Paper Airplanes

For about as long as I can remember I loved making and flying paper airplanes.  There were all sorts of designs, sizes and types.  The needle nosed rocket, the wide winged soarers, many in between.  When I went to school at West Van Lear (6 room school for grades 1-8) we had a large (to me then HUGE) front "lawn" to play on at lunch and recess.  My friend Paul Mike Howard and I would, at times, go out and fly our paper airplanes.  He always seemed to have more talent at making them than I and that fell in line with all Else as he seemed to have more talent for everything than I.

We would make the basic designs and experiment with folding flaps on the wings for guiding them.  We either wanted to make them turn or keep them from turning to force them to go straight.  How long has that been now?  I think we were in the fifth grade then in Mrs. Mollette's class.  That would have made me around eleven years old.  Aging did not take away my love for paper airplanes.  Once we moved to the old "Blessing place" when I was thirteen (late Spring 1967) I still loved to experiment and fly my airplanes.

This place had a big, old (very old) house that sat up on a bank a good ways above the creek.  I can remember getting out in the front/side yard and hurling my planes up into the air.  Mostly they just circled a bit and came back down but, every once in a while, a special gust of wind would catch one and propel it out over the decline and it would soar for a few minutes like a kite without a sting.  I loved those times.  It is really the most simple pleasures in life that are the most important and leave the most lasting memories.

My brother taught me to make paper planes.  He made them differently than most everyone else did.  Rather than a one-piece folded piece of paper he would make a plane with a separate front and tail with folds that looked like two engines on the front. 

Trying to figure out just how long it  has been since I made one.  I don't think I even made them for my own kids so it has to have been a good many years.  But, they were great fun. 

I don't know what got me thinking of all this.  Perhaps it was Heather's descriptions of Haydn's origami.  When I was growing up we would not have know the meaning of origami though we did a lot of "paper folding" making airplanes, paper drinking cups and "fly catchers".

I think some part of us (or at least the most fortunate of us) never grows up completely and remains a child with that childlike wonder for discovering new things.  Discovering new things about out universe, our world, our people, ourselves is the most constantly interesting thing I can possibly imagine.  How poor is the life of a person who already "knows it all"!  How boring life must be without those daily discoveries.