Children are the aptest of pupils. Not merely like sponges, they see and hear all at a phenomenal pace of learning and then with super saturation, comes the unstoppable flood of vivacious imitation. We in turn, must stay alert and check our behavior as least as much as theirs in order to optimize the success of this growth spurt courtesy of Mother Nature. By 1958, the earliest manifestations of social education had developed in me, an eight year old, to the point that I had adopted, along with my brother, our own nuclear family of "children" comprising stuffed animals and inanimate objects (blankets and two-dimensional images of golden fleeced teddy bears clutching formula milk bottles) all of which we named, animated as puppets in numerous improvisations, and assigned dates of birth, histories as well as unique personalities and lives of their own. There was Timmy, my second born (like myself), a teddy with dark brown pelt, limbs that rotated quite easily, beady plastic eyes of dark amber and slightly torn at the crook of one of his elbows with just the hint of gray stuffing beginning to emerge. Timmy was a taciturn sort who would occasionally reveal the need to attend to an itch using the same described injured arm when interrupting himself during brief conversations and announcing "Wait, just gotta scratch my nose." He was born on October 14, 1952 and he had a cousin in Circle Springs, Alaska named Renta. Timmy's "father" had discovered the Atlas of our 1953 Encyclopedia Britannica (with its inscribed dedication to us, by our real life father) and his eyes came upon this town in the Land of The Midnight Sun near the Arctic Circle. Renta? Am not sure. Maybe the word "renter" had been picked up by the child that was me. Don't remember though whether or not Renta owned his own domicile way up north. Perhaps the name means something in Inuit that my fertile young unconscious mind perceived.
My brother's "kids" were not first cousins of my brood; they all seemed to be siblings to each other, but their "dads" were distinct. My progeny were, besides Timmy, my yellowish white flannel blanket with blue satin edging and first born. He (she? the gender was not clear) was named Luva (an individualistic spelling of Lover, no doubt, but communicating my great fondness for this holdover of an infant's earliest tangible objects of comfort and security, not of course, with any libidinal connectedness). Blanky was the name of my brother's blanket and the intimacy between him and this fabric and bed covering pre-dated my birth I was told. Mom has always told the story through the years of her oldest son discovering one day that Blanky was missing. She had simply given it a badly needed washing and it was seen hanging and dripping from a clothesline in our backyard. The persistence and insistence of a child is often truly amazing. Importuning Mom with painful abandon, she at last relented and my brother snatched the offered, still nearly soaking blanket. In nearly the same instant he was hugging Blanky for dear life oblivious to the condition.
Judy was my two dimensional daughter, identical twin to my brother's girl, Dolly. Why we decided to elevate these paper dolls to the status of our beloved offspring is a mystery to me now. They were from the remnants of birthday gift wrapping paper for a toddler and what gift they formerly covered is lost in the mists of time. Jennifer was my brother's daughter and was a lady Teddy about the size of Timmy but shorter and stouter. Her eyes were flatter and larger round plastic disks, black and white and enclosing small eyeballs that danced about depending on the laws of gravity. During a visit to our aunt's house near Thanksgiving day in 1957, my brother was gifted a large teddy (compared to Timmy and Jennifer) and it was determined to be a girl and was named Jean (this curiously, was the name of another aunt who had died a decade before we were born). Probably during Easter week of 1958, we were visited by bachelor brothers and good friends of my father. They presented us with two stuffed bunnies even larger than Jean and we promptly proclaimed our respective fatherhoods. The bright yellow and white furred one was dubbed Peppy and claimed as my outgoing and enthusiastic daughter whose brother was my brother's lavender and white son George, a reserved and rather sensitive relative of the hare family who preferred reading a book to the more adventurous habits of Peppy.
Our extended group included friends of the family who were ever present fixtures and equally trusted and loved, if not cuddled or nurtured quite like the others. There was an admirable and dignified dachshund with delicate dark fawn "skin", a lovely felt and handmade figure crafted by our mother's oldest friend's daughter (who went on to a successful career in toy making and other handicrafts). There was another two-dimensional character, a silly clown made of tin and a refugee from the previous year's Christmas tree: an ornament dubbed "Curlicue." He may have been a forerunner of the abused "Mr. Bill" of 1970's television comedy: a gingerbread man mercilessly tortured in an infinite variety of ways: his undeserving punishments and obvious innocence appealing to our darker natures. Curlicue was chiefly tossed in the air to amuse ourselves and his supposed fate was determined each time by the chance landing that his tiny figure made. He himself was his own Nero at some maniacal Colosseum event: the emperor's thumb's up (or down) being the coin flip-like result of Curlicue's landing. His ventral side enameled with cheerful blue and white paint forming his harlequin suit and pom-pom hat ensured his survival, if this side of him landed upright. His dorsal and unpainted side of exposed tin, if revealed as his "up" side, meant death.
At the dawn of the 1960s, we sought more sophisticated expressions of our evolving interests. Hand puppets permitted more complicated interactions and we reveled in the Disney and other cartoon characters that we knew and loved. Captain Hook, Tinkerbell, Popeye and Olive Oyl were some of these characters that we manipulated in Punch and Judy-like productions. Amazingly, beyond puberty by the mid-'60s, we did not disdain gifts from an aunt from overseas who perhaps envisioned us frozen in time. We were presented with rather small toy animals no more than 7 or 8 inches in height. A red and white puppy, stuffed and eminently huggable was quickly "christened" Baby Bow-wow. His partner in crime was a beautiful gray and white tiger striped Steiffel hand puppet of velour-like fur. He was a small tiger and unsurprisingly dubbed Tiny Tiger. Conversations between them and with us could be sustained discussions on a wide variety of topics, but their ways revealed the juvenescence in our hearts that a more worrisome analysis might have termed regressive. It was certainly therapeutic and we shamelessly remained puppeteers into our late teens.
The love of family and the recognition of how essential, relationships and social networks were for us, spurred us instinctively to breathe life into Timmy, Jennifer and The Gang as we recreated the world that our parents and their parents constructed to nurture and to teach about love and its insuperable majesty and power. The make-believe world of dolls, puppets and teddy bears is no trivial realm that we may be tempted to lump into an entity that, in our small-minded grownup mindsets we might label dismissively as "child's play." No, small ones at play are in fact, seriously working, creating and solving psychic conflicts in ways wonderful and mysterious. We need theatre in our lives and the fledgling members of our human family are perhaps the greatest performers of them all whose openness and spontaneity are qualities we often spend all of our adult lives trying to rekindle. It's a most worthy quest.
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