Mrs. Fitz's Story Emporium

Stuffed animals allow children to safely play out many social interactions which otherwise might not seem, or be, safe.

This is my rationale for having stuffed animals, having many of them, and having them longer than really was necessary.

My favorite was a pink pig given to me when I was eight, years before Sesame Street’s Miss Piggy hogged the limelight. Mine wasn’t a Miss at all. It was a little generic pig I noticed in a display in a ladies’ store, not a toy store. I think it was a prop.

I executed my first tactical maneuver to get what I wanted from Mom and I wanted the pig. My plan was forthright. I begged for it every day for about 2 months before Christmas. When not begging, I looked pouty so Mom could tell I was thinking about my little pig. I even got around to insinuating helpful things I might do for Mom IF I GOT MY PIG. I was cautious not to promise, just insinuate. Finally, and this might have put it over the top, I told Dad how much I wanted my pig.

I think analysts of young behaviors might label this obsessive, which sounds bad, especially considering I scoured our closets every day before Christmas to find out if Mom had my pig bought and hidden in the house.

She did.

One of the nice things about being raised in Elmhurst, IL by parents who knew the Depression and knew War and knew penny-watching from the womb, was our toy status. My two brothers and I didn’t have many of them…bikes and baseball stuff significant exceptions. What we had was time to play. This we had in abundance.

So, basically, I did two things, both quite nice:

1. Played with items meant for other things.
..like living-in-the-cardboard-refrigerator-box, scratching hopscotch on the sidewalk with stones, stringing rubber bands into a long necklace for Chinese jump rope. My brothers had a game I could have lived without but it was clever. They yelled my name. When I turned to see what was up, they’d say “think fast!” while throwing a little ball at my head, which of course hit me, in the head. I was unharmed and it made them laugh so it had a minor fun element to it.

2. Stalked girls with cool toys.
Jan had a surrey, for instance. This was a bike but it had a cloth canopy top and a place for a passenger. Mary had, get this, a TRAMPOLINE. I waited hours in her yard to get just one jump. One toy was a just-my-size wood house somebody’s Dad had built for somebody in somebody’s back yard. I never met the girl. I saw it while walking home from school. I saw it every day I walked home from school. I NEVER saw a girl in it. This waste of such magnificence finally got to me and one day I snuck into it. Okay, I BROKE IN. If I wasn’t terror-struck about getting caught, I might be in there still.

Guilt is one of those generic emotions that fill in whenever I’m too lazy to come up with a better one.

What’s pleasant about guilt is that is pretty much negates everything and everyone else, which is something I sometimes like to do.

What’s pleasant about guilt is you can do it all by yourself.

What’s pleasant about guilt is it makes you feel smart, since you are passing judgment and it takes a brain to do that.

What’s pleasant about guilt is how easy it is to conjure it up; unlike, say, joy.

What’s pleasant about guilt is others, prodded slightly, tend to say nice things about you, reminding you of nice things you have done.

What’s less pleasant about guilt is knowing it is useless and self-indulgent, two states of being that make me feel guilty.

During five years as executive editor at an educational research lab, the statement of one person made me so mad, I can retrieve that emotion any time I consider what she said. She said, “Bring me a thinker. I can get do-ers, as many as I need, at any time. I don’t want do-ers. I want a thinker.”

I think her statement is ignorant and bigoted.

I think her mindset is what makes the United States weaker, since it outsources its doing to other countries.

I think her statement is an insult to people who do.

I think those who DO have plenty of thoughts and they think them.

Any thinker ought to know that.

That’s what I think.

Walking past Illinois Masonic hospital today, I crossed paths with a woman wearing a contraption on her right leg that looked as if the leg was a lipstick stuck in a shiny case.

Slight of build was she with a babushka on her head, the kind of babushka my aunties wore when they walked in rain from the car into church.

She clumped right into the multilevel parking garage, a huge concrete structure pretending it isn’t ugly by cascading green foliage from every tier, like the gardens of Babylon, but not.

Now I know it isn’t possible to drive a car wearing a cast like hers. Where was she going? She clumped like a woman who never asked for help or had no experience receiving some. I didn’t offer any but now I wish I had.

Scanning the cranial horizon is fun when flying. It beats getting to know your seat-mate, which might be fun, too; except you can never be sure.

I like to look at the little domes of heads atop the bodies of those sitting ahead of me: fluffy white, brillo-pad black, lamely brown, once in a while a spikey yellow one. These ethnic igloos are cute, I think. I have no opinion whatsoever about who they belong to, where they hail from, what they are worrying about.

I’ve tried doing the same with feet, watching them when I walk around the streets of Chicago but this gets old pretty fast. Chicagoans, generally speaking, all wear the same shoes.

There are many reasons why folks don’t write. Lack of talent isn’t one of them.

Writing FOR an audience is.

Write TO the audience instead.

It’s fine to think about writing FOR children or FOR Hollywood or FOR the record history will compose about you, which you hope to have some small say in. But it doesn’t work, unless you are writing an announcement, and then, not always.

What happens when you write FOR the audience is that you, the writer, are not present. This is quite a very large omission. All good intentions are present but YOU are not.

So, write to children, write to Hollywood…and let me know if you hear back. As to writing TO the record, don’t expect much. Readers generally prefer to write that themselves.

I attended college during the years when protesting America’s involvement in the war in VietNam primarily comprised curriculum. As I recall, most of us didn’t understand the war. Who was fighting who for what reason was beside the point. We protested our country for being IN such a terrible mess.

I think some students found in protest what they had been seeking – a valve opened to emotional bursts, an excuse to vent, fume, fist-shake, grieve deep, experience what righteousness and outrage feel like.

In this respect, we studied an adolescence-based curriculum. It is beyond sad that it was a war that provided such a thing.

A flowering plant on our balcony must be a Hawaiian expat, from the looks of it. From the looks of it, it’s longing for home. Its shamrocky lettuce leaves are perky but its bloom instinct is asleep. Daily, what I suspect should be pink tutu blooms, remain only closed buds that never meet their promise. They just sort of show up and don’t do anything vaguely flowery.

It’s my fault for planting it where it gets too much sun. I didn’t think it possible to get too much sun, since I live in Chicago; but, alas, ’tis.

What to do? What to do? I think I should move it, change its environment; but secretly hope it will find the courage to make do with where it is.

Maybe God made plants so we would have metaphors.