Ted, Ted, Ted

There is that famous scene in Stuart Little when Stuart puts on his sailor suit and goes down to the sailboat pond in Central Park, where he has a very salty time racing a stranger’s toy sailboat. Ten years ago I lived very near Central Park and I used to go down to that same pond some summer days to read and watch the boats. I don’t know when I realized that it was the pond E.B. White had written about, but it was exactly as he had described it. At the height of summer, when the weather was just to my taste and everyone seemed to be in a good mood, that was an enchanting place. Roller skaters prancing past, little jazz bands playing on the lawn nearby; I was pretty sure I’d never top it. I thought that until Laura and I went to the big Kite Festival at Crissy Field this weekend. Crissy Field is an old airstrip right next to the Golden Gate bridge that was just reopened after being despoiled by the military for many decades. The National Parks Service has put in some wetlands and vast acreages of lawn. It’s a spectacular public space, and the Parks people have done a fine job with it.Mary and Lillian were away on an overnight trip to Sonoma to take the baths and all that. Laura and I got up late, made some sandwiches and caught the northbound 28 bus through Golden Gate Park and the Presidio. The air was already full of kites when we got there and we headed straight for the kite-flying area, but then we had to stop to watch the old-fashioned airplanes that were doing tricks overhead. The wing-walker, Laura surmised, must have had a lot of practice, although what you would do to practice for wing-walking I don’t know.By noon there were so many people flying kites it looked like a snowstorm up there. The sun was flawless and the wind was precisely right: not too fast, not too soft. I wished E.B White had been there to describe it for us. We wandered into a huge white tent where people were making their own kites. Laura made one. It flew brilliantly on the first try. The whole day was going like that. There are those days when everything falls into place and you feel like you are barely touching the ground. The presence of all those kites reinforced the feeling. We sat on the grass for a while and watched whole teams of serious kite people fly giant kites in weird and intricate designs. There was a 30-foot gecko whose arms and legs seemed to swim through the air, and an even larger dragon that was so massive it needed another kite flying overhead to help it stay up. Later we met our friend Ian and his mom, Gail, and we made stone scuptures to add to the collection that has formed along the rocky part of the restored shoreline. I remembered those summers in Central Park, and I understood that those were good times, but they had nothing on the present.