Jonathan Meyer.

At times I feel that my generation, like all others before mine, has some serious faults. I’m a prideful person who tries not to talk down to the things I care about, so where might this come from? I’ll tell you, the lack of kite flying that this generation has done is deeply concerning. This weekend I feel I did my own part in educating my fellow “Gen Z” folks.

While I’ll take credit for actively getting my roommates to fly some kite’s with me, my parents did the dirty work so to speak. A few weeks ago they visited for some reason or another, a part of their visit included a few gifts. The gifts weren’t all for me, imagine that, they bought four beautiful dollar general kite’s for us to sail through the air of Iowa with. Now I give my parents a lot of credit for their character and the people that they are, but they went above and beyond with these gifts for my four roommates. Three of the kite’s had pretty normal designs on them. Two had airplanes and another had an orange dragon. Whether it was all that was left or an intentional practical joke, the fourth kite had a unicorn with plenty of rainbows, perfect for my outdoors man, Alaskan roommate Caleb. His reaction to his gift was something that I have often found myself replaying in my head, “Aww man, thank you guys, I appreciate the gift! Wait, what the hell…”.

Now the kite’s found themselves in storage for a few weeks before the opportunity arose to test out the aerial capability of the plastic and string configurations from Dollar General’s top brand of kite. This weekend the weather was perfect, warm and windy. We have the luxury of having a large open prairie that our cross country course sits on, only five minutes of walking away from our dorm room. Around 6:00 pm Saturday, the spirit moved us to assemble our four amateur flying devices, those of which Ben Franklin would be proud of.

As a pretty cautious person I made sure to walk with my kite close to my chest to avoid any unwanted early flying. My roommates weren’t quite as cautious. Chris threw his up into the wind as soon as we got the door and Dawson followed right along. The early flight somehow resulted in an incident of someone stepping on someone else’s kite tails. After some slight maintenance all the kite’s were ready to be flown and enjoyed. For the first five minutes this was great! Our two dollar contraptions were so entertaining and actually relaxing.

Believe it or not, Caleb the Alaskan outdoorsman ended up breaking his kite in about five minutes. For all his strengths, assembling and flying a kite might not be one of them. With his departure three of us remained out in the empty field. What started as a simple and easy gift turned into well over an hour of fun for three out of four roommates. That’s a win in my book!

With spring here all the way, I’d recommend all young people get outside and learn to fly one of these absolute treasures. You may experience a steep learning curve (we did) but it is so worth it!

Until the unicorn and rainbow kite takes flight, I’m Just Jonathan

Jonathan Meyer is a 2022 STC graduate who currently attends Wartburg College. With passion for his community, Jonathan continues to serve as a correspondent and columnist with the News-Chronicle. Just Jonathan was recognized in the 2024 Iowa Newspaper Association’s Master Columnist competition.