Latest update February 17th, 2025 9:42 PM
Apr 17, 2017 News
By Michael Jordan
Never let your sister buy your kite.
I learned that when I was about ten, when one of my sisters bought the ugliest kite I have ever seen.
We Jordans took pride in our kites and our knowledge of kites. No wimpy, plastic stuff for us. Ours had to be made from wood and paper, and most of all, they had to ‘sing.’
My first memory of Easter was seeing our father at Suddie, Essequibo, raising kites in the back-dam behind our home. The kites were invariably made of brown paper. I remember him once tying the kite string to my belt, so I could ‘fly’ one of his creations without losing it.
Eventually, we moved to Georgetown, and because dad was a postal employee, he would take us to the Guyana Post Office ground to fly our kites.
I got my first kite when I was about six, and I learned, back then, that kites seemed to take on our personalities. I was the youngest at the time, and a rather quiet, book-reading kid. Like me, my kite was ‘quiet’. It didn’t pitch, pull or sing. My eldest brother, of course, had the largest kite. It ‘sang,’ but when he raised it he discovered that he didn’t have much string. My second brother, Vibart, was exuberant, adventurous, and energetic. He had a blue star-point kite and it had all of his energy.
It sang loudly, it pitched, it pulled, it burst away, and to this day, I still remember Vibart and my dad sprinting across the Guyana Post Office ground to retrieve that kite. When I wrote my ‘How I spent My Easter Holiday’, composition, I didn’t write about my ‘paggly’ kite, but about ‘Vibart’s kite that burst away.’
But the thing was that after our Easter Monday jaunt, we were supposed to put those kites away until next Easter. What we did, though, was sneak out and try to fly them in our yard in Garnett Street. We would run down a narrow passageway and try to raise them. What invariably happened was that the kites would bang against the concrete house and eventually be battered.
But that first day of kite-flying turned me into an inveterate kite addict. At first, the ‘kites’ I made would consist of a piece of paper with two holes for string and tail, ‘flown’ through a window. I then gravitated to the ‘caddy old punch’ stage; raiding my mother’s brooms to stitch ‘pointers’ through pages pulled out from exercise books. Later, I learned to make ‘singing engine’ kites out of ‘pointer’ and kite paper.
The trouble was that my parents, especially my paternal grandmother and my father, were sticklers for the Christian tradition that kites should only be flown during Easter. The penalty for flying a kite out of the Easter season was serious ‘licks’. That didn’t stop us from making those kites.
When I was about ten, I made a beautiful ‘pointer’ kite in secret, and hid it in a neighbour’s bottom house where they raised creole hens. When I went to retrieve the kite the next day, it was gone. One of the boys who lived there suggested that ‘rats’ had carried it off. That was the first time I knew that rats flew kites, like the cows one of my brothers claimed had stolen a cricket bat I made.
There was one miserable Easter Monday when it rained so badly that we were unable to go on our usual Easter Monday picnic. Eventually, the rain ceased and by afternoon, we went out. But there was little breeze, and only a boy with a Green Giant kite—those plastic, wimpy kites–got his to fly.
That brings me to the tale of one of my sisters, whose kites never left the ground, stubbornly defying all of my father’s expertise.
What made it worse for that sister was that she had three brothers who loved to ‘tantalise’. Easter after Easter after Easter, my sister’s kites stubbornly refused to become air-borne.
One memorable year sticks in my mind. That was the Easter of the ugly flat kite.
THE FLAT KITE
Easter Monday came around, and for some reason, my sister didn’t have a kite. But she had to have one, so my father made a big, big mistake. He sent my eldest sister to buy one.
Now, I had never seen that sister fly a kite. She probably didn’t have a clue where the loop or the tail went. That sister went to a neighbourhood shop. A few minutes later she came back, quite proudly, with the kite. The ‘troublesome’ brothers in that household took one look at the kite and burst out laughing.
This board kite had no frills, no ears, no decorations! It was pasted with light-brown paper, AND IT WAS FLAT. By that, I mean that it had no nose, which meant it had no tongue, which meant that it could not ‘sing’.
Later in the day, when we went to the Post Office Ground, I saw several more of these flat, ugly kites. It appeared that someone had come up with what they thought was a brilliant idea of making these kites for girls.
When I became a parent, I passed on the Jordan kite-flying tradition to my children. We would go quite early to the National Park, where I would raise five or six kites, and let the children get a ‘belly-full’ of flying before the park got crowded.
Invariably, I would be trying to untangle one kite and raise another at the same time. Like I was as a child, my elder son became a kite fanatic; making kites from any scrap of paper or plastic he could put his hands on.
I remember one Easter when flying kites was far from my mind. We had lost a family member, someone who loved kites, someone whose kites seemed to have his energy and optimistic view of life.
I wanted to find a way to honour him, perhaps, with that trick of writing something on a scrap of paper and sending it up on the kite string.
In the end, I just took the kids to the park and flew their kites in his memory.
Feb 17, 2025
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