School years in my youth—grade school and junior high—were as inflexibly organized and observed as zodiacal years of a professional astrologer.  There was, as the Preacher saith, a time for everything and everything in its ordained time.

            It was a mysterious process, because it was unclear how we all knew—like migrating birds or 17-year locusts—to act at once, without signal, volition or intention to rekindle certain annual rituals.  It was easy to know when to break out the buckle galoshes and the Flexible Fliers, if there were inches of snow on the ground.  It was easy to know when to buy and build kites:  they appeared in the dime stores, and by the time we assembled them and tied together fugitive balls of twine, March winds were up and steady.

            Other seasonal fads were controlled by subliminal urges and actions.  One day in May, kids appeared with bags of marbles, and impromptu marbles tournaments bloomed like daffodils.  Or a few squirt guns appeared on the playground and by the next day, we were all armed and dangerous and a state of the war of all against all (Hobbes’ state of nature) existed on playground and streets.  Total war, too, civilians as readily soaked as gun-toters.

            Yoyos appeared on dime store counters, sometimes with lavish displays and appearances by the phenomenal Filipino twins who did endless tricks with the toys.  We all brought our Duncan yoyos, ranging from the basic red-and-black cheapo model to haughty specials painted gold or silver and studded with genuine glass diamonds.  We carried extra strings in our pockets and gathered in rings on playgrounds to practice and learn—walking the dog, around-the-world, putting the baby to sleep, spidery cat’s cradle maneuvers.  They all looked easy till you tried.

            Kites were sold in all shapes and sizes.  A favorite was a flying US flag, like a Hail Columbia shield of stars and stripes.  The cheapest were minimalist one-color jobs, but you could also buy box kites that needed gale force winds to get airborne, bigger and smaller diamond-shaped models, kites printed with colors and slogans and names—Hi-Flyer, CloudBuster.  With a smidgen of ambition and imagination, you built your own, using any paper that was aerodynamic.

            We didn’t have the exotic world-culture kites available now—shaped like birds or fish or butterflies or WW I biplanes or other images, in rainbow colors.  Kite flying in my world was for ordinary schoolkids, not yoga aficionados or transcendental meditators or mock-Tibetan wannabes.  It was just for fun, to learn absorbing, complex and wholly useless skills.  To fly a fragile structure of thin pine sticks, string and tissue paper in an Indiana March cyclone was as tricky as handling a sailboat in a tsunami but without the glory.  A yachtsman would be rich and exotic—socially powerful, aristocratic—while a kite flyer was a lazy bum and arrant time-killer.

            The act of launching and stabilizing a kite was tricky, the transition from inert to mobile, from earth to sky, fraught with peril.  With too little wind, the kite leapt into a death-spiral, looping headlong into the ground, instantly breaking its spine.  With too much wind, the kite rose spasmodically, jerking from side to side, hit the end of the paid-out twine, broke its back and crumpled into a sad wad of torn paper and shattered sticks before fluttering dead to the ground.

            Sometimes a tail was needed for stability, but it was hard to judge.  We tied rags to the bottom and crossed our fingers.  On a perfect day, the untailed kite rose swiftly and smoothly.  Flying high and steady,  without diving, jinking or crashing.  If you had enough twine, you paid it out till the kite was a bright speck hanging in the blue sky.  In late afternoon, it shadowed a day-moon like a ghost.  The act was soothing and Zen-like, without goal or purpose, without pay-off or glory.  It was means and end, process and product, all at once, perfect for kids, who need no rationale, justification or goals for play.  If adults believe “virtue is its own reward,” children know that unlimited, unconditional play is its own reward.

            My biggest kite adventure—a Moby Dick of kite time—came when my older brother bought a war surplus Navy target kite.  It was designed to be towed by a jeep or a ship and give antiaircraft gunners a cheap, easily launched target.  It was about 6 feet tall by 3 feet across, made of sky-blue parachute nylon with heavy 2 x 4 cross-sticks and equipped with an aluminum rudder that could be controlled by auxiliary strings or wires.  On it was painted a black aircraft silhouette—a Mitsubishi Zero or maybe a Focke Wulfe 190.  It was as heavy (and airworthy) as an outhouse or a sea chest.  It was hard to drag it around on the ground.  How to launch it?  What gauge string, wire or rope to tether it?

