Tonight Eileen and I watched the movie, “Saving Mr. Banks.” Like so many movies that don’t have aliens,
explosions, tanks or hotrods, it wasn’t one I was naturally drawn to. I didn’t bother with it at the theater, and
even waited a while after it came out to rent it from Vudu.com. Also, like so many movies that I am not
naturally excited to see, I ended up loving every minute and was engrossed,
enthralled and riveted to the very end.
“Saving Mr. Banks,” deals with the Author P. L. Travers, Walt
Disney, and the making of the book, Mary Poppins,” into a movie. Without giving anything away for those who
have not seen it, (I hate that…almost as much as I hate the term ‘spoiler
alert’) there were a few things that connected with me in a personal way. The first was the setting in Australia, my
home country. The second was the musical
and artistic importance in the translation of storytelling, and how possessive one
can be about their own characters and work.
It’s a sentiment I more than have just a passing familiarity with. The third was a brown, butcher-paper kite…
I didn’t know my Grandfather for long and did not know him
well. He died when I was very small,
when I was still young enough that to think that all adults were born looking
that way, and existed only to listen to my ideas of fancy. His name was Jack, but to me he was Grandpa.
I have a few pictures of he and I, and in them, he looks as I remember
him today, but I don’t look anything like anyone I recall. When he would visit our house in the suburbs
of Sydney, which was often, he would inevitably find his way to the work bench
under one corner of the house, beside the carport. There he would spend time tinkering with
whatever he wanted to do. When I think of him, it’s at the work bench that I
see him. He would look down at me over
his glasses and speak to me in short, soft sentences. I loved him, and remember feeling secure when
he was around.
One day, after seeing Mary Poppins at the drive-in with the family,
I asked him to make a kite for me. My
father was a pilot, and of course I loved anything that would fly. In just a short period of time, Grandpa had
crafted a brown, butcher-paper kite with a wooden cross brace, complete with a string
through the middle. I was so excited I
must have squealed with joy. For the
next several hours I dragged that kite around the back yard, trying everything I
could to get it to fly. Grandpa stood
with his arms folded at the back of the house, watching over me as I tossed it
up and ran, laid it on the ground and bolted to the back fence, threw it up into
the air and dashed like a wild dog across the lawn, zigging and zagging, pulling the string and hoping
to catch the wind.
After a while and quite out of breath, I inspected the kite
more closely and found that Grandpa had covered both sides of the kite with the
heavy brown paper, making it not only too heavy but also unable to fly. I brought it to his attention, but he said
instead that it probably needed a tail.
He took the kite back to the work bench and fashioned a long tail from
string and brown butcher-paper bow-ties.
To this day, I can clearly remember being impressed and inspired by how
beautifully crafted the kite was, with its perfectly formed bow-tie tail and
long diamond shape. Even the bow-ties on
the tail grew smaller in size toward the end. Other than some fresh grass stains from hard
landings, it was stout and undamaged. I'm
sure I spent a lot more time running around the back yard in hopes that I could get
it take off. I don’t remember quitting
or stopping, but I have no doubt that I was exhausted when I finally did. That may have been his plan all along,
although I doubt it. He really did want
to see it soar as much as I.
Later, I showed the kite to my dad. He knew immediately what to do to get it
flying, but I didn’t want it changed.
Instead, I put the kite in a corner of my bedroom where I could see it
from my bed. That corner was home to
the things I valued…a guitar, some model airplanes I had built, and now Grandpa’s
kite. I wish I still had it.
Grandpa was very
creative. He was a master needle point
artist, and would also make animals and other shapes from pipe cleaners. (You never see them anymore, but when a man
wanted to clean the stem of his tobacco pipe, he used a disposable, thin, cotton
covered piece of wire, about 6 inches long).
He was also a fine mechanic and possessed many other talents, I'm certain.
He also had a darkish side, according to
Dad, and would ignore Grandma for days at a time if he was upset about
something.
It’s funny, thinking about Grandpa and the kite. What a thing of such beauty, so as to be perceived
by me as a small child. It didn’t fly
worth a damn, but looking back, I’m not sure that was its purpose. His devotion
for me was expressed not in the functionality of the thing, but in its loving
and careful construction. To this day
that brown, butcher-paper kite that lived almost all of its life in the corner
of my bedroom in its place of honor, was perhaps the most perfect of things I have ever known. Now when I build, or weld, woodwork, write
or compose music, I can often feel and touch with my mind’s eye, the smooth whittled
cross-brace, the crisp clean folds of the fragile paper skin and the perfectly symmetrical
wings of the bow-ties that seemed to shrink ever smaller on their way to the
feathered string tail that made up the end of the kite. These images serve to motivate and inspire me
in ways I am not always conscious of.
I’d like to think that Grandpa lives on in my life like his
kite. Not everything I’ve done has
worked out. No matter how much I try to “drag”
some poorly imagined idea to fruition, more often than just on occasion, it doesn’t
fly. I would, however, like to think
that the things I build in life at least have the attention and artistry that
lives somewhere in my DNA, just like my Grandpa before me. My dad used to tell me, whenever we spoke of
Grandpa, that I was the “apple of his eye.”
There is something wonderful in that.
There is something important in how you hold the vision of someone you
are doing something for. There is
something imperative between the artist, the beneficiary of that rare gift of
an item, a poem or a song, a story, a sculpture, a painting or yes, even a
brown butcher-paper kite
