I think I may have been a stupid child
Whenever it starts to warm up this time of year and I see people flying kites on the beach, it makes me think back to a to an incident of when I was a stupid kid. Of course there were several incidents of me being a stupid kid, but kites make me think of a specific one.
I was about 5 years old when my family took us for a week long trip to the beach. I don’t know what beach it was, because when you’re a kid, there’s only one beach - THA beach. It’s all the same place to an undeveloped mind. Tospsail is Wrightsville and Wrightsville is Topsail.
The first day of the trip my parents took from what little money they had and bought me one of those lowest-quality kites. I remember it today. It had white plastic with a mean looking bird painted on it. It was a red bird with yellow and black eyes. I flew it off of the roof of our rented beach house before dinner. I loved it.
The second day on the beach, I forgot to bring my kite with me. Well low and behold! There was a middle-aged couple walking along the beach in front of me - flying my kite! It was my red bird with yellow and black eyes; and these old people had it. I started crying my eyes out.
I was too upset to tell my mom why, but she finally got it out of me. She started laughing at me and told me that they make more than one of each type of kite. I didn’t believe her. Although I was usually a quiet and undemanding kid, I made her take me back to our beach house and show me that my kite was still there.
As we walked back towards our cottage, I had these wildly disturbing images in my head of that middle-aged couple breaking into our house with ski-masks, for the sole purpose of taking my kite. I could see them rummaging through our downstairs shower, with the old wife whispering to the old husband, “Be very quiet! I just can’t wait to get my hands on that little boy’s kite, so I can fly it myself right in front of him on the beach tomorrow. We are so delightfully evil! Heh heh!”
My mom and I finally got to the cottage and of course my kite was right where I left it. I felt really stupid. But still to this day, when I see old people flying kites, I can’t help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, that old couple did steal my kite; and when they saw me they were afraid of getting arrested, so they ran back ahead of us and put it back where they had found it. It’s either that, or I was a very stupid kid.