The Toy Box

"For everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose"

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child...

When I became a man, I put away my childish things"

They used to read stuff like that at the beginning of the school day. In lower grades our teachers would open the book to reveal about a dozen passages of wisdom imported by sages of another time. When we went up to middle school they would surrogate the lessons of these old and new dispensations to us, the kids, to read. When we read, it was the first opportunity to command the power of attention in the classroom without the usual notation of good or bad marks for our performance.

A time for this or that keeps us and the world from chaotic ruin. Good advice! Some of the readings influenced our behavior: those harsh admonitions spelled out by the old Ph.D., Moses. He had strong backing from a higher authority and in his Elizabethian English his words carried weight: "Thou shalt not kill." No one in my class ever entertained the thought of killing because Moses's adjunctum was backed up by our knowledge there were no perfect crimes. We were told that by older folks so it was so.

If Moses said it, we were impressed. Everyone knew who Moses was and because Moses said (in Elizabethian English): "thou shalt not steal," the temptation to steal was diminished.

The time to every purpose rules were honored and those who winked at the observance were beatniks or other sorts of outsiders who tilted against civilization.

Because we were very young, we were allowed a lot of latitude to play. When we grew older that would be unacceptable because, I suppose, nothing creative would come of it. Play would be replaced by responsibilities: "When I became a man I put away childish things."

At the teacher's desk from the beginning all the way to the eighth grade there was a drawer (lower left if my memory is correct) full of toys confiscated from kids who foolishly brought them to school. These teachers never gave anything back from the kids they took them from. Our treasures were seized and never seen again unless we took furtive peeks into the drawer of no return.

The idea of toy boxes was good because we learned to organize our possessions. Parents didn't view it so philosophically. They saw scattered playthings as an annoyance and as a hazard. Good thinking! The toy box was a private repository that held no interest to parents and we were too innocent to stash away illicit items that today's children, who never heard of Moses, might unsuprisingly store away there if not brazen enough to display them in the view of parents.

Our siblings were the only snoops at the toy box and if something disappeared, we couldn't blame it on Pop but we could against our brothers or sisters or friends. It's interesting to note that "blame" would be misappropriated to soothe the frustration of things mislain. It's an early foundation for later beliefs in conspiratorial plots replacing reason.

Toys were sometimes picked from great influences given to us by our own observations. If our eyes fell upon something impressive we could imitate the dynamics of the things that adults were very serious about. When I was a small boy, I watched workers tear up a neighboring street. Then they paved Washington Lane from our corner and up the hill and away to infinity that might have been another country; I was in the second grade and never walked as far as where they were working. I could just watch from the curb. Steam shovels and bulldozers and rollers and an army of cursing spitting men laid big red bricks on Washington Lane from where I looked away to the horizon.

I imitated their labor. I tore up a ribbon of grass in my yard and my toy bulldozers and steam shovel and rollers copied the monsters on Washington Lane. I paved my little road with mud through the grass at the rear of our house.

My cap pistol transformed me into my icons: Johnny Mack Brown and Tom Mix and Buck Jones. Our gang shot up baddies from the invisible horses that we rode in arenas of imagination that children are welcome to.

When war came my uncles went off to fight. My pals and I were patriots and we backed them up with our arsenal of wooden rifles and Tommyguns and I sought out Nazis and Japs and won my own little wars more easily than the big guys.

Small inspirations from other people, from other events helped us decide what went on our Birthday and Christmas lists; parents then bought our Erector sets, model trains, chemistry kits... and fire engines, of course.

Small boys hold great power in their world of toys. Some things never got to the toy box where our soldiers and cowboys and knights and dragons and teddy-bears and rubber dinosaurs slept between manipulations.

Our imagination and curiosity were sometimes fatal to objects of our attention. Butterflies and lightning bugs fell from flight into mason-jars where they would suffocate because of our sad ignorance. Cities of ants would be drowned by our design. Tadpoles would be snatched from the water they needed and choke on the same air that ants were denied. We would cut up worms and steal birds' eggs and dig up clams and hide them in our houses 'til they stank. We were the enemies of nature.

When we grew up we put away childish things. The toy box...well, there's a time to get rid of it or visitors or friends or relatives might be a little apprehensive. Our idea of possessions doesn't change. Put them away from the snoops. The real difference is that now we can hide the illicit items that we never thought about when the teddy bear and blocks and coloring books and the fire engines were important as life itself.

We never endangered anyone with toys. Moses would disagree. He said it in old English: "thou shalt not covet." That's the problem with possessions and with "growing up" and the condition seems to worsen for some or maybe a lot of people. Anyway, the schools dumped Moses a long time ago and both his psychology and the guy who noted that when he was a child he thought like a child are dismissed as too dangerous to expose as educational values.

Moses?

Who?

Moses who?

Robin Leech! That's the replacement who knows a lot more about virtue and rewards.