Playtime

The Games I Used to Play

Most of what I remem­ber from my child­hood was that of school and play­ing after school. The for­mer was filled with class­mates and friends and social things, the lat­ter devoid of it. What I did in school usu­ally stayed in school and it did not spill over to the home sphere (after school). A few times, my class­mates vis­ited me at home and it was awk­ward to say the least. I was not com­fort­able then in the idea of min­gling my home life with that of my school life. Not that I was shy, hardly in fact! I was out­spo­ken, talk­a­tive, out­go­ing, viva­cious, and in trou­ble with my teach­ers most of time. This kind of dichotomy between school and home was vol­un­tary in part, because I never needed to meld the two together. School was fine if it stayed in school and I was per­fectly happy not hav­ing my class­mates play with me out of school. This pat­tern of behav­ior (of sep­a­rat­ing school and those who make it up and after school) con­tin­ued until high school, when the merg­ing between the two spheres of my life became inevitable.

But even if school and after school some­how merged when I was young, I would not have been able to do much! My aunt was very pro­tec­tive of my sis­ter and I and we were lim­ited of what we can do or where to go. We were hardly out of sight. The only times my sis­ter and I had pri­vacy was when we were closed inside our room, play­ing our games. A few third play­mates came and went, adding vari­ety to our play­time. But for most of our child­hood we were play­mates to each other. Which was fine, since we were able to make our own fun. She is only 10 months older than me, close enough in age that we made com­pat­i­ble play­mates, but far enough that we were in sep­a­rate grades (which helped with my men­tal sep­a­ra­tion of school and home).

Playtime between my sis­ter and I was epic. Not in its scale, but in its depth. The sto­ries we wove, the char­ac­ters that devel­oped, the plot that unrav­eled, the inter­ac­tions that went on were so detailed that even if we had a third play­mate, they would not be able to fol­low along! Some chil­dren have imag­i­nary friends, my sis­ter and I cre­ated an imag­i­nary world. Characters like Linda, Luisa, Rolly, and Roy became alive in our play. We gave per­son­al­i­ties, thoughts, desires, and even dreams to these char­ac­ters through our inter­ac­tions. We were role­play­ing using what­ever we can. Dolls, toys, plushies, and minia­ture stat­ues were given names and sto­ries. Linda was a very small teddy bear with the mes­sage “Merry Christmas” scrawled on her red shirt and a miss­ing ear (we decided that the remain­ing ear looked like a pony tail). Rolly was a sim­i­lar “Christmas” bear, except his eyes looked more fierce (to us at least) and his ears made of sterner stuff (he had both of them). Luisa was a lamb plush my sis­ter had, but for some inex­plic­a­ble rea­son, she dis­ap­peared and we never found her. Roy was actu­ally one of the first one we named. He was my large edu­ca­tional bear. He had a zip­per labeled “Zipper” and but­tons labeled “Buttons” and his out­fit was mul­ti­col­ored and were labeled as such (“Red,” “Blue,” “Yellow”). But even if we had the toys, the rich­est sto­ries we ever wove were cre­ated with­out them.

Sometimes, when we were right in the mid­dle of a story and play­ing, my aunt would tell us to put away our toys because it was get­ting late and we needed to go to sleep. But we were so reluc­tant to stop play­ing that we con­tin­ued the story regard­less. We did not dare to dis­obey her and con­tinue play­ing with our toys, so we devised a way to con­tinue play­ing with­out get­ting into trou­ble. The way was hand pup­pets. Literally. We formed dis­tinct looks for each char­ac­ter. They were also anthro­po­mor­phic. Linda looks like a swan or a song­bird, Luisa looks like a hen, Rolly is a snake, Roy is a horse and so on. We devel­oped favorites, of course. My pri­mary char­ac­ter was Luisa Lovelace. She was a for­eigner or some­thing and had prob­lems fit­ting in despite being pop­u­lar. My sister’s pri­mary char­ac­ter was Linda Reyes. She was shy and smart (though she was picked on for her poor grades). The two became best friends, but often had explo­sive fights that left me and my sis­ter cry­ing. Our char­ac­ters’ per­son­al­i­ties and prob­lems reflected our own. We role­played (because that is what it was) con­flicts and res­o­lu­tions and we even maneu­vered through a mine­field of social interactions.

