I told you I was going to be foolish on April first, and I made a real success of it.
Two friends and I had set aside the day to get together and do 'something that doesn't matter'.
At least, that's the way I put it.
For as many reasons as there are people, sometimes life just gets kind of heavy and you have to get the world off of your shoulders on purpose.
But I was as surprised as could be that, as I prayed about what we should do, what came to mind was, "Go fly a kite."
Better yet, go make a kite.
I found some very simple and very clear instructions on the PBS website.
And since I had recently been given three large rolls of (awesome) paper by one of my (awesome) shoots, we needed only to add string and a few dowels and we were in business.
Now, I had visions when the first thoughts of kite-flying came to me.
Visions from my childhood.
Visions of my big bruvver's kite...so far out in the blue California sky that it was a mere speck.
I really looked up to my Funny Big Bruvver, and any attention his teenage self paid my little grade school self was deeply cherished.
So the day he asked if I wanted to hold the line of his far-off-in-the-sky-kite for a minute, I felt the honor, and his trust in me, deeply.
At least, I felt it for the first fifteen or twenty minutes I stood there.
All alone.
In the fading daylight.
And then I realized he'd gone home to have dinner.
Well, I still love my Funny Bruvver, and I still want him to be proud of me, and I was still thinking about him when we started building our first kites.
We started off well.
And after building the kites, we played with paint and markers.
When they were sufficiently cheerful, we packed our picnic lunch and headed to the nearby lake...
...where 40 mph winds blew our food off of our spoons before we could get it to our mouths...
...and where we held our coffee cups about a foot away from the Thermos and let the wind blow the coffee into them...
...and where we made the brilliant decision to move to the park north of the lake - "where the winds won't be so straightline" - before launching our kites.
Ha.
Haha.
Hahaha.
One of the girls never made it out of the parking lot before the Kite-Eating Tree took posession of her kite.
I made it to the field before the wind sent my kite in dizzying circles, snapped it's string, sent it's tail to Kansas, and slammed it into the ground.
The third (overachiever) girl got as far as to have me hold her kite aloft while she let out string...only to have it break free immediately upon release, drop a few feet, and glue itself to my legs by sheer wind power.
If that had been the end of it, we had already laughed hard enough to shake every care from our shoulders.
But the chase across the parking lot after a runaway kite finished us off.
When it was over, the strings and (remaining) tails looked like this...
...our well-built and beautiful kites still looked like this...
...and the Inchie looked like this.
And, though our kites never became mere specks in the blue Oklahoma sky...
...our cares sure did.