Memoirs of an Amnesiac

Before there were iPods, iPads, Dx, and what-have-you technologies children these days were so carefully enamored swiping their lazy fingers around, there was kite flying.

Summer times in my youth were always spent outdoors. Back then, the climate had not gone haywire. You could clearly spell the difference between a drizzle and a downpour. Now, you'd go insane trying to estimate the capricious climate. At about 3pm onward, our little barrio turns into a festival of kites of different colors, shapes, and sizes. There were those kinds that you hadn't thought would fly. I remembered having braved looking at the scorching heat of the sun just to marvel at a caterpillar kite. I bemused how much love and effort is put into each piece in the whole structure just to let it take flight.

These and other more flighty things occupied my rather nostalgic brain as I sat in my usual seat in the bus this morning. There was a clear sky and yet I missed seeing kites. I recalled how broadcasters before would campaign on days without end just so the children would cease flying kites as the strings get tangled with the electric wires and thus was the major cause of most household fires.

Kites and things that fly will probably have a special place in my heart. They are reminiscent of childhood days gone and the elusive passage of time spent and wasted on trying to pursue one's career and ambitions.

I have used kite flying as an illustration in the classroom. You know those in-between days when I as a teacher get so immersed in the lesson that I forgot that my student's minds are caught in fancy about probably princesses kissing frogs and dogs that fly. In the most opportune time, stories about kite flying come in handy.

My favorite is the story about Charlie Brown. My students aren't really familiar with him but they are familiar with his dog, Snoopy. (Now, you're starting to relate with me.) Charlie Brown is from the comic strip, Peanuts. It is the story of a little boy who could not fly a kite and his dog, Snoopy who could not bark. Charles Schulz, the cartoonist who is the brainchild behind Peanuts somehow saw a parallelism with his own life and that of Charlie Brown's. At an early age, he had wanted to draw and create comics. (Comics. Another residue from my generation whose imagination are not limited beyond the strips.) Like all artists (whose passions somehow emanate from the admiration one gets from the readers), he had always wanted to submit his drawings to their school paper but he gets rejected as many times as he attempted to. Yet he never quit. He tried his luck with Walt Disney. And then he got rejected again.

Charles' determination to succeed as a cartoonist never ended with his rejections. He went on to draw about a little boy who always wanted to fly a kite but can't. At present, there are probably thousands of copies and syndicated editions of the comic strip, Peanuts. Although Charles didn't get to see the breadth and height of the success of his comic strip, he is probably proud of one thing. That he never quit.

In a parallel universe, come to think of it. Every day, we launch our kites through the many things we aspire for -- that man's love and admiration, that new house on the corner, that new car, that promotion, that new baby or that graduation. We are not sworn to oblivion about the risks we get whenever there is no wind to fire up our flight. But we fly our kites nevertheless.

Not because we are afraid we might not be able to bring ourselves back again after the entangling (among the electric wires) but because we revel in the power that we get once we are on flight. Those fearless moments when we let go of inhibitions and cares.

Those moments we will never get to experience if we never took the risk.