Stuffties

What was your favorite childhood toy

This is my oldest son, Elijah's, favorite toy.  His name is Elephant-Elephant and he's had him since my mother bought him for Elijah on a trip to the zoo when he was 21 months old. My favorites, unfortunately can only be seen in my minds eye and so far the technology doesn't allow for those images to be uploaded to the internet.

There were the toys I wanted--Transformers were the big ones--and then there were the toys that were my constant companions, the ones that consumed my imaginative life.  There was no  one favorite toy, but there was a group of toys that were central to my childhood play: My “stuffties” (our childhood name for stuffed animal toys).  It never occurred to me that a boy playing with stuffed animals was unusual or un-masculine. (Of course it’s not something I talked about at school otherwise I’m sure someone would have “educated” me.)

Essentially what me and my siblings were playing was “house.”  I was father to ten children; my brother had his brood as well.  While I can’t identify a favorite among my ten, Vince definitely had two favorites, Snoopy and Celery.  Celery was a dog hand puppet that he’d had since his earliest days living in Oregon.  One of Celery’s eyelids had been burned off when he placed the dog’s head on the surface of our wood-burning stove in our Oregon farmhouse.   And then my sister, Dawn, being a girl, had a virtual orphanage of stuffed animals and dolls.  She was assigned the role (whether she liked it or not) of the wealthy and somewhat wicked aunt.  There were no spouses and this fact was glossed over without explanation.  There was no backstory of deaths or divorce.  We were simply single parents.

Together we created an entire alternate world where I was a pediatrician driving a yellow Corvette, Vince was an architect, and Dawn was some sort of self-made magnate, rich beyond telling.  Our games all revolved around our “children.”  Our beds were their homes and their cars were “slideboxes” (empty shoe boxes).

Imagine my amazement when the folks at Nissan actually created the real-life "Slidebox" vehicle we'd imagined those shoe boxes to be when we were kids playing with our stuffties.

Even all these years later I remember the distinct personalities of each of my “kids” as well as their real-life origins:

Leonard and Pupcake were the “youngest.”  I assigned them to be a year younger than my own age.

• Leonard was my oldest stuffed animal, a leopard about the same size as Elijah’s favorite, Elephant-Elephant.  I got him at the same time as Vince got Celery and Dawn got a stuffed yellow duck (the only toy of the trio not to survive-Vince and I tossed it into that same wood-burning stove that destroyed Celery’s eye).  I was never attached to Leonard the way Vince was to Celery, probably because I lost him for about four years.  He turned up among my cousin’s toys and I brought him back home.  Leonard was fairly eccentric, moving to the beat of his own drum and favoring bizarre fashion choices.
• Pupcake was my second oldest stufftie. He was a cheap print of the dog from the Strawberry Shortcake series, stuffed with filling to make a very small pillow rather than a three-dimensional toy.  I got him when I was  about 8 years old and living in St. Croix.  Pupcake was a chilled-out surfer dude.

The next two, Gerry and Frogger,  were my real-life age, both picked up second-hand after we moved to Florida.

• Frogger was a flimsy frog with dangling limbs and a thin fabric covering.  Frogger was the nerd of the family, socially awkward but an outstanding skateboarder.
• Gerry was a tan dog in peppermint striped pajama shirt and matching sleeping cap.  He had a music box inside that played a lullaby when you wound the the metal key on his rear.  I never used that feature.  Gerry was shrewd business-kid of the family, well on his way to wealth (if he could avoid prison due to his questionable ethics).

The next five, Humphrey, Big Bear, Riff Raff, Charlie, and Dotty were all a year “older” than me.

• Humphrey (along with Dotty and Charlie) was hand-crocheted by my great-grandmother, an obsessive crocheter who was constantly sending us her creations.  All three of us had several several of the toys she made.  Humphrey was a light brown bear and was the athlete of the family, devoted to weight lifting, with a bulky, polyester-filled body to prove it.
• Big Bear was actually not big.  He was both the newest and oldest member of the family.  He was the last addition but also a “reboot” of on my my first stuffed animals, a larger bear that I’d lost in Oregon.  When I got this bear, I gave him Big Bear’s name and in that sense brought him back to life.  He was a small plush bear wearing a North American Van Lines t-shirt.  Big Bear was the outdoorsman of the family, fond of camping, hunting, and fishing.
• Charlie was a clown with yellow circus outfit crocheted to his crocheted body.  His head was styrofoam ball with a crocheted covering.  Charlie, in my imagination was no clown. Instead he was a blond, stereotypically “All-American boy” (yet in our imaginary world, he was also mixed race.  Stuffed animals were the equivalent of “white”--culturally and numerically dominant, and dolls had the “black” experience.  Mixed race toys were like Charlie, doll-like in appearance but having the fuzzy, soft texture and stuffing of a stuffed animal.  Likewise a plastic animal such as a My Little Pony would also have been considered racially mixed).
• Riff-Raff was probably my highest quality stuffed animal, besides Big Bear.  He was a plush hand puppet lion with a full, golden mane.  He was loud and the de facto leader of his siblings.
• Dotty was a white crocheted bear in an orange crocheted top and red crocheted pants.  She was the sole girl of the family, sweet, friendly, and kind (and frankly, along with Charlie, somewhat lacking in personality).  An odd note about Dotty is that I’m pretty sure I named her for a classmate of mine.  We were not close and I don’t recall ever having a crush on her so I'm not sure what motivated me to do that. The real Dottie would likely have found this very weird and perhaps a bit creepy, had she known, and would not have hesitated to let me know.

And last and probably least was Ralph.

• Ralph was a dark brown vaguely dog shaped piece of stuffed plush material.  I bought the material and stuffing at a fabric store and made him myself during a short-lived interest in sewing my brother and I went through.  Ralph was like ten years older than everyone else in the family and had very little to do with the others.

Something else that Dottie (and all my other classmates) would have found weird is that I continued to play with these toys long past the age most kids abandoned this type of play.  I was still playing with them, drawing pictures of them, doing little personality profiles through 8th grade.  And I probably didn’t stop thinking about them and their imaginary lives until sometime in in my freshman year of high school.

Even today, if you asked me, with a little thought I could probably tell you where all ten of my “children” from my childhood are today and what they are doing as middle-aged stuffed animals with families of their own.

Sadly, in real life, all ten are gone.  Sometime after I went to college all of these stuffed animals (with all the drawings and paraphenalia I created around them) were lost, presumably carelessly thrown away during one move or another. It is one of the great regrets of my life.  I would have loved to share these toys with my own real-life children, especially Elijah, who has inherited his father’s penchant for deep, richly imaginative play, and who has far more stuffed animals than I could ever have dreamed of.

Clearly storytelling has been with me since I was a kid.  I love stories and the world of the imagination.  It’s remarkable that this passion survived a childhood where imagination was often regarded with suspicion and fiction considered at best a waste of time and at worst a spiritual danger.  Still my storytelling heart survived, thrived and grew through the world of my favorite toys.  And today I still believe in stories, that they can tell truths that are harder to access with just the facts and present reality.

My toys may be gone but they live, where they’ve always lived, in my imagination.