When I was a child I kept imaginary horses, no more than three
at a time.
Any more than three and the time investment was too hefty and I
couldn’t keep track of everybody. I had one white Arabian mare, who was the
most stalwart of all the horses, and it is a great sadness that I cannot
remember her name. I remember deliberating over her name; it needed to be
graceful and romantic. Genevieve or Tara maybe.
Gwendolyn.
I usually also kept two young black horses, faster than my
Arabian mare, but feisty and harder to handle. They probably had names like
Black Diamond or Velvet. These horses would run behind my father’s car when we
went on road trips, which offered me a sense of comfort, that something awesome
of mine was also coming with us.
I kept the horses in the garage, in small transparent stalls
between my mother’s gardening supplies and my father’s motorboat. These are
full size horses, mind you; somehow they all managed to fit in that space. But
someone was always moving the wheelbarrow in the way of my horse system.
Writing this right now, I can hear the scrape of the wheelbarrow as I moved it
aside to get through to my horses.
While I was going through this horse period (before I
started taking riding lessons on visible horses), I could be found every
morning opening up the garage door, then walking calmly with my two hands in
the air, leading two horses at once out to the front yard. This yard was most
conveniently fenced in electric and had a nice gate, and I was satisfied that my
horses were content and healthy there. In the evening, the reverse happened:
hands in the air, leading horses back to the safety of the garage. I would
usually also ride in the evening too, trying to get my sister to join me. Then
we would slap our thighs with a thin stick and prance and run around the
driveway.
Now this was just my imaginary horses. I could write
likewise about the town of Lego people and dry beans we had (“Beanville”), or
the extensive village of rocks by the lake where we made seaweed cakes to sell
(we were enamored with the suffix “-ville”, apparently, so this was
“Rockville”), the American girl dolls and the living room carpet floods they
survived in their laundry basket lifeboats, the plastic horses and their world
travels chosen by spinning the globe with eyes closed and a finger poked down,
the huge families of barbies and their dramas and infidelities and love lives,
or the space ships on the couch manned by an expert crew of beanie babies.
I would play tirelessly, endlessly, with no thought of
hunger or time or the importance of setting the table. There are no words to
describe how delicious this was, one of those incredibly satisfying drives that
needs to be expressed as a young human. I can say with utmost clarity that my
boundless opportunity to be allowed to create my own worlds of play was the
greatest benefit of homeschooling.
My first greatest heartbreak came when my younger sister sat
by the beanie babies in their spaceship and called me over (I was worlds away
with a book on the couch), “Let’s play! Come on!” And I couldn’t. I couldn’t play. It no longer felt “true” to craft the
imaginary stories and take the figures in my hands and move them across the
couch. I was surprised and sad and felt
that something was wrong with me, that I couldn’t muster this anymore. But I
was taken away by someone else’s story now, the books, and I had less of a need
to craft my own stories. And I was putting my energy towards horse riding
lessons, planning for horse shows, getting excited about systems that were outside
of my head.
What is play,
really? Can adults play? What is different between adult play and child play?
I think play is where importance and whimsy meet. As a
child, it is critical and necessary of energy that your horses survive the
tsunami on the carpet—there’s the importance—but also whimsical and safe. For
instance, at any time you could stop the game or Daddy comes home after work
all comfort and safety, and these things are the foundation of feeling not
actually in danger, of not actually being in a tsunami.
I think play is also about creating something from within
yourself. As a child, it’s writing an intricate story about your barbies or caring
for your imaginary horses. As an adult, on good days, this can come from making
music on the pipe organ or finding just the apt word to describe an experience.
In a much broader sense, I suppose all of life can be playful, provided you’re
in a period when things are not troubling, and where living, and being aware of
living, the intricate story of a human experience comes as self expression.
As an adult I feel that sense of time stopping, about
something being important and whimsical when I’m crafting in my kitchen, for
instance. Not following a recipe, which would be just plain adult, but puzzling
over what’s in my fridge and then imagining up something to create from it.
What about curry powder and chocolate! On soy nuts? Yes! It’s whimsical because
of the strange combinations, a little bit of self expression. And it’s important
because this is taking care of my health and well-being.
A sense of play happened during field work the other day.
Monsieur Visiting French Scholar, who is a wonderful combination of
analytically brilliant and very silly, and I were working in neighboring plots
of cover crops. The setting: something important (we’re doing science) but also
whimsical, because as I’m bent over I feel a light tap on my butt. Looking up I
see Mr Scholar grinning ghoulishly from his plot and that he had excellent aim
with a grass weed arrow he had flown at my butt (root ball acting as weighted
arrowhead, stems serving as feathered shaft). We laughed and of course there
was no danger in any of this. Later I found him bent over, curve of lower back
exposed, and so I planted a dandelion down the back of his pants. The basal rosette of the plant popped perkily
from that place, a novel flower pot design.
