Journal Entry

Before PlayStation: The toys I grew up with

Every Christmas, watching the children swoon over their gadgets and electronic cars, babies and games, I drift back in time to my six-year-old self in a shady back yard in New Jersey, proudly displaying my most precious new toy, a tiny china tea set, to my over-the-fence neighbor-child friend, who spoke no English.

Till then my favorite toy was a cardboard box, painstakingly marked with round burners and crayoned knobs. Till then, her most beloved toy was the little shop front she’d crafted out of loose sticks and boards, and filled with little leaf wrapped packages of pebbles and dirt. These “toys” we passed back and forth through the holes in the chain link fence separating us, as we played together for hours, taking turns buying and selling the little packages. I would “cook” and serve her on little leaf plates that fit easily through the holes.

In earlier years, the games we played in the streets of Brooklyn, New York, were boisterous and sometimes even dangerous. We rode our skate boards, made from real skates and old boards, down the hill between 4th and 5th Avenues, reaching incredible speeds before reaching the bottom. Turning was out of the question due to the huge open sewer drainage holes on every corner, and if the light were green when we got there, we just zoomed across the street and walked back. If not… it was hair-raising guiding your flattened body and your board under the huge semi trucks as they made their way slowly through the light. Somehow we always made it across without incident.

Not true for those crazy bikes with the high handlebars and banana seats. The challenge was to pile as many kids as possible onto every possible aperture of the bike and see how many stayed on all the way to the bottom. When too many of us didn’t, we reverted to playing Skully with crayon-filled bottle caps on a huge game board chalked into the middle of the street, or we all played hopscotch, jacks and jump rope, even the boys. All the girls played stick ball too, with a real stick, usually an old mop or broom handle someone whittled down. Most play was unisex in a world where toys were whatever you found to have fun with and your imagination was the battery that moved them.

Once we moved to New Jersey, crowds of kids seemed only to exist at school. I being the only girl child in a family of five kids, found myself abandoned and alone until I cultivated a show me/show you comprehension with the lonely faced little girl over the fence one day, offering to share my raisins with her. (And by the way, am I the only one who was told that raisins were candy?) From then on, without words, silently with gestures, we developed intricate forms of play and pretend that occupied all our time until one of our parents would infiltrate our silence with their beckoning calls.

I’ll never forget that Christmas, when I presented my treasure to her at the fence, handing her a tiny toy cup and saucer through the hole. These were by far the finest instruments ever to be introduced into our play. Together, almost mesmerized, we studied them, with awed and adoring eyes, and in that bonded state, the language barrier totally disappeared, and we were one little-girl-spirit, sharing one golden moment, with one shared toy, bringing joy in the remembering, that has transcended time itself, and shadowed every Christmas since.