tiny worlds

Several days ago, Sheila linked to a site that had pictures - I think they were like trading cards that came with chocolates - of mushrooms (it was a European blog; I think it was all in French). And she talked a little about how those mushrooms evoked the tiny worlds like The Borrowers and the family that lived in the bookshelves of Captain Kangaroo.

(And I do not remember that! And I was all about the Captain back in the day, but I only remember a tiny marching band that only he could see...and this is one reason why they've not brought the show up to the present day, and made it "edgy"...can you imagine "But I saw them! I saw the tiny marching band again!" "Captain...are you high or did you just get hit on the head too many times with ping pong balls?" I mean...there are just some things that should NOT be made edgy and played for cheap humor...And from what I've read, Bob Keeshan (the Captain) was very much an advocate for children and for quality children's programming, kind of like Mr. Rogers in that way. But I sorta liked the Captain better than Mr. Rogers when I was a kid).

And it got me thinking about tiny worlds. Some of my favorite cartoons were the old Tom and Jerry cartoons where you saw interior shots of Jerry's mousehole...you could see the back of the lath and plaster of the wall in some cases, and you could imagine the space between the walls. And you saw his bed (a matchbox) and his chair (an empty thread spool) and his sink (a thimble). And Warner Brothers did something similar, earlier, with Sniffles the Mouse (most people I've talked to HATE the Sniffles cartoons, and while they certainly didn't have the anarchic laugh-a-minute pace of the later Bugs and Daffy cartoons...there was still something GOOD about them, something safe and sweet that appealed to small children. Or at least, that appealed to me as a small child).

And when I was a kid...I remember the Borrowers books, I read them all from the library. And I had another series, sort of a knock-off American version of the Borrowers, called The Littles - except they had tails and pointed ears so it was not entirely clear if they were some kind of miniaturized human or if they were some sort of "little people" or pixie or something. (Later on, there was a Saturday-morning cartoon about the Littles. It wasn't great, but I had loved the books as a kid, so I doggedly watched it). And again - these tiny people (or whatevers) lived in the walls or under the floor of houses, right alongside humans, and their furniture and other impedimentia were made from human castoffs - you could recognize thimbles and playing cards and broken combs in the illustrations from The Borrowers.

And Stuart Little! To an extent, that's another tiny-world book. (I remember as a child - I had a little mouse doll that my mother had made me. I called him Stuart. For a while, when I was quite small, my parents indulged me to let him sit at the table with us when we ate dinner - I used a doll's table on top of the dinner table, and Stuart sat in a doll-house chair. His plate was a button and his glass the washed-out cap from a Magic Marker. And yes, my parents even let me put morsels of food on his plate as long as I cleaned it up later). I also remember trying to make ice skates for Stuart by bending paper clips into kind of an ice-skate shape. But they were hard to attach to his feet because he didn't have shoes...I think I tied them on with thread.

I also had a book - I can't remember the title now and it's disappeared into the mists of time - that showed how to make simple dollhouse type furniture - sponges for beds, spool chairs, dried flowers stuck in clay inserted in an empty toothpaste tube cap for a vase...again, shades of Sniffles' house! The book was illustrated by photographs; the dollhouse-dwellers shown using the furniture were mostly the tiniest-size of the Steiff teddy bears, and also a small toy chicken made out of pompoms. (I remember particularly the dining room shot - showing them all grouped around a table, sitting on spool stools, with "food" made by putting Cheerios and other small things on button plates).

And for me - part of it was that it was a cozy sort of thing. It made me feel warm and safe to look into my dollhouse (I got a dollhouse one Christmas) and see the family in there, all provided for with beds and blankets on the beds and food in the tiny icebox and tiny books that I made by writing stories and poems in my most microscopic printing and then stapling together....I think part of it was a fundamental inborn desire to CARE for something, to be able to look at it and say "they're safe and warm and have things to do because I took care of it" - a lot of the furniture and accessories in the house was stuff I made myself.

I think part of it also was a desire to control...I didn't have control over a lot when I was a kid. But I could set up the dollhouse the way I wanted, I could put the whole family together in the living room if I chose. If I was angry, I could scatter them throughout the house and force them to be lonely...I didn't do that often, I was a pretty benevolent dictator.

Even before the dollhouse, I had a Sunshine Family. (Any other girls of the 70s remember them? Sort of a hippiefied, back-to-the lander family? I had the mom and dad and baby...later on a little girl was added to be an older sister to the baby but I never had her. And I think she destroyed the fundamental symmetry, the simple trinity of the family.) Anyway. They were about Barbie sized (maybe a bit smaller) and they came with booklets that showed how to make things for them - like how to make a baby crib out of one of those plastic berry boxes. And as a very small girl, I remember doing that (I think there were also simple kits you could buy of stuff for them, to make...my Sunshine Family dad had a "leather" gardening apron that I think I remember making from a kit). They lived on a bookshelf in my room.

I wonder - do kids play that way much any more? I mean, I know there's Barbie in her many Shiva-like manifestations and there are the Bratz dolls and the various knockoffs - but somehow they seem more consumerist ("Buy 'bling' for your Bratz." Indeed.) and don't have that same ethos...that same home-and-family thing. (I cannot imagine the Bratz in a family setting. Yes, I know there are Baby Bratz - presumably little sisters and NOT the result of teenage-pregnancy on the part of the semi-grown Bratz... but I cannot see in my mind's eye what those dolls' fathers and mothers would look like..and perhaps that is part of the issue - there are no parents on the scene at all - a 'tweener's paradise and an adult's nightmare).

But anyway. I had my Sunshine family, and my family of mouse dolls (Stuart grew up and got married - his wife's name was Caroline - and they had Raymond and Martin and Susie and Teency, the baby...and they all lived in the dollhouse for a while). And I had another mouse doll, named Guinevere, who lived in her own, separate house...her world was not part of Stuart and his family's; she was in a different universe.

And later, I had a more authentic dollhouse family that was living circa 1920, which required me to do simple research to find out, for example, whether they would have had a telephone or not and what it would have looked like...And I will admit I still "played" (more in the sense of making stuff and arranging it in the house, rather than truly moving the dolls through domestic dramas) to an embarrassingly late age - like 14 or 15. And you know, I still kind of miss the dollhouse. I know some adults have them but I just can't face having to go out and buy all of the impedimentia, and making new stuff, and doubtless having it sit half-finished for months...and then having my friends ask about it, because although a lot of them think I'm weird already, a dollhouse (as a childless adult) would be a new "round-the-bend" for them.
(My friends, much as I love them...well, some of them don't totally understand me.)

But at least I have my memories of those days. And I admit, even now as an adult, I look long and hard at toothpaste-tube caps before I throw them out. And I have a whole pile of those tiny matchboxes tucked away. (The tiny ones - the kitchen-match matchboxes that are about 1 1/2" by 2 1/2", were like gold when I was a kid...they made authentic chests of drawers with drawers that really moved. But when I was a kid, no one in my family smoked, and candles were used RARELY - so there were almost never any empty matchboxes. And now, since I light candles nearly every night, I have lots of them...and I cannot bear to throw them away. I guess I secretly hope I'll make friends with someone who has a seven or eight year old daughter who likes to make dollhouse stuff, and then I can give them to her - and she can have the one supply I coveted and never had enough of as a kid).