PEA RIDGE — A few days ago I was listening to children playing in their father’s truck, imagining that they were driving, and pretending to do first one job and then another with the truck.
It reminded me that my brother Ben and I did a good bit of imagining at play when we were little boys. Imagining really expands one’s opportunities to play. Sometimes it helps to have a real thing as a prop, like your dad’s truck, but the real item is just a start. When your imagination gets going, the whole wide world opens up.
The kids I was listening to could be firefighters if they wanted to be. Or, they could be furniture movers. Or they could be a mowing crew moving their mowers to a new job.
When they became firefighters, their dad’s pickup became a powerful red fire truck. One of them could do the siren sound whilethe other made the rumbling sound of the motor and the sound of shifting gears. The sound of the powerful motor might be interspersed with the screech of tires in a turn, or the blast of the air horn, or the squeal of brakes as the “fire truck” desperately tries to avoid crashing into a car that foolishly crosses in front of it. This is how you travel 50 MPH while sitting still, and how you save a house from burning while you are sitting in your own driveway.
It’s imagination now; but someday they may really do those things that they are pretending today.
My brother Ben and I often played cars. Whether we had a real toy car, orjust a little block of wood for a vehicle, we could do all kinds of things with what we had. Usually I wanted my “car” or my “truck” to be a Chevrolet, so whether it was a toy car or a rock or a block of wood, it was my “Chevrolet.” When I was a boy, Chevrolets always had six-cylinder motors. You can make a pretty good Chevrolet sound if you put the tip of your tongue against your gum just behind your front teeth, and move the air forward, making your tongue flutter, with a t-t-t-t-t-t sound while your voice makes a solid humming sound. The Ford V8 sound was harder.Ben’s pretend cars were usually Fords. He couldn’t make the Chevrolet sound as well as I could, or so I thought. Sometimes his Fords sounded like Vnnnn, Vnnnn, Vnnnn. That was when he gunned the motor. Sometimes he made aFord V8 sound by making the sound come out of the corner of his mouth, with the air vibrating the side of his cheek, making a rattling Shhhhh sound. That sound was for when your Ford was going really fast.
I finally learned to make Ben’s Ford sound too, but after awhile it made my mouth hurt, so I went back to my Chevy sounds.
I’ve noticed that kids often use their imaginations to play at work they have seen adults doing.
Sometimes we used to play storekeeper. We would set up a pretend cash register, and one of us would be the storekeeper, while the other would come in to buy things. We could weigh things, state prices,take money, make change, bag things up to go, all in imagination. We had horses on the farm back then, and as we got big enough to wish we could drive the horses, one of uswould pretend to be the horse, and one would be Dad. We usually found a real rope to be the reins.
The rope went around the shoulders of “the horse.” We might really pull our red wagon, or we might just pretend to pull something, like a pretend plow.
We also did horse racing.
To race horses, we each needed a horse, which usually meant a stick, maybe a broom, or just a plain long stick. Then we mounted our horses and we were off! With this kind of horse, you could trot if you wanted, or you could gallop. We usually galloped.
I have come to think that when kids play at work roles, they really learn different roles and are actually practicing skills that will eventually be practical work skills for them. It is also a reminder to me that experiencing real work as drudgery is a learned thing. One could just aseasily learn that work is enjoyable and satisfying, and that accomplishment is fun. It is also a reminder to me that one can do the opposite, and make “work” even of one’s play. To one person, golfing and fishing is work, whereas to another making something out of wood or managing cows and calves is relaxation and fun. Dr. Charles Inlow was a cardiologist at work, but his relaxation and fun was to run his tractor and bale hay on his farm. The fun and satisfaction is not in a certain activity as such, but in the imaginative way your mind’s eye sees what you are doing.
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history.
He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 03/28/2012