Dec. 27, 2003 - 18:09 MST

THE WONDERING JEW

Construction 101

There was a magic age for me, from the time I could communicate up to maybe age eight. Where the things that were not real could be "pretended." A time when imagination made things a reality almost.

Along about then I began to check out trash barrels in our neighborhood and find things to convert to things I needed in play. An old percolater I remember became Aladdin's magic lamp, we took turns playing the Genie granting wishes, those too were imaginary to grown ups but real to us.

To a small kid the adults were enigmas, giants to boot with motives and actions we could not fathom. Yet many of our games of imagination imitated grown up life (our concept of it). I remember the packs which contained white cylindrical candies which were red on the end. Didn't cost much at the store and we could play at being grown up enough to smoke and carry our own "pack" around.

There were those days of steady rain, super cold or heavy snow that we would be housebound. About the best we could do would be go to a close by friends house or the friend to ours. Negotiation and requests and guarantees of no damage, allowed us to borrow and use the stuff for what we usually wanted to do. Four dining room chairs, some old blankets or sheets arranged around them made the dandiest fort, cabin, cave, hideaway that our imagination could conceive. At times the structure could "wear many hats." The flimsy structure could be in rapid succession most anything according to what ever our fevered imagination and whimsical play of our day would dream up.

A bonanza at certain homes of a friend would be a couple of bridge tables and dining room chairs and enough blankets and sheets to enclose "our place." Blankets gave us a dark place and sheets gave us muted illumination. We could arrange them into one thing or could separate them into two and with extra covering three juvenile places of magic. Some times boxes and plundered trash would appear and fit our place out. Each personal item could likewise be an object denoting a weapon, a hammer, a club or whatever our fancy decided what we wanted it to be.

If we were luckily at peace with the girls, we would build it and the girls would furnish it, all the toys imitating adult women's things would appear and be arranged as the girl would dictate. It was a trade off though, we would have to be husbands and rock the cradle as it were, drink pretend tea and engage each other in civil conversation. To suit a boys desire for action and violence (fictional of course) we would dream up "lets pretend" situations involving robbery of the house thus bringing in the gunfights. In turn the girls had to pretend to be frightened to tears.

All too soon we grew a bit and put those things behind us, in our future came the attempts to use hammer and nails, saws, chisels, measuring instruments and those types of things, I think we were pretty well grounded in our efforts by what we learned in Construction 101 . . . . . . . . . .

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