Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Toys of Childhood

Memory is always faulty in bringing back the most cherished in its original transparency. The question is, do I remember what is forgotten or do I remember what I keep remembering. In either case, whether what I remember are concrete figures or metaphors, when memory takes me far, far back and childhood appears at the periphery of my recollection, I find that some things I loved as toys were neither the most common nor the most mind blowing.

Legos weren’t invented yet in my young years. I wish they had been, but we had alphabet blocks. I am sure they gave me my first lessons on the laws of physics and geometry and helped me psychologically by letting me take out my initial frustrations on them. Also, the letters on the blocks introduced me to written language, to symbolic communication handled between auditory and visual receptive senses, and possibly led the way to devise a coded alphabet to be used between my cousin and me later in our adolescence, unattainable by the adults.

Earlier though, when still unaware of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, I didn’t care for dolls too much, but they were forced on me, for my being a female child, as it was the sign of those times. --Funny isn’t it, I just made a typo and wrote sigh instead of sign in the previous sentence. “A sigh of those times.” Isn’t that something? The mind works in mysterious ways.--

Anyhow, coming back to toys, despite my annoyance for being given so many dolls, I liked one doll I had named Plum-Leaf, for the plum tree in the yard I used to climb on. I was attached to Plum-Leaf for her resistance to breakage and her pretty face, but mostly because my favorite uncle bought it for me from a street vendor when we were going someplace together. Still, I never held that doll or any other doll to my bosom, pretending I were the mommy like other little girls, which worried the adult females in my life. I held Plum Leaf by the arm or the leg, dangling her on my side and made her my teddy bear’s companion.

Now, my teddy bear, named Plush, was something else. Him, I cradled in my arms and sang to. Come to think of it, this behavior is the precursor of my choices in adulthood. No wonder my favorite fairy tale still is The Beauty and the Beast. Unfortunately for Plush though, his reign didn’t last too long because of the mangled fur, due to being given incomplete baths by me and the sour odor he acquired in time.

Later on, during my grade-school years, paper dolls were the craze, and imitating my friends, I played with dressing the dolls with their paper outfits. My favorite pastime was drawing outfits from paper, coloring designs on them, and making my own fashion contraptions.

Yet the most favorite toy of all time for me, ever since I learned how to walk, was a pail and shovel. I remember sitting at the beach and filling the pail with sand and emptying it, like a version of Sisyphus on a flattened surface. For years after my toddler times, I carried a pail and shovel with me to the beach to build sandcastles with, only to watch them taken away by the aggressive waves or another child’s foot. This never stopped me, however, from keeping on building. Once I constructed my make-believe abode with a moat, towers, turrets, and a drawbridge, I stood up to brush the beach grits off my shins and knees, sensing my mind would preserve this kingdom of imagination of the world and its people on an abstract screen, same as my skin kept the indentations of the sand for a very long time afterwards. Arising from the recollection and scattered fragments of senses in my own story, such as the scent of the ocean and the feel of the sand, a smile crosses my lips, still today, when my eyes spot a child with a pail and shovel at the beach.

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Prompt: Your Five Favorite Toys As A Child