Even in our imag­i­nary play we can­not escape the social dra­mas. Cliques form and a social hier­ar­chy devel­oped in our pre­tend world. There were true friends, back­stab­bing friends, and fair­weather friends that just used us. Romance came in form of boys who ignored our char­ac­ters, boys who were mean to us, and boys who were per­fect gen­tle­men. Luisa had a crush on Tony, a very cul­tured jock who did not know Luisa existed. Linda liked Rolly, a tough trou­ble­maker. Pina (Linda and Luisa’s nerdy best friend) liked Zur-Zur, a very good-looking geek. There were ene­mies, too. Mendy was the other pop­u­lar girl and her entourage con­sisted of Diana (an obese bunny) and Jessica (a vain, but very pretty short girl). Mendy was smart, rich, and beau­ti­ful and picks on Linda quite a lot. Luisa defends Linda, but soon became the tar­get of Mendy’s mean­ness since she con­sid­ered Luisa as a threat to her own pop­u­lar­ity. Mendy was also the school slut. Mendy rou­tinely flirts with Tony and Rolly much to our character’s con­ster­na­tion. At that age, we did not know what sex was about. We assumed that if a girl presses her hands against the boy’s hands and then kiss, that was it and the girl gets preg­nant. Oh, and a lot of moan­ing. We had our 3^rd-grade char­ac­ters kiss­ing and mak­ing love and moan­ing. And we did not even need MTV.

But play­time did not stop at hand pup­pets. Sure, the char­ac­ters had a name, his­tory, school, birth­days, and were incred­i­bly com­plex and that we played these hand pup­pets for six years (it ran longer than the Mexican soaps we used to watch), but it was not the only thing we played. We had a box full of toys. A lot of the toys we played did not retain their orig­i­nal use, though. My sister’s tea party set’s tray became a three-story apart­ment for our small toys. My Ninja Turtles became police­men (except for my Samurai Leonardo, he became either the mayor or the “city’s” rich­est denizen) and Hollywood Barbie became a teacher. We would use old boxes and turn them into class­rooms for my sister’s McDonald mini-Barbies. I remem­ber one time that a third play­mate intro­duced the con­cept of a pageant to our play. He even made tiny sashes with the names of coun­tries. I can remem­ber debat­ing whether the pink-dress-wearing mini-Barbie looked like Ms. Portugal or Ms. Swaziland. My sister’s tiny Belle minia­ture became Ms. Norway while her mini-Hollywood Barbie (we played her as the daugh­ter of the actual Hollywood Barbie) became Ms. USA. My Boy Scout neck­er­chief ring became the winner’s crown. A bat­tered gorilla hat-and-bucket became the stage. There was singing and danc­ing and even a question-and-answer round.

One thing that was con­sis­tent with the games I played with my sis­ter was that it was always her games that we were play­ing. I could never get her to play Street Fighter with my toys so I always end up play­ing what she wanted to play. Not that I minded, her toys were usu­ally cooler. Her Barbie dolls were more flex­i­ble than my chunk-o-bots (except my Ninja Turtles though, they were the only toys I thought that were cooler than any­thing she owned… so much so that my sis­ter owns them now ). I used to pre­tend that her Hollywood Barbie was Chun-Li and I had it do back flips and heli­copter kicks. And so many clothes! They were like the Legos I never had. In cheap fab­ric. Her Barbie Bubble Bath also made real bub­bles! She also had a Barbie Corvette (she had the largest toy car between the two of us. How unfair was that!). I played with her so much that I ended up with my own purse and wal­let. It was a baby blue purse with a flower and a baby blue plaid background.

Another fun thing we did was draw­ing. On any­thing but paper. My aunt was not the type to give us blank sheets of paper to “waste.” So, we made do on what­ever medium we could find. Our favorite were ply­wood walls. With a damp fin­ger, we could draw shapes on it. We soon stopped when my aunt found out were we stick­ing our fin­gers in our mouths and using our saliva as ink. We did use paper also, but the paper we used belonged to pages of books. Our par­tic­u­lar favorite was an old Bible. It had many pages where the chap­ter ends and it had only one or two sen­tences. So, we ripped those out and drew on the white space (we knew that Jesus did not mind, it was for a good cause, after all, idle hands are the Devil’s work­shop, and we were not idle). The back of the books were good sources of paper. We found many books with sev­eral blank sheets in their last pages that were soon drawn on.

We also used to play “house” or our vari­a­tion of it (we were neigh­bors instead of liv­ing together) with our­selves. The game usu­ally starts with us “buy­ing” sup­plies for our house. We rarely play this because it gets quite messy and it was a headache to clean up. “House” involved tak­ing care of “chil­dren,” too. And cook­ing. And get­ting chil­dren to school. “House” with two peo­ple was bor­ing, actu­ally. It takes too long to set up and twice as long to clean up. My fond­est of mem­ory of “house” con­sisted play­ing with very few toys (15 at the most) between the five (me, my sis­ter, and two other chil­dren). We also played “school” with our older cousins. They were the teach­ers and we were the stu­dents. They had us do spelling contests!

I look back at those times with a smile on my face. Sure, I never had the fun expe­ri­ences I read in books about chil­dren, but I know that my expe­ri­ence was uniquely mine (and my sister’s) and it was fun in its own spe­cial way. There is no regret.