Up in the sky!

I don’t really know what I’ve been truly thinking about lately. This is a little hard for me to pen. Every writer goes through what is known as “writer’s block” – an open ended season of time when ideas or sometimes even the energy to dispense them on to a blank screen become as difficult as extracting a wisdom tooth with sore and bandaged fingers.

I hardly consider myself a writer and so I can hardly claim to have the professional angst associated with such a title, but I do feel unnerved of late and terribly uninspired. It may very well be that my mind is so preoccupied with personal issues that have become increasingly difficult for me to know how to process –mentally and in the crash of lives bumping into each other.

In another life I was so not like this. It’s been a tradeoff really – this American life I have now is much more filled with creativity, spontaneity, assurance of identity and a measure of joy in comparison to days of old when I hesitated before others, allowed myself to be taken advantage of and was blindly innocent in a beautiful sort of way. I don’t feel as clean as I did once but it’s all for reasons that make for a more unveiled humanity. I talk in ways I didn’t before and that’s okay too, but where most people just are who they are, I find that I have to give reasons or definitions for why I am the way I am today.

This past weekend I felt something I had not experienced in over thirty years. I held a kite in the air and with a bundle of string in my hand I ran across an open grassy field as fast as my aging legs would allow me until I felt the pull of the wind grab my diamond kite and catapult it into the air with the greatest of ease. The last time I did that was in the 1970s in New York City atop the roof of a five storey apartment building I lived in with my mother, father and two older sisters.

The experience of seeing this kite dance four hundred feet in the air, with its long red tail writing invisible letters across the sky brought my youth back to me with all its joys, fear, wonderments and loves. I handed the kite to my son … and we looked at each other momentarily. There were no words … just an unspoken exchange with his father that he will remember always.