DAN'S PAPERS, June 13, 2008 Page 75 www.danshamptons.com
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By Susan Galardi
Toy Story
Photo by S. Galardi
In the Margery Williams’ classic children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit, (or “How Toys Become Real”) a plush toy learns from a skin horse that being real isn’t about what you’re made of, it is the result of being loved. The rabbit is a boy’s favored toy, and feels very special. Then there’s a turn for the worse. The boy contracts scarlet fever, and the rabbit’s fate is to be burned. He cries a tear, which brings on the Nursery Magic Fairy who explains to the rabbit that he was only real to the boy. One of the many messages is that something (or someone) becomes “animate” (or “animated”) when it experiences love, attention and caring. All I can say is that our son’s toys are in big trouble. The Greg Wiggle doll hasn’t sung “Big Red Car” in about a year, and I fear he’s lost his ability for speech. The Peter Pan action figure might as well be missing in action – thinking happy thoughts isn’t getting him off the ground, let alone out of the many toy bins in the playroom. And the Ratatouille rodent? He’s destined for a life as a doorstop. There’s a saying that a child’s favorite toy is the new one. So where does that leave the 10,000 other ones? Preferably, on the shelves of the toy stores. But that doesn’t happen for many reasons beyond the child’s insistence. We shower children with more, more, more out of love, guilt, and the deter-
mination to give them a better everything than we had. Beyond parental generosity, our son has two sets of grandparents who each give him several gifts on every birthday and gift-giving holiday. Birthdays are the toy orgies, with presents flowing in from family and friends. My anxiety level rises with every new package, as I think, “Where are we going to put this stuff? He already has a dedicated playroom ……” to “How is he ever going to learn to appreciate the value of things if … blah, blah, blah.” Yet there’s still the pull to get him new
things – an urge to wow him. There’s an art song, based on the translated poem by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore called “Colored Toys.” A few lines are: “When I bring to you colored toys, my child, I understand why there is such as play of color on clouds, on water – and why flowers are painted in tints. When I bring sweet things to your greedy hands, I know why there is honey in the cup of a flower, and why fruits are secretly filled with sweet juice.” I learned the song when I was 19 and had no idea what it meant – not until many years later when we had our son. A child experiences new things differently than adults. They experience it for the first time, and that is vibrant. Maybe it’s not really the toy the child wants, but the thrilling feeling that comes with being loved and treated “special.” Everyone knows that through our children, we experience life in a fresh way. We’ve all heard exhausted parents say “It’s for the kids,” when they came back from an all day trip to a baseball game, a water park, a sold-out circus in a hot tent. These efforts, like the gifts we give to children, make them giddy. We probably don’t care about the event or the toy. But we do care about having experiences with our children that are loving, joyful, fun – and real.
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