Authors: Tal Streeter
Date Submitted: May 31, 2001
Article Type: Journal

In the summer of my tenth birthday, my father sawed thin, narrow sticks out of a pine board for me. I scissored a diamond shape out of a sturdy brown grocery bag and used rice paste made over the oven burner to glue it to the sticks. It was my first kite, the first kite I made, and it possessed a kind of magic as I felt it lift out of my finger’s grasp, run upward higher and higher, then come to rest flying smoothly in the clouds high above. It was also the first kite I had ever flown, and the experience, perhaps enhanced by my having made the kite myself, somehow or other in my mind at least, was something that forever set me apart from my school mates and friends who had never flown a kite.

Our daughter Lissa celebrated her tenth birthday during the period when our family lived in Japan and the three of us— Lissa, her mother and I—made our first visit to India. She was still dependent on us, but a wonderful facility for languages—she spoke and understood Japanese—had given her an aura of self-assurance unusual for a ten-year old. Within a surprisingly short time, she had become an adroit traveler.

I wished I could enter her mind, wondering what I might learn from her perceptions of these countries we traveled in, so different from our own. Early on in India, one of her acquisitions made with her own money was a little Indian mirror she had picked out from among a variety of items on the table at a street vendor’s stall. Though she was not at all vain, far from it, the novelty of having her own mirror attracted her and she pulled it out often. When I carried her on my shoulders, for example, she reached down to put it in front of my face so I could see both of us reflected in the mirror’s glass.