The living room walls of the old Lake Avenue house that I grew up in featured wallpaper depicting hundreds of little yellow flowers splayed against a white background. Having not seen similar flowery wall paper in a house since those hazy childhood years, I imagine the style would probably not be considered fashionable in the 21st century. However, I am not a hundred percent sure, because as a garden variety issue bachelor, I am convinced that I am congenitally incapable of competent discernment in the realm of interior decorating style and design.
In any case, the Lake Avenue living room was more notable to my childhood self for its its distinctive brown furry carpet as opposed to its botanically bedecked walls. Given prevailing 1970s standards, the living room carpet strands were not quite shag style but in 2010 they would have definitely stood out for their stringy length and the fact that they collectively featured the darkest shade of brown that you can imagine visualizing in carpet form.
As a six year old boy I loved that old carpet for one principal reason. This was due to how I mentally repurposed a visible permanent crease that ran down the expansive carpet’s full length. The crease was a visual legacy effect from when this dark brown expanse of collective fiber threads had been folded precisely in half during its time in retail storage. The two indentations forming the outline of the dividing crease were some six inches wide and over fifteen feet long. The crease was so pronounced that it was visible to the naked eye from any vantage point in the living room.
To my six year old mind, these defining features made the carpet crease absolute perfection because its dimensions served as the ideal fascimile for the Death Star trench from the movie Star Wars. This mental repurposing illustrates the depths to which my young child’s imagination had to compensate for my family's lack of money to buy me toys that came out of actual boxes (a la genuine Star Wars action figures).
Imagination. Margery Williams Bianco, the author of classic children’s books like Velveteen Rabbit and Poor Cecco, once said that imagination is simply another word for the interpretation of life. Since a child’s play is itself nothing but imagination in motion, then you could say that as a little kid I assigned a very aerodynamic form factor to my interpretation of life.
This is because in lieu of playing with store bought plastic toys, the following is what I did for days and evenings on end: while hopping and ducking over the living room crease cum reimagined Death Star trench, I balled up my left hand into a tight fist with the thumb sticking out to simulate a Tie fighter, flattened my palm straight with the right hand to represent an X-wing fighter, and then proceeded to repeatedly reenact the climactic final Death Star battle over and over again. I also provided my own personal soundtrack as I very loudly hummed the Star Wars orchestral theme and shrieked the simulated sounds of roaring star fighter engines, blazing laser cannons, the screams of doomed Rebel and Imperial pilots corkscrewing their respective ways into fiery oblivion, and the resulting exploded space ship debris.
I played this decidedly abstract version of Star Wars with a young boy's ferocity and while I am sure I must have looked quite bizarre to my mom and grandparents as I excitedly crouched and hopped all over the middle of the living room and flailed my balled up fist and open palm in inexplicable gyrations, to their credit, they never thought I belonged in a "sitio de locos" (insane asylum). Well, if they did, at least they were nice enough to never tell me.
In fact, my mom may have actually felt sorry for me because poor as we were—and our branch of the family cornered the market on the poor church mice category in those years—she did manage to send me and Edwin to see The Empire Strikes Back over five times when that iconic film had its theatrical release in 1980. Five trips to the same movie meant she shelled out some twenty five dollars in about a two month time span for us to see Empire. Twenty five bucks represented a small fortune to our family in those years, a fact that I was more than a little aware of even then. I have always been grateful to my mom for having understood how personally and monumentally important this sci-fi sliver of American pop culture was to me.
Growing up it wasn’t only about space opera talismans for me though. One day around Christmas time, when I was about seven, my mom bought me and Edwin two stuffed animal toys from the local super market, a soft brown teddy bear for me that I imaginitively enough christened “Teddy” and a tanned and luxuriously tailed stuffed squirrel that Edwin designated “Squirrely.” Teddy sported a cashmere soft black cloth, had two shiny plastic balls for eyes, and he was exactly the right size and weight of an archetypal teddy bear. He quickly became my all time favorite toy.
One day soon after my mom had brought us our stuffed animals, during an especially rowdy round of BOOM! BANG! style sibling wrestling encounters, I ill advisedly assaulted Edwin’s “Squirelly”. In a fit of sibing pique, I manhandeld Squirelly until its upright tail became mostly detached and hung back off of him like a very loosely attached appendage. Screeching a vow of revenge Edwin, in retaliation, “bearnapped” defenseless Teddy and then repeatedly slammed him by his stubby legs against a long vanity mirror hanging in the house until Teddy’s plastic button-like nose flew right off. Distressed at this turn of events, I abruptly stopped our not so brotherly play and took my wounded friend directly to my mom. She performed emergency surgery on Teddy by promptly sewing a new nose for him. Teddy’s surgically replaced proboscis was a square brown patch made from an old pair of courdory pants that I had recently outgrown. Teddy was again good to go.
At some point early in our time in each other’s lives, I decided to accessorize Teddy because I wanted to him look both unique and uniquely mine. I outfitted him with a rather fluffy pink yarn strand that was tied all the way around his neck. This pink collar had the effect of making Teddy more distinctive but also unintentionally incurred the risk factor of making him, in my child’s line of reasoning, more “girly.” I remember thinking that since it wouldn’t do to have him be overly wimpy, and since I most definitely imagined him as a “boy” bear, I needed to counterbalance the whimsically shaded collar I had secured for him.
So I rummaged through my existing collection of toys until I found a battle ship made out of grey die cast metal. This war like toy became Teddy’s own talisman: a transitional object of sorts, that I decreed Teddy would carry with him everywhere that he went, to show what a “tough” bear he was, pink collar notwithstanding. To rationalize why Teddy always carried his totem with him, I further decreed by order of the Imagination Sheriff (me) that the battleship was made out of honey, sort of like a freeze dried apricot, and that this vessel was Teddy’s “honey battleship.” The logic completely breaks down here, of course, because there is no real life equivalent for a vat of honey dehydrated into a toy battleship’s form factor, but whatever. I was seven years old, so the yin yang symbolism of a pink collar and a grey battleship for my beloved stuffed bear canceling each other out was sufficiently sensical for my second grade self, illogical to the rest of the world or not.
Teddy and me were good friends. He sat by me while we played forts with my brother. Unlike seemingly every adult in my life, he never yelled at me for being bad at math. He faithfully slept next to me every evening and late at night I would whisper a young boy’s secrets into his ears, while he silently listened and took all that in. Hours after I should have been sound asleep, I would gaze out the bedroom window towards the Pasadena night time skyline with a pair of binoculars that I had “temporarily relocated” from my grandpop’s stash of Cool Stuff he kept by his bed. I scanned the sky for many long minutes at a time, hoping to spot a stray UFO space ship so that I could report to Teddy that, yes, there was alien life Out There, floating just above us. The UFO flying saucers never did fly by across the view from my bedroom window, but Teddy humored me just the same, waiting patiently until my eye lids grew heavy and I stumbled back into bed by his side and down under the covers. In my memory of him now, as in how I experienced him then, he was a really cool bear......as cool a bear as a kid ever befriended, and as real a toy as a boy ever imagined.
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