant to herald the start of Mediterranean spring.
On one Clean Monday in the early 1970s, after my family had moved to Greece from the U.S., I tried to fly a kite and failed miserably. I vowed never to do it again.
The next year, my father recalled that proclamation and offered up some kite-flying lessons to me and a group of friends. I don’t recall our exact ages — we were in elementary school — but that day remains etched in my memory for the grand spectacle of an Athenian horizon buzzing with kites — and my reluctance to join in.
Nevertheless, Dad made me tag along. He had taken us to an undeveloped area at the foot of Mount Hymettus. Other revelers already had launched their vessels, forming a rainbow above us. As in the previous year, my initial attempts to fly the kite were ugly. Then Dad stepped in.
Greek kites were tough to manage, at least for me. Far from the simple diamond composite American design with tail attached, they were large hexagonal wood frames draped with paper. The tail had to be symmetrically mounted from a hanger rope. I wanted no part of it.
My father ignored me. He showed the boys a technique to attach the tail, and how a smooth launch needed some coordination between two holders and one runner. Then he discussed the finer points of letting out string while still tugging to gain altitude.
With me watching, the guys did very well. Our kite went far and high — so much so that after awhile it looked like a speck above us, not the low-altitude Ben Franklin thunderstorm image from my school books.
While secretly admiring the day’s handiwork, I had resisted Dad and never showed any outward enjoyment. But our kite turned in quite the performance: We were Mission Control in Houston, and it was an Apollo space capsule. In subsequent years, on Clean Monday, the gang and I gave it a shot without my father, but we couldn’t replicate that one glorious day. Our kites never sailed as well, and by the time high school rolled around, we had given up.
Yet even then I rode my bike to the Hymettus foothills to watch the kite flyers. Later, I’d return home and admire the Lenten menagerie from my bedroom window, through binoculars. The next time I flew a kite was some 20 years later in the Boston suburbs, when I took my son Jason out at age 8 — or was it 9? That’s how fast it all went. When Jason flew a kite for the first time, my father wasn’t there. He was wracked with leukemia and dying. Neither of us would ever see him again.
So for me, it’s too late. But my friend, even at age 70, still has a chance to look back with no regrets. I told her to slow down, be grateful for all she has — like her four grandchildren — and eventually she’d realize her dreams without burning bridges.
I only wish I knew the first time I flew a kite with Dad would be my last. I still see him there with the guys, his white dress shirt open at the collar and cigarette in hand. His typically slicked-back hair was a mess as he laughed and shouted encouragement to a group of schoolboys not much taller than his waist.
On that Clean Monday, our kite rocketed into the Greek sky, a canvas so blue it hurt to watch for long.
