Kite

Every day at work, I stare out my window at an old ironwood tree behind a Jiffy Lube with a rainbow kite stuck at the top of it. The kite belonged to a man that passed away, David Ross. David lived in a halfway house for mentally ill residents located behind a Jiffy Lube next to my office. Before I noticed the kite, I noticed David. David made himself decidedly noticeable, as paranoid schizophrenics with multiple facial tattoos often do. He would cruise by my window on his bike several times a day on his way back and forth to a gas station to purchase tall-boy beers in paper sacks. With each visit to the gas station, his maneuvering on the bike became more and more erratic. I used to wonder why he didn’t just buy a bunch of beer at the beginning of the day instead of making all those trips; but I guess it gave him something to do or maybe a sense of purpose. Between gas station trips, he would sit on the lawn beside the Jiffy Lube playing guitar and singing at the tops of his lungs, or conspiring with some homeless men who hang out on the block, each man with their own tall boy in hand. His only other known hobby (to me) was kite flying. At the height of his day-drunkenness, he liked to wow the drivers on Charlotte Avenue by flying his kite, laughing maniacly. I never saw him get arrested or approached by police, although I’m not sure if kite flying from the sidewalk of one of Nashville’s busiest streets is in illegal or not. Either because I am obsessed with human depravity or just a concerned citizen, I get Facebook updates from Metro Police whenever there are felony arrests in the area. One day I got one with David’s picture saying he had been stabbed to death in a barn by a homeless man during an argument. I felt like I had been punched in the stomach and my eyes got all watery. I mentioned it to my other coworkers who share the same window view. We talked about how we used to speculate on what the letters on his tattoos spelled out. Now that I can see them close up, they raise more questions and curiosity than answers. David’s kite is getting bleached out by the sun and will disintegrate or fall out of the tree eventually, but until then it makes me very, very sad. I think about the literal window I had into his life- he never noticed me. I wonder about his family and how much they must have worried about him, the hopes his parents must have had for him, and how his life turned out.