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Took Lightning Bug to a kite-flying festival at the beach today.

Photo by Eric Coble

Some mental images:

The 30-foot-long squid kite that resembled nothing so much as a giant smiling Chiluly monstrosity, sending multiple children off the beach crying.

The food truck serving nothing but cookie dough which ominously never had any customers.

Lightning Bug renaming “The Headlands Playground” as “The Headless Playground”.

The multiple (always young) people who waded into the lake only to shriek “OH MY GOD IT’S SO COLD!  OH MY GOD IT’S FREEZING!” and promptly scramble back out.

The two teenage boys whose only activity was smashing rocks into other rocks to see if they could break open rocks.

The multiple young women sitting apart from each other, elegantly staring out into the water, oblivious to the kites around them, looking utterly alone yet not at all lonely.

Watching Lightning Bug as her kite flies higher and higher, the string twisting around her leg and visions of Captain Ahab’s final moments flash in my mind.

The sudden flashback, as I played out the string higher and higher on our kite, to my own childhood flying kites on the reservation on a dirt hill overlooking an unused dirt football field with a dozen other kids and our cheap kites as the sun sets and everyone is laughing and talking and it taught me what community felt like.

The look on Lightning Bug’s beaming face as her kite reached 50 feet into the sky and just floated there against the brilliant blue sky, and her knowing SHE had done this, was doing this with hundreds of other people at the very same time, that maybe this is what community feels like.