By Charles Stampul
I’ve long said that kids don’t care about toys. They don’t really care about dolls, balloons, or stocking stuffers. Not the things themselves, only the emotions and ideas they attach to them. They can have the same emotions and ideas without the landfall-destined toys. Now I have evidence.
This wasn’t a planned experiment. It started one night during a bath. I gave my daughter an empty shampoo bottle to play with. We were both in a silly mood, so we gave the bottle a name and a backstory. The story continued for a few nights. The bottle became a friend.
A few weeks later, she had stopped playing with the bottle, so I threw it away. She asked me where it was a day later. I told her it was in the recycle bin at the curb and would be taken away in the morning. She cried in protest and begged me to go outside and get it.
“It’s too dark,” I said. I will go first thing tomorrow before they come. But the next morning I woke up late. I looked out the window and saw that the bin had been emptied.
“Sorry, they picked up.”
“Where is he going?” She asked, tears falling.
“A new adventure.”
I left her to fix myself a bagel. “Hi!” I said loudly enough for her to hear from the living room. “What’s your name? Nice to meet you!”
I brought the Philadelphia Cream Cheese box to her. “ Look who I found in the kitchen, his name is Philly.” The tears stopped. “Sometimes when you lose a friend you find an even better friend.”
She took Philly to bed that night. 5 am the next morning she ran out of her bed crying, “Daddy I lost Philly!”
“What’s wrong,” I said
“I can’t find Philly.”
I went to her room and found the box under the blanket.
Philly was lost again a few hours later. She had been looking through books on the living room table.
“Daddy, I can’t find Philly.”
“Clean up these books!”
“Find Philly!”
“Clean up these books, or I’m taking something away. Usually, I will take away anything I have to clean up, but don’t like to confiscate books. When another request went unanswered, I put away the books myself, finding Philly.
“If you cleaned up the books you would have found him. Now I’m throwing him out.”
“No!” she cried.
I ripped the box up and threw it out.
I apologized a few minutes later, then retrieved the pieces from the garbage and taped them back together. But the magic was gone. She never touched the box again.
Charles Stampul is the author of I Am Free To Learn. He writes at https://simplicityandpurity.
could be a true story.
could be a nice piece of fiction.
entertaining regardless.
Completely true, but I learned that she didn’t actually forget about Philly and is upset that I threw him out for good.