Crafts, retrospect: paper airplanes, part 2

Self-tutoring about people and events from the past: the tutor continues about paper airplanes.

In my previous post I mention paper airplanes and what fun I had with them when I was a kid. It was bonding time with my sister, which is to be cherished.

Later in life, I started to see kids at school fly paper airplanes during recess or lunch. These kids were often very artistic, and also part of counterculture in one way or another. What they loved doing, nobody could beat them at. Many, wearing punk rock T-shirts, leather wrist bands, and even dog collars, loved to fly paper airplanes.

Walking in “that part of the school” at lunch, you’d see them flying their newest planes or else folding them. Their designs were generations ahead of those my sister and I had made. Some were artistically decorated with marker.

When I would visit that hall, which I did a few times per month, I would get welcome looks from some, steely looks from some others, but ignored by most. None was violent; to them, I was a waste of time at worst. However, their subculture in that school made me very proud of them. (I never got a chance to tell them so.) I think we need more pioneers like they were – and hopefully still are.

Interestingly, teachers never seemed to visit that area during lunch, even though, in theory, someone had lunch duty. Perhaps the teachers knew that law and order, if of a unique kind, was maintained there by those artistic kids, who folded, coloured, and flew paper airplanes to self-express and belong.