Brooklyn Woman

A Publication of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

OCT. 24, 2003 issue

The World According To Me

By Ryn Gargulinski

A TOYBOX FULL OF MUSHY BRAINS 

When my grandpa was a kid, he only had one toy – a red fire truck.  And his mother gave it away.  I remember this tale of woe and would repeat it, as my own mother rolled her eyes at its constant reiteration, carefully making sure never to give away our fire truck were we ever to obtain one.  I would also gaze at my seemingly endless pile of Lego’s, jigsaws and Lincoln Log and think: I still want the Barbie townhouse.  I will die without the Barbie townhouse.  (I never got the Barbie townhouse and, as far as I know that didn’t make me die.  But I did get the purple Barbie Corvette that I immediately destroyed by haphazardly sticking its fireball stickers messily on the hood in an excited state on Christmas morning.)

Here would be a good time to digress, to spout off about how spoiled kids are today and how they are not happy with what they get and never mind the grandpa with one fire truck but what about the great grandpa who was so poor he got used to eating only the fat off meat and how grossed out we’d get watching him consume a pork chop.  I would be able to say that the youth of the 2000s are brought up with no gratitude, don’t know the value of a dollar and are always demanding more, more more.  But I won’t.

Now would also be an ample opportunity to say that modern toys leave kids limpid and fat.  They no longer need to move around to play, not even budge from the couch with their joystick.  They no longer have to chase wayward Lincoln Logs (always the two-hole ones) that go skittering under the couch.  They don’t even engage in pseudo-yogic games like Twister.  A fire truck you have to physically push is all but forgotten, long replaced by remote-control Porsches that total strangers and terrify neighborhood cats.  This, I could surmise, leads ultimately to the deadly obesity epidemic of America, necessitating weird combinations of heart medication and stores like Lane Bryant.  But, quite selfishly, all the fat people only serve to make others look thinner and rid us of the guilt of eating one too many freshly ripened figs when popped off the tree and in season.  So I won’t get into that.

Neither will I touch upon the amount of money that goes into the toy market, how Santa has simply become a round, red Geoffrey from Toys ‘R’ Us with a bag more endless that the illusion you get from looking in a wall of mirrors slightly tilted that seem to make replications of the back of your head go on forever and ever.  Greed.  Gluttony.  Two deadly sins.  I could spew virtue on how we gobble.  But I’m over here wiping my mouth, too, and the proverbial pot shan’t joust names at the equally black kettle.

So I’ll settle on imagination – or lack thereof.  Toys today do everything for the “poor” kid, who ends up pretty much brain dead.  Well, I cannot say NO imagination goes into hitting Nintendo’s power switch or rewiring the Tomb Raider cartridge when reception gets fuzzy and Laura can’t jump.  But there is no thrash of brainpower going on.  We get robot kids who eatsleepdie with visions of electronic doodads and battery-operated gadgets in their echoing and otherwise empty heads.  Toys and games no longer pose a challenge or opportunity for growth.  They are just another reason to stay on the divan munching Frito’s and numbing the mind.

It was a real treat when, not too long ago, two feisty medium-sized children actually wanted to hear a Grimm’s fairy tale from the free book I picked up at a yard sale.   I paused frequently throughout the tale, asking them what they thought would happen next, who was hiding in the bloody box they found in the attic – that kind of stuff – and was amazed at their imaginative answers.  

I am also gratified while scouring books like “City Play,” a gregarious account of how city kids used to play – even without a fire truck.  Perhaps some of us even engaged a game of skittles, using trash as sacred game pieces, finding a suitable manhole and calling it third base.   The wall became a hardball opponent, a police blockade a horse, a spare tire a spaceship or swing.  Country kids, I am sure, could amass a similarly fantastic collection of imaginative brain usage.   Dried out weeds make stellar wigs.  Rocks can be collected for a makeshift round of marbles or to build a fortress.  A mutilated field mouse becomes the subject in a realistic of a game of “Operation.”

Instead of opening the toy box and closing off the mind, throw the kids outside, all ye parents, aunts and babysitters, and force them use the imagination that we all are blessed with (let’s just then hope they don’t break into cars).  Then you need no longer hear the blips and the bleeps and the beeps and the bytes and, most especially, the moans of the dead – the anguished sigh of an unused brain.