Pratt: With a little nudge, we all can soar

When I see a kid flying a kite, I remember the amazing discovery I and my little brothers made about my dad when we were in elementary school.
Beth Pratt


I don’t remember which, if any, of the three of us decided we needed to learn to fly a kite. Maybe we saw one brought to school. Chances are Dad decided we needed to know about flying kites because we could learn about air currents.

What really stands out in my mind was the size of our box kite. Dad made the kite from newspapers he stretched and taped or glued over a lightweight frame of sticks he had carefully measured and glued together. I remember him telling Mother to tear some fabric strips to make the tail of the kite, an important factor in how well the kite would fly, he explained. Her other assigned task was to get the roll of string.

We did not just walk into a store and buy kite string. This was string they had carefully collected from various sources over several years, tying ends together and winding it into a big ball of string over time. When you had lived so recently through the Great Depression, you learned to save or make do with whatever bits of things came your way.

The kite was in three sections, or boxes, and probably about 12 inches around and 36 inches in length. The middle box did not have paper stretched over it; it just connected the boxes on each end. I don’t know whether he had seen the pattern for a box kite in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which our grandparents sometimes passed along to us, or whether he had learned as a boy from his dad how to build kites.

Granddad, who lived just a mile away, was handy with hammer and nails. He made me a sturdy, little rocking chair and a table for my toddler tea parties.

But we had never seen any evidence our dad could do such crafts. He seemed to be all thumbs when it came to doing anything that smacked of handyman capabilities. We lived a long time with bare boards running horizontally in the living room. He thought it looked just fine. After World War II ended, Mother finally got the supplies, put up the wallboard and did the finishing work herself.

I was amused to see those big planks as finish work in one of the houses on the home show tour this year. The builder did put a wash of paint on the boards. We were just ahead of our time in being so rustic. I chuckle to think what my mother would have said about that house.

Dad had other priorities. As soon as we kids were big enough to look through the lens of his treasured telescope, he was showing us the moon and other planets.

He had little opportunity to continue his education beyond ninth grade because, as the eldest, he was needed to work on the farm. But by nature and interest he was a scientist, mathematician, theologian and historian. He was also shy and unassuming.

His paternal grandfather had been a school principal, and I learned later from my aunts that my dad had spent much of his childhood at his grandparents’ home near a small town in the Fort Worth area. His sisters said he read all the books in his grandfather’s library.

Eventually, his parents bought a farm in Hall County, later moving to Floyd County to rent land after the arrival of the boll weevil resulted in the loss of the farm in Hall County.

I’ve often wondered if given more opportunity for education, what profession my dad would have chosen. He had artistic gifts, too, something I didn’t realize until I was an adult.

So many people of his generation and circumstance in life did not learn to value their unique talents because those around them did not recognize or encourage those gifts. So, they spent their lives doing hard work in order to please parents or for lack of opportunity or exposure to other possibilities.

Don’t misunderstand me. Tilling the land is a worthy calling, but just as is true in every other profession, people sometimes do it because they don’t know there are other possibilities.

Every child deserves to have some adult — parent, teacher, family friend, relative — who helps them see possibilities for the future. Such encouragement needs to begin early in life and continue through adolescence. Sincere encouragement begats courage to take the unknown path.

My dad was content with his life. I just wish I had been a more attentive daughter as an adolescent, but maybe that kite won’t fly because it goes against nature. We have to get much older before we can really see our parents as real people, individuals apart from ourselves.

And about that kite my dad made; it flew well, very well indeed.




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