Reliving my childhood through these writing prompts is admittedly a mixed bag. Some memories are so clear in my mind, they could have happened yesterday. Others are shrouded in fog, and others are simply deleted, whether for efficiency or protection.
When I received this prompt, I was actually stymied for a bit. What toys did I play with? Did I actually play with toys? I’m sure I did, but do I remember them? And of the toys I remember playing with, which were my favorite? Did I have favorites?
The stand-outs in the ancient memory bank were what must have been my brothers’ toys: GI Joes, plastic army men, an Erector Set, Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs. I know I had Barbie dolls but the boys would use them on failed GI Joe rescue missions and they would end up in the slimy frog pond in the backyard. (Note on the frog pond – I think it was a goldfish pond once upon a time when my parents first moved to that house. It became a frog pond after being neglected. I never knew it in any other state than green and slimy.) I recall very distinctly the disassembled rifles and shotguns we were given to play army with in the woods. We did this often and my weapon of choice was a sawed-off .22 – mostly because it was the smallest and the lightest, like me.
I remember a picnic table and its accompanying tea set, suitable for a little girl, received at Christmas. It was a novelty, to be sure, but not deserving of the favorite label. I have vague recollections of an Easy-Bake Oven, a wood-burning art set and a life-size talking doll. There was the Etch-a-Sketch and the thing you made crazy designs with multi-colored pens. I went through phases of crafty things: pot-holders, crocheting, macramé. None of these things hold the staying power of the sawed-off .22, playing war out in the woods with my brothers.
I don’t remember at what age I transitioned from toys to music and books. It may have been around the age of eight. In my eighth year, there was radical change in my household: a new baby was born, my oldest brother left home, and nothing was ever the same afterward.
One of my most favorite possessions was a record-player and lots of records. I owned the soundtrack to Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book. I can still sing every word of every song on both of those albums. Try me. I dare ya. I played the grooves out of Grand Funk Railroad’s version of “Locomotion” dancing around my bedroom. I inherited loads of 45’s – Herman’s Hermits, the Yardbirds, the Monkees. I even had the Who’s Magic Bus album. I was most definitely a hip kid.
The first book that I remember receiving as a gift was that year: my step-mother’s older sister gifted me Charlotte’s Web, in hardcover. I had always been a reader, and that one gift changed the trajectory of what would be considered “play” for me from then on. Whatever happened around me, whatever chaos ensued, I could escape in a book – the thicker the book, the smaller the typeface, the better. At one very trying time in my life, I was reading The Secret Garden. I do believe it saved me. Trips to the library meant armfuls of books that would not last me until the next trip. I read many things more than once to fill the time. I have been known to inhale the written word like others breathe. If I am reading, I am lost to the outside world and fully engulfed and engrossed in the world in which I am living vicariously.
Not surprisingly, I was voted Class Bookworm in the eighth grade. I read everything that I could understand in the local library, including articles about DNA and rDNA. I read everything I could get my hands on in the school library. My teachers would give me what they were reading as assignments, rather than what the class was reading, largely because I had already read it and it was child’s play for my geeky mind – imagine my book report assignment one year was on The Bourne Identity, loaned to me from my teacher’s collection. The joy of a good book lasts only as long as the reading of it. Which for me, wasn’t, and still isn’t, long at all.