Until this summer, I had only seen this plane hanging in my grandmother’s house, in the old home office that was my grandfather’s. It was so familiar that it became one of those parts of a home that merges into the background. This summer of 2025, my mother and I were tasked with finally dismantling everything in the house to put into storage because my grandmother had died several years ago, and it was finally time. It was given to my grandfather many years ago because of his history in the air force, and it won a place of honor in the office window, placed right where it cast a beautiful profile in the sunlight.

I am constantly being introduced or reintroduced to things Dad made that I had cursory knowledge of or had no idea existed. For instance, the plane’s pilot will wave a big hello in tandem with the propeller being pushed. It’s whimsical but also sophisticated: both motions are seamless, and somehow the waving hand is done in a half-circle rotation that makes it much more lifelike.

It’s a playful object, but given to someone important to dad, even if he could never very directly tell my grandfather how much he meant to him. He used to talk to me all the time as a kid about how my grandfather was a good, kind person, and it made my father sad that he died when I was still a toddler and never got to see me grow up. He didn’t share this with my mother, which is why I think the plane is much more than just a toy plane. As a work, it’s an evolutionary point between the race car with its salvaged, reclaimed parts, and then the tin that begins to make a regular appearance in Dad’s art. The plane’s tin is a very different form of the medium than the note that his art ended on, but the gentle patterning of the nails and how it’s rounded over the wood base shows the evolution.

- Misa Kobayashi