The Rabbit Head

WTF?!

I was on my way to the library, when I saw this from across the street. I had to cross the street for a closer look. Sometimes I see random objects hung in the chain link fence, like the skateboard sold at the dollar store or a missing baby sock, but this stuffed animal took me way back, to a time when me and my brother outgrew our childhood toys forever. 

Instead of play, my Barbie doll got a Mohawk haircut that I dunked into a paper cup of blue food coloring on the kitchen counter, and we froze my brother's Stretch Armstrong doll in the freezer, just for kicks, to see what the red goo inside would do. It cracked into big chunks after we took it out and threw him onto the hard kitchen tiles. Oh. Neat! 
After that initial experimentation, everything we had was up for grabs. 

Oh, I see. It's "Don't let this be you!" in kid-talk.

My Kermit the Frog doll was hung by a rope-fashioned noose from the top of the stairs by my brother and our cousin, as a tribal warning to me when I came through the front door about what was in store. Aha! Something was afoot with those boys, and methinks our childhood is officially over. I could fight the tides that be, but true to me, I shrugged it off and joined in the fun. 

Kermie went into the dryer, Barbie was blown to bits by firecrackers (after she drag raced Mad Max style a few times in several horribly disfiguring crash-and-burn scenarios), and then we just simply tore things apart. The next year in junior high school, we read Lord of the Flies for the first time. Lesson learned.

Lawn Perfection

When I was a kid, I once complained to my mom about boredom during a particularly slow summer, because I grew up with kids who weren't exactly on my level, which always left me wondering what to do next. Naturally, I developed an enormous amount of entertainments while alone. In response to my "whining", my mom ordered me to the basement for a big, white, plastic bucket to pick out every dandelion in the backyard with my little next door neighbor, because she didn't want "weeds" in "her" lawn. She would also suggest we do laundry, wash dishes, fold clothes, and other horrors when we hinted at boredom, so I learned industrious, productive habits early on.

We did that for awhile, then became actually bored, after exhausting every avenue available to us through this venue: we decorated ourselves with flower crowns and garlands, then went indoors and pretended to be Greek Goddesses, wrapping ourselves in bedsheets, giggling in the guest bedroom downstairs, doing playacting that I sourced from the books on the shelf. Finally my mom came downstairs to see what all the commotion was about, to find me and my friend jumping up and down on the bed, grabbing each other when we fell down, laughing over the stupid romantic phrases adults used in soap operas, like "Darling, I'm yours!", pretending all the world was a stage.

I still do that, and I still appreciate a really nice yard, even ones with hundreds of wildflowers one might consider a "weed" in passing, as I still love hammy, over-dramatic, bad acting for sport; life lessons learned in childhood, now made into art. Such is the life.
 

Toys: Having a Ball

The pink ball.

The ubiquitous toy for almost every kid on the planet is some kind 
of ball, of various makes and models. But like an empty playground, there's something sad, lonely, and forlorn about a discarded ball 
that's been tossed away. It's only as good as the child who plays 
with it. Or maybe I was just melancholy that day.  
What takes you back to childhood?

Out of this world.