Imagination

When I was a kid we moved to a big new house. It had a fireplace, which meant no more fake brick looking cardboard structure that had a rotating colored lamp behind the fake cardboard logs, that we would put out with the Christmas decorations. I used to love that ugly thing when I was little. I suppose it was for making me feel in the holiday mood and Santa would soon be coming...But we finally had a fireplace just like they Brady Bunch! But, when it came time to hang the stockings, despair. It was brick, we could not put up hooks or nails. Glue wouldn't work, especially if Santa was generous that year. We ended up putting the loop from the stocking under the heaviest books in the house. Encyclopedias...They held the stockings nicely and then we put the fluffy cotton stuff across the top to cover the books and it looked like "snow." Hey, it worked and then we decorated it with various ornaments and a mirror that looked like a frozen lake....Imagination.

I also got a big new bedroom with double doors to swing open just like Doris Day did on her show. I did that for a month or so, then only used one door. The thrill of acting like Doris Day was gone. That was okay, I still loved my room. I inherited my parents bedroom set and well, it wasn't what a young girl really would have liked. Enter my Aunt Dorothy. She insisted my father paint the headboard and dresser white. She also had him frame the existing mirror in wood and paint it white as well. Then she and my mother gold leafed it. It was beautiful. We didn't have a lot of money, but with her help, my room looked good enough for a princess....Imagination.

Since I had inherited the double bed with the freshly painted and gold leafed headboard, I was the one who got kicked out of my room when my grandmother would come to visit. I felt violated. I had to knock to go into my room. I had to get my clothes the night before so I could get dressed without waking her. I hated giving up my room, but looking back, it was the right thing to do. My parents were right in making me give up my bedroom to my grandmother or whomever slept over. Depending on who was there, I would set my alarm to go off at three in the morning, or I would open the door just enough for the dog to get in and jump up on my bed! He did sleep with me, so he was getting kicked out as well. I suppose that was my way of retaliating. Good and bad.....Imagination.

When we rode bikes, we put cards on the spokes with clothes pins. Looked dumb, sounded cool. I had a basket on the front of my bike and tried to put my dog in it, like Dorothy did in the Wizard of Oz. I put him in there, but he always jumped out....Imagination.

We played baseball on the street. We made up our own bases. When we didn't have enough players, we used our dog as the outfield and he always returned the ball to the pitcher. Smart dog and.....Imagination

When a friend got braces, I wanted to get them too. Okay, I was maybe eight! I eventually did get braces and the fun was lost at that point. But, in the mean time I used the foil from ding dongs to put on my teeth to make it look like I had braces. That was fun too, until I got my first filling in a tooth, from eating the ding dongs. Foil on metal dental work...Ouch. Still..... Imagination.

When we wanted to have larger breasts, out came the tissues. This didn't last long for me, because the real ones grew in.....Imagination.

When I washed dishes in the kitchen sink, I played drive thru. Drive thrus were new and my brother and his friends would ride up on their bikes, to the kitchen window and I would give them a glass of soapy water with frothy bubbles on top. It did look like a yummy drink. And don't think I didn't make them pay! I don't think any of the kids actually drank the dishwater.... Imagination.

I used to do the, which is better Ajax or Comet commercials too. I didn't actually have Ajax. But I pretended....Imagination.

Of course, I played with dolls and played house. I had a friend with a beautiful outdoor doll house and we would have tea parties out there. I played house and with my dolls in my own bedroom. When we played house, we used real cans, from vegetables or soups. We would save them and pretend we were cooking. We did use real pans. But, I asked my mother to save the cans for me to play house with. I really didn't have to do that, because she already done so. She used them to bake and banana nut bread or to keep bacon grease in.....Imagination.

We made a club house out of materials we found discarded by the construction crews working on new homes. We held meetings and took roll, just like school. We dreamed up things to do to keep busy. We had rules and admitted only those we wanted in our secret fort....Imagination.

We made gocarts and even made our version of a raft to use in the flood channel. There wasn't much water in there and the contraption we made, did not float anyhow. We caught Pollywogs and frogs and brought them home in pails.....Imagination.

Barbie and Ken. Need I say more?.....Imagination.

I have been concerned that kids today don't use their imaginations enough. We take them everywhere and buy them the play toys and fake kitchens. When it came to Barbie, she had all the toys too. Hotel, house, pool, cars, airplane, kitchens, beauty salons, on and on. My girls did use their imaginations when playing with dolls or Barbie, for hours on end. They did do dress up and put on their own plays. But once they out grew dolls, they moved onto video games, computers, ipods, so many things, which became a lack of....Imagination.

Then yesterday, my thirteen year old and her (going to be thirteen next month) cousin, who is staying with us this week, made a fort. A fort out of blankets on top of my daughter's bed. My twelve year old asked if I had seen the fort the girls had made. All I could think of was, shit, they will never put away all those blankets they took out of the linen closet. My twelve year old told me the fort is very cool. When the thirteen year olds came upstairs and told me about their fort and that it was on top of the bed, I asked, "Where are you going to sleep?" Their response was, "In the fort!".....Imagination!