The World of Toys

When I was younger and I still made up stories for my stuffed animals, dolls, and little plastic figurines to act out, I was obsessed with the idea of sameness. One of my favorite characters was Wing, a tiny (about an inch tall) orange, plastic bear with wings and a tail with a white tuft on the end. Every morning he would wake up and drive to work in his beat-up pink VW Bug. At five o' clock he would arrive home and (depending on my decided storyline) would start working on his hobby, which was usually playing the guitar loud enough to annoy the neighbors or reading in a chair made out of building blocks. Many times wing had several prize possessions and the Statue of Liberty was always in his living room (yes, he was that rich). Wing would eat at 6:00 sharp and go to bed at 8:00 under a small plastic palm tree. Inevitably, his sacred schedule would always go awry because of the other townspeople, which were ingeniously played by my friend and her sister.

Eventually the games I played with my toys wormed their way into stories when I started getting into writing. I remember when I made a little dragon out of clay I wrote a story about how he selfishly ruled kingdom until something happened that made him change his ways. (I was 8 or 9 when I wrote it so I can't remember everything) When I was a little bit older I wrote a story about a little wooden snake I had gotten that day and a princess. Now that I'm in high school, and pretending has faded away into the past, I still think about all those unwritten stories and how wonderful it would be if we could write them as easily as we acted them out when we were

younger. Pretending is such a wonderful pastime for the little ones because it gives

them so much creativity. Maybe if we tried to re-teach ourselves to enjoy pretending instead of sitting in front of the computer or TV every free minute we would be alot

better off. That's right, you have an excuse to sit on the floor and play with your old stuffed animals! Go for it!