            My brother and friends took it to a nearby park with a big meadow.  I tagged along to witness.  It was a fiercely windy day, my brother had nylon line about the size of clothesline, wrapped around a small log.  He and his friends tried to hurl the behemoth up into the wind.  Repeatedly, it rose and then dove, dangerously, menacingly.  It was big enough to pile-drive a person into the turf.  Someone drove a car onto the meadow and another guy sat in the open trunk, holding the kite.  The driver goosed the car into motion, the big kite was snatched from the launcher’s hands and shot upward like a demented firework.  My brother tried to pay out line, but the kite ripped the whole log and wad of nylon from his grip and continued its vertical ascent, trailing its tether.  Then it slowed, slammed into an invisible barrier—the jet stream?  a force field?—and imploded.  Just like the dime store kites, it crumpled into itself as if in a giant’s grasp and showered to earth in pieces.  Someone said, in deepest awe, “Cool!”

            Other seasonal rituals were more purposeful, even organized.  We used squirt guns to ambush the unarmed and to challenge the armed.  We chased girls (they adhered to their own liturgy of seasonal play—hopscotch, rope-jumping, doll-dressing, etc.)—to terrorize them with soakings.  We squirted passing dogs or—better!—cats.  We menaced lower-grade kids not yet inducted into the fads and crazes.

            We also organized into teams or squads, agreed on boundaries, turned gunfights into variants of capture the flag or kick the can.  Alliances and truces were forged and broken.  Warfare reigned for a few days, and everyone got into trouble with teachers, parents, siblings, storekeepers and other authorities.  A drawerful of squirt guns were impounded till the end of school.  It was a spell of anarchy as glorious as a genuine revolution.  We were bandits and outlaws banished to the greenwood and unaccountable to manners and rules.  Such a cheap and simple saturnalia!

            The weaponry of water fights evolved.  I found a couple of pre-War  water pistols in our toybox—stamped tin guns operating on a hypodermic principle.  New squirt guns at the dime store were molded of bright, translucent plastic (the post-War miracle material, a fabulous treasure from the Planet Mongo!) and worked like pumps.  One Christmas I got a squirt Thompson submachine gun that held about a quart—the ancestor of today’s behemoth supersoakers. 

            Yoyos, unlike other toys, actually demanded skill, coordination and practice and came close to being like “official” Games that Are Good for You.  But they were solitary skills, not exactly competitive, so they were also like magic tricks or weird talents like inverting your tongue, cracking double-jointed fingers or turning your eyelids inside-out.  You could practice your yoyo anywhere, anytime.  It didn’t require acres of room, clear, breezy weather, a water supply or accessories.  It only demanded you be willing to waste time and energy learning a wholly useless set of manual skills.  It wasn’t dangerous, unless you hit yourself or surrounding objects with the whirling wooden wheel.  (I was told that Filipinos developed the yoyo originally as a hand weapon, but I thought this a preposterous lie of Munchausen proportions.)  A yoyo was as useless—and as elegant—as a hummingbird or a piano sonata.

            Marbles I followed, though I sometimes kibitzed.  At home were bags of gorgeous old glass marbles—aggies, shooters, whatever the jargon was—and I did trade some with hardcore marbles enthusiasts.  I admired the elegance and symmetry of the game as I watched, but it was too severe for a kid with manual dexterity defeated even by a game like tiddly-winks.  The few times I tried marbles, they either went nowhere or soared into deep grass beyond the marbles arena.

            In the Byzantine miniature cosmos of school society, other seasonal fads flourished—flying 10-cent balsa gliders, playing mumblety-peg (jack knives were semi-taboo), games of checkers or dominoes, wearing odd regalia like propeller beanies, carrying cool lunch boxes or pencil cases, exhibiting exotic toys like Slinkies or Silly Putty, bringing comic books to swap.  Ephemeral whims and crazes came and went and brightened the grey sameness of school and lessons.

            Like all hieratic societies, our grade school culture demanded attention to decorum and detail.  We were clothing snobs as haughty and rigorous as Beau Brummel—Keds sneakers or none, Levi’s jeans or none, proper tee-shirts and neat clothes.  Poor kids in bib-and-tucker overalls or ragged flannel shirts went to the wall, patronized and snubbed.  We were careless and thoughtless, intent on ourselves and our roles in the rites and requisites of our group.

            The little ceremonies of seasonal change made us happy and secure.  It was March for true if we flew kites, as if the kites conjured spring from winter’s earth.  It was May and summer’s eve if we soaked each other with squirt guns or hunkered in the dirt with marbles.  Like Mayan stargazers, we anxiously marked the passing of the year with proper honors.  Children are Tories, and part of our character owed allegiance to tradition, pattern and certainty.  Only later did we rebel, experiment, be outlandish individualists.  Then we still lived as regimented as worker bees and as variegated as a field of daisies, turning our faces to the sun but each a solo microcosm, a little world made cunningly.  ###