The imagination of children is a powerful yet perplexing phenomenon. Those who’ve spent any significant time with kids, or even who remember their own childhood well, can speak to the extensive creative ability of society’s youngest members. And in raising a child whose age predates my own memories (though he’s crossing that threshold right about now), I’ve been newly surprised at how early this instinct kicks in. Graham was grabbing play food and pretending to nom it more than a year ago. It was about a year ago that he first looked at a half-bitten slice of toast in his hand, decided it resembled a fish, and started merrily swimming it around in the air, shouting “fwi!” (his adorable but now fading moniker for aquatic creatures).
But if we suspend our established understanding that children do embrace imaginative play from their earliest days, the fact becomes astonishing. Why would the people whose grip on the boundaries of reality and possibility is least developed so easily embrace a practice that further muddies these waters? After all, young children have almost no understanding of the world’s mechanics or limitations, relying on their meager experiments and their parents’ testimony to build this framework. To be clear, with imagination in this sense I am not referring to places where children confuse imagination for reality, but where they demonstrate a clear understanding that they are pretending, they know the difference, and they find this fun.
Some of this, admittedly, might just be about the nature of play in general. As one of my “nieces” (the daughter of close friends) recently told her parents, “I don’t want to grow up because adults don’t play.” Not strictly true, of course, as I immediately thought of my animated celebrations and agonizations the last time I went bowling, not to mention those who do improvisational theater for a living (another set of close friend parents come to mind). But it’s true that an adult is unlikely to indulge in play-eating a plastic piece of fruit or role-playing as a dragon in the exclusive company of their peers. Despite the fact that doing so is, objectively, fun.
Today I flew home, or from home to home depending on how you look at it, from Albuquerque to Philadelphia. The great reward for this journey is being reunited (after a mere 48 hours apart) with my own nuclear family, or at least the one of my choosing and creation rather than the now diminished one of my birth and upbringing. The trade-offs of travel are never easy and always hit me hard, even in the happiest of times. I hugged my mother in the pre-dawn light outside the Southwest sliding doors and recalled too easily that I’d been just here with my father two months prior, sharing an embrace, the last time we ever touched.
But the homecoming enabled me to hang out with Graham, my child of 31 months, who adores buses. He’s even convincing me to overcome my lifelong dislike of city buses. And so when an expected early evening thunderstorm fizzled without a drop, I suggested we turn off Bluey and head to the playground. I was initially thinking Kendrick, the closer and slightly less interesting of our two, but he lobbied to ride the bus, which would mean trekking to the further-flung Gorgas. The bus, as you might imagine, is possibly more fun than the playground for Graham. He is obsessed with anything on wheels and almost as into anything you can see from a car, bus, train, or plane. Many times, he sits quietly and pinwheels his head at the various sights, but more recently he’s begun to narrate what he sees.
For the return journey, after a tour of the play structure and a longer walk through the park grounds Graham loves most, we intended to take the bus again. But many regular schedules were dwindling in the Saturday twilight, so we were left racing to the 27 stop and came up about a minute short, watching the bus pull from our stop to the intersection as we stood a helpless block away. We had to return on foot, which meant me awkwardly carrying both Graham and his new two-foot rake toy we’d towed along the whole way. All the while, Graham vocally lamented that he really wanted to take the 35 bus (which had run its last for the night) and the functionally redundant 27 bus, whose next offering would put us home too late for dinner.
None of this is new or different enough to qualify as my One Thing for the day. When we got home, Graham related to his mother how sad he’d been to miss the bus and that he still, despite the imminence of dinner, wanted to go back out and ride these routes. So I suggested we play pretend and imagine we were on the 35. At first, he preferred to play an actual game with memory cards depicting animals. We were so ensconced in that that I’d forgotten my fleeting unusual suggestion when he said “all done, want to play bus game.”
“What’s the bus game? I want to learn.”
Alex shot me a look. “He means what you said earlier. About pretending to ride the bus.”
I explained quickly to Graham how we were orienting the couch to simulate the 35 bus, where the door was, and that I would drive. Of course, shortly after I picked up my first passenger, he decided that really he should drive, and should do so with his back to the windshield, which I narrated to him as going quite well. We made several stops to pick up various stuffies, including at the ballpark to get the Phillie Phanatic, and he enjoyed my oral estimation of a bus accelerating and decelerating in their trademark din.
I have a firm recollection of my shock at reading this article (possibly behind the NYT paywall; I think I still had a WVU-based workaround then) with the deliberately provocative headline “Don’t Play With Your Kids. Seriously.” I remember a notion (upon review, little more than an implication in the text, if that) that parents’ imagination can’t keep up with their children’s and will possibly stunt their play. But the article is also laden with the author’s avowed dislike of pretending in the first place, part of a growing trend of parenting reclamations that we can embrace our full-throated adulthood and don’t have to be childlike with our children to properly care for them.
Possibly true, and certainly a relief for the Very Serious among us (I was, ironically, that way as a child myself, pining for adulthood for years in a way I only second-guessed in college). But what missed opportunities! Sure, we don’t have to direct the play, but to miss out on it entirely or only observe? Some of my fondest memories are when I convinced my often weary and only sometimes reluctant father to play with me in some fanciful imaginative pursuit. We played SimCity – admittedly a proscriptive sort of imaginative play – and he would invent storylines about the political situation in the town that grew, contracted, and endured various disasters. I involved him in the intrigues and developments of the “County System,” the fictive socio-political society I’d imposed on the landscape of our woodsy acre-and-a-half in rural Oregon, which I wrote up in magic marker newsletters. And most memorably, he would periodically pick up the Weekly Reader, an insipid USA-Today-for-kids Scholastic production (apparently discontinued in 2012) I hauled home, read it aloud, and start mixing spurious quips and absurd consequences with the actual text on the page. Not all of the jokes landed perfectly, and some doubtless sailed over my head, but some of these readings were the most I can recall laughing in my whole childhood, and most of the time since.
Our little foray into riding the couch-35 into Philadelphia hardly competes with these experiences. Indeed, like smacking one’s lips a few inches from plastic veggies, it’s pretty linear and realistic as imaginative play goes. But it’s a reminder that I’m looking forward to play, that (for me at least) the magic of childhood is best when shared, embraced, and even experienced by the parent(s). I’m not sure Graham felt his driving stint was a good replacement for riding the actual 35 or 27 tonight. But it certainly got my wheels turning about a lifetime of co-building worlds to come.
This is the second post in the One Thing series.
#1: Wistful Wisteria
Introduction: Announcement and Rules
