Parent:Wise Austin: High Art<p>

It never fails to stop people in stunned surprise.

To the casual onlooker, it's the obliterated rear window of my home, one that is veiled in strips of balsawood, birch and spruce, intertwined with a thousand feet of string and tape, supporting untold square feet of color in crayon, pencil and paint, all spread across canvases of tissue, newspaper, fine linen writing paper and translucent plastic.

It is high art. Working art. Art that is functionally flyable.

In other words: it's a bunch of kites.

For me, though, it is also much more, something far beyond stunning:

It is what kept my child in my life.

Judging from the number of people who have marveled at these simple creations, you would think that I have helped my daughter excel in rocket science. No, our kites are not rocket science. But the simple fact that my daughter has a trophy to go with each one is the reason I write this. Simply put, my daughter does not deserve to win with such ease.

Time Spent Well

Of course, anything is easy if you are the only entrant. Last March, my daughter, Chelsea, stood alone on the flying field of the Austin Kite Festival after the Junior Unusual kite category and heard the announcer jokingly proclaim that she had won First and Second and Third Place. In all of Austin a city with a population of nearly one million, some 150,000 of whom are younger than 16 only she and I had put a child's kite in the air in front of 20,000 people. How is it Chelsea was alone?

The Austin Kite Festival actually began the year my parents were born: 1927. Some folks put some kites up in the air by Barton Springs to welcome the end of winter and a Festival was born. I love simple starts like that, and that was about how simple it was when Chelsea and I made our first kite. Well, actually, it wasn't simple at allthere was a huge fight but the teddy bear flew, she won First Place and we have gone and won ever since.

But that is not the end, nor really the beginning, nor really the point, of this story.

The point is that kite-making can lead to profound truths; that the simplicity of building a kite and getting it into the air is really an amazing act in today's busy world. An act of spending your time well.

My friends know me as a mechanic, a writer, an author, an illustrator. But my most important role is that of a divorced dad one, I might add, who takes great delight in perplexing and enlightening his daughter at every opportunity. Chelsea, who is ____, tells me I'll be three weeks gone before she wins our last encounter, and then I'll probably have a letter delivered post-mortem to have the last word.

For me, and I would hope not you, divorce solidified nothing except the fact that quiet moments of opportunity with my child never should be squandered.

Back in 1999, all three of usChelsea, my ex-wife and Iwere going through the motions of what life apart was going to look like. I was trying to keep it simple and normal, which is hard to do when you don't live with the six-year-old daughter you adore. That's when I saw an ad in the paper for the Zilker Kite Festival Contest. It listed the categories, with descriptions of each, and two age categories: one for kids 16 and younger and one for those 17 and older. Well, heck I thought, we would do itonce. The only rules were that the kites had to be homemade; must be in the air when the judges were watching; and held, although not necessarily made, by the child.

It had been twenty-five years or so since I had built a kite with my father, but I figured: how hard could it be?

I called Dad and looked at some kite books at the library but neither was much help. Dad suggested bamboo‡ la the kind they used to stuff into shoes back in the 50sand the books featured mind-bogglingly beautiful contraptions with equally mind-boggling instructions.

I finally decided we (as in I) would make a two-sticker diamond kite, 36 x 24 crossed at 12 down from the top with a slight bow by arching the cross stick with string. (Believe me, it sounds more complicated than it is.) And since we were only going to do this once, I thought it should be really special. So, I took my finest linen writing paper and carefully cross-glued the sheets. On them, I drew Chelsea's beloved teddy bear in a flying Superman pose. Since the bear was with Chelsea at her mother's home, though, I had to use photos and his Most Wanted poster from the time he got lost in Target.

Two weeks before the contest, I drove to my ex-wife's home and handed Chelsea the drawing so that she could color her bear for the world to see: in the sky!

Constructionon Kites and Family

Change for the better often comes when you least expect it. But I never would have bet on it mixing a bunch of corny metaphors like out of the blue, every cloud has a silver lining, or on gossamer wings or that a kite would be the vehicle for fine-tuning our family machine.

During the two weeks that Chelsea colored her bear at her mother's house, I would sit alone in my house and work on the kite frame. Each night, I would call Chelsea to discuss the progress she was making on the bear; each night she would tell me that he was becoming more beautiful by the day.

