The Limits of Neighborliness
I suppose usually, we would wait until the kite dives into the grass hummocks of the field. In that case, the string goes slack, and retrieving the kite becomes a matter of spooling the inert cord back onto the plastic handle. This time, my three year old son wanted to hold the handle. The kite string, a thread of nylon as thin as embroidery floss, was improbably canted into the sky, tugged by a sail shaped like a dragon and being tossed by the heavier winds that start about eighty feet aloft. It is one thing to release a helium balloon into the sky (though you shouldn’t). The experience of watching an object fall upward is exhilarating, disorienting, resetting of expectations, even vertigo-inducing…such is our imprisonment in gravity, that mysterious force that seeks always to move us closer together, crush us all into One. And, indeed, helium, given the chance, will eventually escape Earth altogether, and fly off ...