I believe that without the setting of importance (we were
all out there being productive and scientific), there would be less of a life
spark to beget creativity and see grass weeds as arrows and behinds as flower
pots.
Let me describe for you a scene of play that is not of a
child, that happened recently, and that brought happiness and whimsy mixed with
that sense of drive and importance. If you told my ten year old self that this
would bring me so such giddy glee, I would have disbelieved you indeed.
I went grocery shopping with a friend.
The farm store was mostly empty that evening and my sweet
friend Tall Bri (“lets be tall happy dancing woman together!” we’ll say before
a Friday night) and I gathered carts and rolled into the dreamy land of local,
minimally-packaged, and impossibly inexpensive food. You don’t get prices like
this in Wegmans or at the Ithaca coop. It takes a Mennonite Grocery Shop in the
small town of Seneca Falls.
“Jams!” Tall Bri crowed, “cheese!” I called, and we giddily
rolled into the separate lands. For me this was a jubilant unfettered
conquering of good food, where I didn’t have to sigh wearily about how
expensive fresh ground peanut butter was, and where I could buy a simple
plastic bag with walnuts in it, not some glossy colored
cardboard-plastic-structured container with a small essay of labeling on it. I bought two
containers of peanut butter, a giant glugging pillar each, with that
self-satisfied understanding of I’m Stocking Up For the Future While The
Gettin’s Good. “The Asparagus is so
CHEAP!” I could hear Tall Bri from the land of fresh vegetables. I hooked my
right foot up into my cart and skate-boarded gleefully to join her. Grapefruits
and apples and eggplant, again, the cornucopia of plenty.
Rolling along, admiring left and right down every aisle, as
if in Disney Land, simply so pleased by everything. Blue AND red popcorn, just
because they both existed, went into my cart. I saw Tall Bri’s head skimming
along a few aisles over. “I found the nuts!” she sang and, in a pang of leaving
the many varieties of bulk flour I was studying, I rolled to join her with the
pecans. The pang of leaving something good for something else good cannot
actually be a pang, it is in fact a celebration.
We had the dose of importance from the nature of buying food
for oneself and the dose of whimsical because the food was so simple and
pleasing and local and nearly half the price of things at Wegmans.
A Mennonite grocery store offers not only a highly
economical shopping experience but a cultural one as well, the products that
you don’t find in your middle America grocery store. For instance, I bought a LOG of butter. “Amish
butter roll” said its name tag. I passed a bag of breakfast cereal the size of
a small child, disconcertingly pastel circles and squares and stars made from
wheat and corn syrup, whimsical indeed, “Happy Shapes” it read on the bag, by a
company called comfortingly “Hospitality”.
The manufacturer of cheese curds, some tiny brand that was
local to upstate NY, Stoltzfus Dairy Cheese. Stoltzfus. Of course I took a packet home,
just to enjoy that sneeze name each time I opened my fridge.
Two women in blue and green dresses, white aprons, and
little bonnets rang us up. I just about pranced each item onto the belt and
fluttered with urgency to deploy my battalion of reusable bags for the haul.
“I’m so excited about these spices!” I said as I topped the 8th
container on the stack I was creating; it shuttered its way balanced on the belt
toward Miss Bonnet Cashier. She was totally unfazed by my giddy enthusiasm and with
complete composure scanned each item for me. The sum came to more than I have
ever spent on groceries in one swipe, but with that much peanut butter and
popcorn and maple syrup I won’t step into a florescent grocery store for
anything besides soy milk for months.
Whatever it may be, grocery shopping or goofing around in
the field, I never want to lose that whimsical importance I used to feel
leading my imaginary horses to the front yard.
4 comments:
I love reading your descriptions of your childhood play. I remember you leading your imaginary horses out to pasture each day.
The start of this article took me back to those days of imaginary horses and Beanville! Good times. : ) I enjoyed this whole post very much — the description of childhood play, but also the descriptions of grown-up play. I think it's important to never lose a sense of playfulness in life. : )
By the way, Stoltzfus is a very Mennonite name (Swiss-Mennonite, to be precise). I've known a few Stoltzfuses (Stoltzfusen? Not sure how to pluralize Stoltzfus...).
In college I wrote a paper that had the phrase "simplicity of nothingness". It meant simply doing things for no important reason. (I had counted small trees - treelets? treelings - on the road to school that morning, just because.) I still do it. I biked over to feed chickens this morning and had to figure out how to get eggs home (important) without forethought. 1 in a pants pocket, one in a plastic tub from the recycle bin with a kale leaf for padding. Whimsical and important. (and ate the greens with egg for breakfast.)
Melissa,
I love this! The kale leaf as a little nest. The joy in the tiny and whimsy!
:-)
Post a Comment