Go Fly a Kite

 

Were you expecting to keep the old thing in storage until a milder month appeared on your kitchen wall calendar celebrating legendary volcanic plugs? You were, weren’t you? A place like Strombolicchio is curiously left off a list of upcoming destinations for the wandering and lustful. The influential souls who can’t live without their passports. Squint as much as you want, but you won’t see any customs agents on Rockall. It’s not so easy to find a place with firm yet flat magma that offers an ideal surface for photographing the sunset through a flute of rosé. How are you meant to overcome the obstacles of eating a grain bowl in the middle of the North Atlantic, hundreds of miles from civilization in any direction? You’re not. You’re meant to starve. Or make nice with the circling gulls, convincing them to drop krill and phytoplankton into your open mouth in exchange for teaching them English literature. Sammy Taylor “Ham” Coleridge is as good a place as any to begin. As they say, avian illiteracy is an albatross – but it doesn’t have to be. And with your help, it won’t be.

After praying to St. Michael of the Needle for extra time, you were banking on summer as an appropriate season to make a triumphant return to your kite-flying ways. When has waiting for good weather helped a kiteman of yore? Did Ben Franklin say, “it’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man in the clouds the Ancient Greeks called Zeus is roaring?” If he did, it didn’t deter him from stepping out for some understandably moist experimentation. Where would the Wright Brothers be without kites? 

Still riding bicycles.  

You mustn’t complain of the wind from inside your home. It’s easy to remark on the whistling and howling on the other side of the wall. The time to fly is now – not later. Not in the warmer months when beaches are packed with lounging, tanning goobers and denim-wearing drone operators annoying everyone under the sun. 

So go fly a kite. You could use a hobby.