Not too long ago I found at the
back of a drawer filled with miscellaneous junk one of my old
pocketknives. I hadn’t seen it, or any
other boy’s pocketknife in years, and it started me down a path of remembrance
of things past that is becoming for me a familiar itinerary. How very different were the “old days” of
even a single lifetime! A fortnight ago
it was Christmas. Because of the diverse
travel plans, housing arrangements, commissary assignments, and social
priorities of the three families of our adult children, our Christmas morning
gift exchange was, by common-sense general agreement, a scaled-down event to be
achieved as modestly and expeditiously as the presence of several small,
excited children might allow. But even
if one stuck with the “one gift” policy, which not everyone did, our sitting
room was soon overflowing with piles of hastily removed crumpled wrapping
paper, and the carpet already littered with unprepossessing bits and pieces of
brightly colored plastic, constituent parts of various games and gizmos
designed to ignite a temporary excitement among their recipients and, in the
longer term, swell the trade deficit with China.
I remember no plastic from seventy
years ago. Our infantile amusements
were, for the most part, self-designed and their implements home made. We actually made our own sleds, skis, and
wheeled carts. Living on a run-down farm
mainly consisted of fixing broken things and making do with what could be
whittled out of ash and cedar blanks. A
corner of the barn was always full of old metal rods, gears, and wheels
patiently awaiting their inventive recycling. Nor was this phenomenon limited
to the economically marginal in the American sticks. I don’t read a lot of political biography,
and seldom long retain much of it when read; but I do remember a small detail
from an autobiography of Harold Macmillan, who had been the British Prime
Minister during my Oxford years. He had
been born in the final years of the nineteenth century. The style of his upper-crust upbringing—a
straight line from a nannied nursery through Eton to Balliol College, Oxford—avoided ostentatious displays of affluence; but the family was quite
comfortable. He makes the point,
nonetheless, that as a growing lad he and his peers always made their own toys and rarely saw a store-bought one. My Uncle John, though not an Etonian, shared
this spirit. One day he found a cache of
old iron horseshoes under a chicken shed he was repairing. That same day between dinner and sundown he
had created a horseshoe pitch that gave pleasure for the next thirty years.
Most toys needed wooden parts, and
this is where the pocketknife came in. I
am not talking about the portable workshop that was the old Swiss Army knife,
nor some sturdy, potentially lethal Opinel.
I mean a fifty-cent flat piece of gun metal, three or four inches long
and clad in faux antler, possibly sheathing but a single blade of high quality
carbon steel that would accept, through patient honing, a super-keen edge and
hold it. All cutting tools had to be
kept sharp, but the goal for a pocketknife was a blade that could effortlessly
slice though a piece of notebook paper. Everybody
whittled, all the time—except when honing the blade with an Arkansas stone,
also carried in a pocket. You got to be
quite good just by eyesight at shaving things straight, and to a fairly fine
tolerance.
The knife itself was a toy. Can I be writing these words? I am a modern
parent of hyper-modern parents who carefully read all warning labels,
ingredient lists, expiration dates and allergy alerts. But we boys once played Mumblety-Peg
endlessly. Mumblety-Peg was like Country
Ham. All aficionados of it knew its
exact rules with dogmatic certainty, and no two sets of rules agreed. Essentially it was a game of considerable
skill involving precision in knife-throwing at a defined or imagined target on
the ground. Often the thrower adopted a
contorted bodily posture to create a novelty feat that his competitor in the
game had to match. The knife-throw could
also have a role in another all-consuming pastime—“keeper’s” marbles. This term meant in theory that you actually
took permanent possession of marbles won; but the natural justice of childhood,
unlike the avarice of its elders, rebels at the obscenity of monopoly. So what it meant de facto was the endless ebb and flow of the supposed booty among
the various participants. Anyway, going
in for the kill in a defined “marble circle” might involve the expert
sectioning of the circle by knife-throw.
“Gender roles” were not nearly so
fixed as our contemporary academic theorists would have you believe. Most “motion” games—Kick the Can, Simon Says,
Red Rover, and so on—were generally played by all. The total cost for the equipment for these
games was zero dollars and zero cents.
Hopscotch was primarily but not exclusively a girls’ pastime; but the
kingdom over which girls ruled most awesomely was that of the skip-rope. As Joni Mitchell says, you don’t know what
you’ve got til it's gone. I’ve lived in
my present, pleasant neighborhood for thirty years now. Never once have I encountered on its broad
sidewalks the traces of a chalked hopscotch grid. Nor anywhere, in the last half century, have
I seen the vernacular choreography, as precise as that in any Hollywood review,
of agile children leaping, seemingly without effort, in and out of a maelstrom
of rapidly whirling rope. Out comes the
doctor. Out comes the nurse. Out comes the lady with the alligator purse.