Being a first-grader, however, Chelsea was on first grade time-space dilation which means, as any parent knows, that time and project completion got away from her.

She called me the Friday night before the contest in tears. She had wanted to color her bear in markers but it was just too big and there was no time left. I calmed her down and asked her to put her mother on the phone. I then asked whether Mom could help Chelsea finish the project.

What ensued was a silly phone-fight common to divorcing parents who are not sure how to do it all apart and together at the same time. We just couldn't figure out boundaries, time, separation, hers, mine, ours and not ours.

We managed to pull ourselves together, though. And when Chelsea and her mother arrived at my place the night before the contest, Boppie the kite was a beautiful mixture of Chelsea's markers and Mom and Chelsea's swirling, twisting, rainbow watercolors filling the landscape of my linen paper.

As Pooh Bear would have said, March 7, 1999 was a blustery day. Chelsea and I managed to get poor Boppie in the air, but in 30 mph winds the kite oscillated so badly we thought it would tear itself apart. Luckily we had time and a rather ridiculously large repair kit of sticks, string, scissors, knives and lots and lots of different tape. After adding more than 20 feet of knotted GI issue wool, Boppie soared. And as the sun shone through the linen paper, the marker, the watercolors and the watermarked stains, it was enough to make even non-churchgoers genuflect.

When competition time came, we joined a few other parents and kids on the field. Boppie the teddy bear flew high from Chelsea's hands while the judges looked from the kite to the number pinned on Chelsea's back. When the competition was over, Chelsea and our kite took the high pedestal. We quickly found a pay phone and called her mother, who had a space cleared for the trophy by the time we reached her home.

What We Learned

That was eight contests ago. No, we are not kite hobbyists, aficionados, amateurs or professionals. Kite building is just something we do, one of many things we do, to build and strengthen our relationship.

Once a year we think about the theme of the kite Elvis keeps coming up but we haven't done him yet. Then at some point we head over to King's Hobby for wood and Hobby Lobby for other stuff. Then we futz. We've done two-sticker kites and three-sticker kites; I have even entered the Adult Unusual category with a with a B-17 kite and an upside-down-tri-box-toboggan kite, but I didn't win. I did bring home the bacon one year in the smallest kite category: my entry was a three sticker kite that measured only 20 square millimeters and flew high on 25 feet of fine thread. Someday we want to enter the biggest kite category, but tackling 100 or more square feet of kite-making seems a bigger task than we're willing to undertakeat the moment.

Once or twice we have completed our kite with enough time left over to test fly it before the competition. We've flown in cold, hot, sunny, overcast, squally and dead calm kite competitions. Mom has joined us a few times; she also has helped in building a kite a few times.

Kite building did not repair my relationship with my ex-wife. It did not help us figure out how to navigate the minefield of divorce, custody, and the severing of our joint history. It did, however, help me hang on to my daughter. It gave us, as father and daughter, something that was ours alone to nourish, build and savor. It became a metaphor for our relationship, which now soars higher than any kite we've built.

The Zilker Kite Festival will go on as usual this year. There will be vendors, music, exhibitions and thousands of store-bought kites filling the sky. Each year I wonder whether the mundane, in the form of homemade kites, will still carry weight and fly. So far, it has. But it becomes more elusive with each passing year.

I watch with sadness the parents, usually fathers, who are turned away at the kite registration tables. It has to be homemade, the judges say of these fathers' kites, all of which are store-bought. I want to tell these men that a few hours of playing solitaire or poker on the computeror whatever their solitary hobby of choice may becannot compare with the sheer beauty of building a kite with their child. Lash two sticks together and cover them with yesterday's stock market results and you will receive higher dividends. I promise.

Chelsea may not deserve to win these competitions with such ease, but she does deserve a father at her side, no matter what his relationship with her mother. Our kite building made that possible. It, or something like it, could do the same for all fathers.

Whenever I think I am reading too much into my kite-building-as-family-saving metaphor, I need only look at the first kite my daughter and I built eight years ago. It is not the kite itself, but rather the words my daughter penned in marker on the back that inspire me. I do not know whether she was thinking of Mommy and Daddy's divorce when she wrote them, and neither does she, but I have a hunch she was thinking of all of us, together, forever, in whatever childlike form that would take. Sitting amongst flowers and rainbows, Chelsea wrote this: