Wear goggles in a tiny plastic pool
“You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.” – Vernon Howard
Recently the humble cardboard box was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame, joining just 36 other toys: Alphabet Blocks, Barbie, Bicycle, Candy Land, Checkers, Crayola Crayons, Duncan Yo-Yo, Easy Bake Oven, Erector Set, Etch A Sketch, Frisbee, G.I. Joe, Hula Hoop, Jack-in-the-Box, Jacks, Jigsaw Puzzle, Jump Rope, LEGO, Lionel Trains, Lincoln Logs, Marbles, Monopoly, Mr. Potato Head, Play-Doh, Radio Flyer Wagon, Raggedy Ann, Rocking Horse, Roller Skates, SCRABBLE, Silly Putty, Slinky, Teddy Bear, Tinkertoy, Tonka Trucks, and View-Master. Remember any of those?
As the weather warmed this June, we moved our lives outside. “She needs a real pool,” we said to each other. “That little yellow plastic one from last year is just pathetic – it’s just too little. She needs a bigger one.” So we bought her one, an above ground fancy job with a ladder and a pump and a cover, one that holds four and a half gazillion pounds of water.
The Very Large Pool Box sat unopened in our dining room for a while. “Maybe it’s too deep,” I said one night after dinner as we sat talking, the girls having run off to other, more interesting things. “She likes to run and jump – she can’t really do that in this big pool,” Mr Brilliant responded. We sat and sweated and digested and pondered some more.
A few weeks ago, I went upstairs to see where Tessie had gone, the quiet disconcerting from a child who Lives Out Loud like a tiny, determined Janis Joplin. I peeked into my office door, a trail of yellow objects leading me to it, small squares wrapped in light translucent yellow, like stepping stones to the Holy Grail, identical in shape and size, arranged in a long line through the room. I followed them, these sturdy puffs of yellow, to find Tess bent over double, her head on one of them on the floor, still wrapped. “What are these, Tess?” I asked, realizing in that moment what they were. “Pillows!” she exclaimed. “Lots and lots of pillows! Pillows! Pillows! Pillows!” And so, hours of play are sometimes derived from the most unlikely of places, a bag of still-wrapped Extra-Maxi Always Sanitary Pads providing dozens of beautiful puffy pillows for her dolls, and for her little head, too.
As British educational theorist Cathy Nutbrown has said, “Pausing to listen to an airplane in the sky, stooping to watch a ladybug on a plant, sitting on a rock to watch the waves crash over the quayside – children have their own agendas and timescales. As they find out more about their world and their place in it; they work hard not to let adults hurry them. We need to hear their voices.”
Perhaps we also need to hear our own voices again.
Physicist Richard Feynman has written that “play is hard to maintain as you get older. You get less playful. You shouldn’t, of course.”
We had a pirate birthday party for Tess in early June, her fourth. And yes, a cake to rival last year’s fire truck cake was concocted, this one a pirate ship complete with Milk Dud cannon balls, a wafer plank, Tootsie Roll cannons, and orange gummy life rafts. Yet of all the elaborate preparations, the thing the pirate children liked the best was Mr Brilliant’s chalk drawings of circles and wavy lines on our long front walk, an obstacle course full of crocodiles as he created stories about jumping from island to island. Chalk, sidewalk, imagination, story.
One of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen, I saw on an airport shuttle bus at National Airport in Washington, D.C., when we lived there.
Flying home from someplace exotic like Indianapolis or Minneapolis, someplace with a teeny tiny apolis at the end of it, I lugged my heavy bag onto the shuttle, so ready to get back to my car in the parking lot, to get home, at last. As I rolled and lurched with the action of the shuttle bus, I noticed an airport worker across from me, identifiable by his DCA identification badge hanging around his neck, an older man, likely at the end of his career. He looked tired, as if he had taken this trip many, many times.
He had on the dark overalls of a janitor or maintenance worker, his hands ashy grey as he held what was an ancient lunch box, a dark green metal lunch box that was decades old, that he had likely carried to National Airport every day for forty years, one hinge held together with a big, heavy safety pin, dented and worn, the green paint shiny in places and worn off in others, dark where the dents were and light where the paint had rubbed through to grey metal. I watched as he sat holding the dark plastic handle, one of those on metal hinges at each end, that lies flat when the hinges are folded, and that raises to allow a grip when the hinges are extended. His lunchbox was older than I was. It had a beauty that could not be replicated, the wornness of his hands, the imprint of his days.
“To poke a wood fire is more solid enjoyment than almost anything else in the world,” Charles Dudley Warner once said. A simple, spectacular pleasure, that. To play in a cardboard box might come in a close second.
