“A stick, a cardboard box, and an old potato,” I said with an absolutely straight face.
“Hmm,” she said. “That doesn’t sound like much fun—except for the cardboard box.” Addy grinned in seriousness. The child can transform a box into anything. Her life is presently immersed in Barbies, and over the past season, for her collection of dolls, she’s constructed a schoolhouse, a theater, a restaurant, and an airplane—all made from cardboard boxes.
Oh sure, she enjoys her share of pre-made toys. Under the tree this year she’ll find plenty of new ones. Electronic whatzits and online whozits and fantastical contraptions that screech and boogie and leap and croon.
Yet mistake not the quiet call of a cardboard box in a child’s life.
When a kid can create her own fun, as a parent I respect that.
I respect it a lot.
Dewitt Lowrey, one of the original Band of Brothers, was telling me about the games he played as a kid growing up in Alabama during the Great Depression. One was called Mama Pig.
“You took an old Barlow knife with three blades and put the littlest blade in the ground,” Lowrey explained. “Then you tried to flip it to make the knife stick on the big blade.”
Clear joy filled his voice when he told me about Mama Pig. The game sparked a recollection, a remembrance of simpler times.
But then he shook it off and added, “Oh, but it would be far too dull for kids to play today.”
Maybe, I thought. But maybe not.
When my wife was a kid in the 1970s growing up in Ventura, California, she and a neighborhood friend created their own game called “Hide From Cars.” When I asked Mary to explain the game she shrugged nonchalantly.
“Well, that was it,” she said. “Cars came down the road, and we hid from them. It was a hoot.”
I understood perfectly. During winters in Canada when I was a boy, I chopped ice off the big rocks in our backyard. It must have appeared dull compared to anything you’d find in a store. Nothing to plug in or make noise. No lights or bells, whistles or scores. A real dud in the grand scheme of games.
But, oh it was exhilarating. Can you picture it?
You grabbed the ax firmly and went chop, chop, chip.
The ice slid off in slabs.
Sometimes when you swung your ax against the ice, the ice groaned and fought back. But you drove the ax down again harder, and up sparked a shower of powder. The wind whistling off the lake caught the fine frozen particles and carried them north into unknowingness. You felt shivery but powerful. It was your ax that broke through the blockage. Your sweat.
In the hands of a 10-year-old boy, you couldn’t buy a game that made you feel so grand.
I believe that every generation, no matter how much we insist we’re different from other generations, is basically the same. When we’re kids, we all enjoy our self-made games. Those games get placed into the enormous blender of who we become, the mixture of wonder and mystery, creativity and color.
How beautiful our boring games. Our cardboard boxes. Our Mama Pigs. Our Hide From Cars.
Maybe they are not so boring after all.
This Christmas, let more of those games begin.
Question: What “boring” games did you play when you were a kid?
11 comments:
I reall don't remember any boring games I played as a kid. Mostly because they were all not boring back then. Like you said for yourself, when you are a kid you have an other way of gaming and feeling grand.
What I remember well is my brother-in-law making his son a knight's castle out of a card box. Guess what his son said: 'Daddy I don't need anything for Christmas anymore, I already have everything'.
If life can be that easy for a adult again, that would be great. Sometimes I miss the easiness you have as a child.
Great article, Marcus and so true. We used to play kick the can when I was young. One person is "it" and everyone else hides. There's a can that's put on the ground. The people hiding try to kick the can before the person who is "it" finds them and jumps over the can. Simple and lots of fun!
By the way, my daughter is crazy about Barbies too.
Both my kids (3 and 5)love to play with boxes too, we are currently packing to move and they keep stealing them..
Another favourite they have is to spread a quilt or sheet over some dining chairs spaced apart and have a tent which they just sit or lay under.
Like most young boys, I could play with a stick, uh, I mean a gun ... for hours on end. Perhaps days. Being a diehard Star Trek fan (the original, of course), any stick that had the backwards handle that was more like a phaser than a normal gun was even more valuable.
Although they might not say it now (being teenagers and all), the kinds of toys you're describing have been my kids' favorites, too. One time when my oldest was out at her grandparents' house, there were no toys readily available, so Grammy put two pennies in a two liter pop bottle. Instant favorite toy.
Frankly, no fancy gadget will eclipse the box and the stick as the universal best toys ever...
I love these comments today. So good to hear these! Merry Christmas everyone.
I love this blog entry, it's so true! My best friend Alex and I were given a spoon by my mom.... only a very sturdy spoon would work. We would go outside in the backyard wooded area, and dig in the dirt for hours on end in the summertime. Oh, the treasures we would find! Worms, pill bugs, ants, etc. We would just say to each other, "Let's go dig!" and our eyes would fill with excitement!
Matches. Best toy ever. My brother almost started an overnight blaze whipped by wind over in Lakeview Heights back in the day. After that, matches weren't considered the best toy...until we discovered gasoline soaked tennis balls when we moved to Vancouver. Then we needed the matches again.
Brent
Hoo boy.
Good thing that last one was Anonymous, Marcus. He could quite possibly be investigated for a couple of raging infernos lately. I remember playing "caroms in the summer. It was a game similar to Billiard with it's own tables, wooden rings, and a sort of "cue stick" that you used to put the rings in the pockets at the corners of the table. merry Christmas, and thanks for all of these wiritngs that sometimes cause us to remember our own "cardboard box" playtimes.
"2 Square" with my Sister, it was a glorified version of catch, you had to bounce the ball once on the ground and then send it into her square and back and forth, we played on the sidewalk in front of the house, and sometimes we made up word games to go along with it like Easter Colors, and we had to name an Easter Color when the ball bounced, the one who ran out first lost lol you could add more friends at school and that was called "Four Square" and there were drawn lines on the asphault on the playground to do so. Wonder if the lines are still there at that grade school... ;-)
We use to play a game called My Car. We would sit on the porch and every time a car would pass the first one to yell MY CAR!! would get the car. It was so much fun!
Post a Comment