Toyland

I can only guess what my mom or dad thought when they ventured out of the hallway past the threshold of our room, but I can tell you what the kid's eye view was from flat on the blue hooked rug.  On one wall were our bunk beds and the toy box and opposite were our two dressers and a bookcase. Our desks stood against the far wall while the wall nearest the doorway consisted primarily of murderous bifold metal closet doors..  The general effect, from ground level, was that of a box canyon, cliffs overhanging the chasm and detritus piled high against the canyon walls.

Hole in the Wall, Wyoming

It made for a narrow twisty path from door to the plateau of my top bunk. Once up the ladder I was like a character in a Western, safe behind my ramparts of stuffed animal friends, with a birds’ eye view of the goings on down below.  Winnie the Pooh, sewn by my mom in honey hued velveteen, Raggedy Ann with her black button eyes and replacement knees of hand-colored felt, Silver the tall gray poodle dog, and Charlie Brown, the understuffed floppy eared puppy, were just a few of the critters that I lined up every night so they could all watch me sleep.  

The narrow confines of our room became a fantasy land for the Breyer model horses we collected, or the menagerie of pipe cleaner and yarn animals Laura and I made.  We created camels and lions, deer and even a Pushmi-Pullyu...the herd we constructed included the equine protagonist of every horse story by Walter Farley and Marguerite Henry as well as Smoky the cow horse and Black Beauty. The artificial flowers my mom had yet to “antique” and her out-of-fashion head scarves were fair game for making our room the garden of Eden in our eyes.

Laura and I benefited from the talents and hobbies of our family: our Barbie doll dresses were trimmed in rick rack with darts, collars, even tulle and pleats.  My grandmother’s imagination led her to sew lovely glass buttons on tops as brooches or to hem a matching satiny scrap of fabric into a scarf for the swing back coat and dress ensemble.  I would say our Barbies were better dressed than any other little girls’....if not for the fact we instantly lost the shoes and earrings so our dolls were always barefooted.

The wagon load of homemade blocks my grandfather made more than sixty years ago show but little wear from the three generations of children who have built roads and castles and walls and fences from them. We drove our Matchbox cars over them and even made sixties style furniture...Scandinavian, I guess, for the Barbies to lounge on.

I remember our dollhouse.  It was a two story Colonial...metal….with plastic furniture that was all the same color.  We played with it lots….until the day my mom decided we were old enough...and careful enough...to be trusted with her dollhouse furniture. What an upgrade! Instead of molded monochromatic plastic, her childhood couch and chairs were padded and upholstered; the dressing table had a mirror and a skirted stool.  The radio had cathedral windows.  The single door refrigerator looked just like the one in our kitchen, but there was also an icebox.  The china family with their rosebud lips and their “nurse” were quaintly old fashioned, but also fragile, so we rarely used them in our play, spending most of our time rearranging the furniture as was our prerogative as females.

When we traveled, our ditty bags of prized possessions came along.  “Super balls and “creepy crawlers” , baseball cards and Matchbox cars: looking back, I now realize how much of what we prized cost less than a dollar bill.

The Matchbox display was right on front of the cashier at the local dime store, but we bought our baseball cards at the Walgreens next door. A quarter bought a toy, but a big gumball from the machine was still just a dime. As kids whose earning power was measured in pennies(for dandelions) or dimes per hour, our desires were constrained by our pocket change.

But not all our toys were “Made in Japan”. (In case you don’t remember, in the ‘60s that was code for “cheap”!)  Every Christmas our stockings would yield treasures like the wooden apple with a tiny tea set inside, or a bag of polished stones, a two toned ball with faceted sides that bounced in crazy directions or a sliding puzzle with a smiling frog and tiles numbered 1 through 31.  Looking back, I’m betting my mom found prizes like these in the Miles Kimball catalog, which ranked with the Christmas catalogs distributed by Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck as the subject matter for wishful thinking.

This New Year’s Day, the parades are over and football rules the big screen.  It’s way too cold to play outside.  How many kids are spending this afternoon playing with Barbies...or blocks...or puzzles?