In the autumn of 1976, the neighborhood smelled like freshly fallen leaves and woodsmoke. You could just begin to feel the crispness of winter on the wind. Dale McKinney was almost thirty-five, a man who still carried the sharp corners of a boy who grew up in too many foster homes. His own father had died when Dale was three years old. The death certificate said it was stomach cancer while others whispered something about him dying in the county jail under suspicious circumstances.
For young Dale there had been no backyard games, no bedtime stories, no father to show him how to throw a baseball or tie a knot. He worked at a machine shop and came home exhausted after every shift, smelling of metal with grease under his fingernails. He tried his best, every single day, to be the kind of dad he’d never known but it wasn’t always easy.
His son, Mikey, was five with an endless curiosity about a world that was still brand new to him. That Saturday afternoon the boy tugged at his father’s sleeve the moment Dale woke up.
“Dad, can we fly the kite? The one we got last week?”
Dale looked at the triangular-shaped Gayla “Baby Bat” kite leaning there against the fridge, its raven-colored wings and menacing red and yellow eyes calling to him. Yes, he was tired from the week’s hard work but he couldn’t ignore the spark in Mikey’s eyes. It was the same hopeful anticipation he often felt as a kid but wasn’t allowed to keep.
“Alright, buddy. Let’s go and see how she flies.”
They walked the two blocks to Fairmoor Elementary. The neighborhood schoolyard with its old red-brick walls, metallic smell of coal burning deep in the belly of its furnace, and the wide grassy field behind the playground. Mikey carried the kite like it was his most valuable possession, at that moment it was.
In his jacket pockets Dale held a large spool of string and a paper bag with a bottle of Coke and some Slim Jims.
The playground was empty except for a couple of neighborhood kids on the swings in the distance. Dale helped Mikey attach the tail, long strips of plastic that came with the kite. They attached the string with a tight knot and together they sprinted across the grass.
On the third attempt the kite caught an updraft and shot skyward, climbing fast, tugging hard like a horse set free in the meadow.
“Whoa!” Mikey laughed, feet planted firmly, arms stretched high.
Dale grinned, the kind of grin that made the lines around his eyes soften. “Look at her go! Hang on tight Mikey. The bat really wants to fly.”
Minutes went by. Higher and higher the kite climbed until the string ran out with a sharp sudden jerk. It kept pulling hard, now just a dark triangle against the sky, straining toward the clouds like it wanted to join the jets leaving Port Columbus.
“Oh no. We’re at the end,” Mikey said, sadly.
Dale looked up, squinting at the shrinking dark speck darting from side to side in the sky. He felt an old wound resurface but this time it was mixed with a new kind of joy. He remembered standing outside a foster home once, in Schiller Park, watching neighborhood kids fly a kite. He was too shy to ask if he could join them. It was only a dream to experience this for himself back then.
“Hold tight, son. Stay here and don’t let her go. I’ll just be gone for a few minutes.”
Dale went home and hopped into the car and hurriedly drove a couple of miles to the Kmart on East Broad Street, heart pounding. Inside, under the buzz of fluorescent lights and the smell of buttered popcorn from the little snack bar, he bought every spool of kite string on the shelves. All four of them. The cashier, an ancient lady with a perfectly coiffed beehive and smelling of cheap rose perfume, raised an eyebrow.
“You must plan on flying a lot of kites!”
“No, just one,” he said, smiling boyishly.
Back at Fairmoor, Mikey was still holding on for dear life, kite string digging deep into his fingers. His arms were tired but his eyes were still full of hope. Dale knelt and tied the new string to the old with careful, patient knots. The kind of knots he’d taught himself from the old Boy Scout books. He unwrapped spool after spool, tied knot after knot, until the line stretched thousands of feet into the air. The kite had become invisible. The string now seemed to be dangling from the clouds themselves.
They sat on the cool grass together, passing the bottle of Coke back and forth. The string hummed in Mikey’s hands like a harp string descending from the heavens.
“Dad… it’s so high we can’t even see it anymore. Don’t you wish we could see what it sees?”
Dale put his arm around his son’s narrow shoulders. They no longer even noticed the cold wind or much of anything else around them. For a long moment he didn’t speak. He was thinking about all the things he’d missed out on, and everything he refused to let Mikey miss. Only then it dawned on Dale that they were experiencing these childhood moments for the first time, together.
“Sometimes,” he said carefully, “you gotta know when to let something you really care about be what it’s meant to be. If we reel it back in now and it’ll just be a kite again. Up there…it’s magic. It’s free.”
Mikey looked at his dad, then the kite string as it arched into the sky.
“Why don’t we let it go?”
Dale nodded. “Yeah. Let’s do it together.”
They loosened their grip in unison. The string slipped through their fingers, racing away in quick, joyful loops until the end disappeared into the gray clouds. For a second they both ran after it, laughing. Then they lay back in the grass and watched the clouds dragging across the empty sky, imagining their kite sailing all the way to the edge of the world.
“You know,” Dale said after a while, voice cracking, “your grandad never got to fly a kite with me. Not even once. I’m glad I got to do this with you. We can always buy another kite.”
Mikey didn’t fully understand the weight behind the words, but he understood the joy of the moment. He scooted closer until his head rested on his father’s shoulder.
They lingered there a few minutes longer before their hunger made them remember dinner beckoned. Each of them warmed their hands in their pockets on the walk home and Dale glanced over his shoulder once more at the empty sky over Fairmoor Elementary.
Somewhere up there, the kite kept soaring. It carried with it one ache of a childhood lost and a moment between a father who never had one and a son who always would. This particular memory was one that would survive through decades of life-changes, joy, and pain. It was a story, every time it was retold, would never fail to soften the lines around their eyes and put a smile on their faces.
All for now. Thanks so much for reading.
