11 February
A normal man pretending to be a crazy man pretending to be a normal man talked to us on the beach.
He wasn't pretending that he knew how to fly the kite. Not even a crazy man would have pretended that. Keeping a kite in the air is not easy. It isn't easy anywhere, but it is especially difficult on the beach.
I thought about the last time I had tried to fly a kite on the beach. Kite after kite slipped through my fingers and sailed off inland to entangle themselves in trees or to wrap their naked legs around telephone wires.
On one occasion, four friendly strangers (both to me and to each other) teamed up to help me disentangle an amorous kite. We spaced ourselves out twenty feet apart along the kitestring and pedaled sand and coordinated hand movements designed to coax the kite back to its proper place. We all got sand in our eyes and the kite remained wrapped in the wires and one by one the friendly strangers left to keep on leading their lives.
I tried to tell this story to the normal man, but he didn't understand, or he pretended not to.
BB
