Kites

My great-grandfather
was widely regarded
as the Arnold Palmer of kiting.
He was a world-renowned expert on kitemaking
and on the intellectual history of kite-patenting.

(Which I suppose must be a vast and
relevant area of study.)

He was also, in his time,
an advertising Vice President for Kodak-Eastman
after working his way through college
as a Magician on the Vaudeville circuit, a hobby which
he later recanted as falsification and deception.

(Though I wonder if he ever thought the same of
Advertising.)

He and his wife,
my great-grandmother,
a warm, kind woman
with a penchant for cocktail-hours
and tautologies

(and of whom my memories are sadly hazy,)

would travel the world
collecting tribal masks
for some purpose or another:
solemn sentinels warding off
invading mildew from posts
along the staircase.

In my last, feeble memories of him,
I am twelve and he is hunched over,
I am giggling and his moustaches gently droop,
his withered fingers curl around a pencil,
writing down a grocery list.
His failing ears
cause him to mistake 'Corn Chex'
as 'Corn Check,'
a phrase repeated
dutifully.

(a mistake we don't have the heart
to correct.)

His wife is
only recently deceased,
something which seems to have left its mark
in a quiet corner of his heart,
its loneliness settled even in
those careful fingers.

Kites, though. what a wonderfully silly interest.