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My brother, Tom, asked for my help when he remodeled
his hundred year old house. I thought he only needed
me to pick out paint colors for his walls.
Instead, I found myself underneath his house, in
the dark, crawling on my belly with a flashlight.
Down it that dark space I entered a figurative world
of caves. I saw the underside of a century-old floor
and joist as rock walls and stalactites, places
where drawings might be made as drawings alone,
not drawings to be viewed. Just drawings. Yes, the
type of marks imaginary civilizations or lost worlds
may leave behind, enigmatic and indecipherable.
I considered making (or not making) these marks
myself on the underside of these floorboards and
I thought of the half hidden worlds created by Charles
Simonds. Those bits and pieces, minute remnants
of alternative civilizations, painstakingly created
organic villages tucked into near secret locations.
The best known and preserved example is on the stairwell
of the Whitney Museum. Coming upon a tiny unpeopled
space that Simonds has created is not unlike discovering
a place like Mesa Verde, the long abandoned cliff
side architectural remains of the Anasazi civilization.
I remember seeing a small blob of red clay, the
same color clay as the fired brick walls it was
clinging to just out of reach on an exposed exterior
wall in Soho. I thought I was seeing an odd wasp's
nest and looked closer. It was a miniature cluster
of simple dwellings for beings no taller than a
gum drop.
During the time I worked at Oberlin College, Charles
Simonds was commissioned to build a portable microcosm
of red clay on a wooden base.
While I watched him slowly build this small world,
I was struck by the universality of creating personal
worlds and spaces.
Somewhere in early adolescence we dream of owning
our own island and reinventing civilization. Some
use dollhouses as the medium, others plan on winning
the lottery to build the personal island nation.
For my brother, Tom, and I, it was a larger, but
not abandoned world, inhabited by toy men.
Toy men, the usual plastic type, sold in bags of
fifty or more, came in limited variety. Most often
they were soldiers in full battle dress, shooting
rifles indiscriminately, bayoneting the air, crawling
on their bellies, or carrying injured comrades on
stretchers. The second most common type were bags
of cowboys, Indians and a few horses thrown in to
fight over, also in a limited variety of frozen
aggressive poses.
Whether soldiers, cowboys, or Indians, the toy men
were members of the "ungentle" gender.
There were never any women. The lack of women limited
the suggested types of activities to war, murder,
invasion, shooting, and carrying off the dead and
wounded. Peaceful activities could be attempted
but were unconvincing due to the postures and poses
of most toy men.
Carrying off the dead and wounded was an interesting
concept. Doctors, nurses, and priests were non-existent.
Soldiers were expected to return to duty by the
next day unless run over by a law mower. On rare
occasions when one might become lost or buried,
resurrection was not only an option, but an inevitable
certainty, if found or unearthed. Even if buried
a year or more, a toy man would instantly be revivified
the moment he was extracted from the soil.
These were not Gods, merely unnamed immortals.
The world of toy men is often a world at war. War
is the constant for toys with aggressive postures.
In such a world of constant war, violence can become
real. The use of burning liquids can turn leaders
and followers alike into flattened blobs of plastic.
There were, however, two named immortals amongst
the toy men. Jim and
Henry moved beyond the nature of their type and
forged peace through adventure and sport.
Tom had selected a stretcher bearer as "his
man," Jim Dawson. Jim was a pensive man, always
at the ready to give a hand or two, never one to
shirk a burden. Jim was a cautious leader who could
also follow, either as front or rear stretcher bearer
might be expected to do.
Jim never fought and was the promoter of the monthly
Olympics, which required that all toy men participants
must be relieved of their weapons (usually with
the help of a razor blade) and painted the colors
of the flag for the country they represented.
Jim was also the main importer of building materials
for all construction projects, which is the acknowledged
source of his great financial wealth and power.
Without Jim, there would never have been the institution
of the monthly Olympics and our basement might have
looked like anyone else's.
The other named toy man was mine. He was not at
all like other toy men.
He was not cowboy, Indian, or soldier. His color
wasn't red, olive drab, or green; but white. He
held no weapon. He stood with his hands at his side,
at attention.
Normally, toy men were purchased in groups of 25
or 100 at a time. "My man," who I named
"Henry Ford," didn't come in a set, but
was purchased as a single item at the Ben Franklin
5 & 10 store. Henry Ford stood on an attached
plinth, making him slightly taller than other men
of plastic. Written across the face of his pedestal
were the words "William McKinley, President."
I still called him Henry Ford.
William McKinley was the dead president my elementary
school had been named after. Other assassinated
presidents, Lincoln and Garfield, were honored with
schools named in their memory. I attended Garfield
Junior High and
my grandmother taught at Lincoln. Lincoln Junior
High's school colors,
were black and white. Go figure.
My man was called Henry Ford. My Henry Ford was
not only an innovator, he was a pacifist, and an
explorer. His efforts at maintaining world peace
were most eloquently expressed in his unbridled,
enthusiastic support of the monthly Olympic movement.
Henry not only designed and constructed many important
Olympic venues, but won a large number of gold medals,
especially in the winter Olympics of December 1959,
January 1960 and February 1960. His Olympic record
in the unmanned bobsled-ski jump remains unchallenged.
Many of the Olympic venues and world exploration
required importation of many buckets of clay and
wood scraps from nearby construction sites.
This importation took place without the knowledge
of either of our parents. Jim, through his alter-ego,
Tom transported buckets and buckets of damp, moldable
clay until the one-half of the basement, known to
our parents as the furnace room and storage room,
was filled so the only places one might safely step
were the major roadways and mountain paths linking
the variously discovered parts of the world and
Olympic villages.
Ships that plied the water routes to the many lands
required only small quantities of actual water.
The voyages were sometimes facilitated by the creation
of virtual, blue waterways. Unfortunately, the blue
paint did not dry very fast and we had to stop using
it or come up with an excuse mom might find reasonable
for the condition of our hands and pants.
Perhaps our ever-expanding world might have become
more elaborate and fantastic if not for the unfortunate
convergence of the live chickens and backed up sewer.
How Tom and I got a box of baby chicks, I don't
recall. Maybe some neighborhood kid received them
for Easter and passed them on to us because they
were no longer cute. We also got a package of chick
food and a bowl of water. This made for a bizarre
new land for Henry and Jim to explore. At first,
the inhabitants of this new world were a curiosity,
later a calamity.
The chickens had been invited to participate in
the Olympics, but lacked skill and competitiveness.
They were banned from future Olympics, but certainly
would not have qualified in any normal event, team
or individual. The really bad part of having chickens
was that they grew quickly, despite an effort to
not feed them, and would not remain in the box.
They caused great consternation and havoc wherever
they went. Toy men fell over everywhere the chickens
went! Ships and cars were knocked off course, buildings
toppled, and chicken shit was everywhere.
Then came the flooding. Tom and I were away at
Cub Scouts when the basement sink and laundry started
to back up from a mysterious sewer blockage.
Had Jim really put rocks and fiberglass insulation
in the toilet as a science experiment?
No one knew.
What we did know is that when we came home all
the doors were open and dad was swearing in the
basement.
The next day, like a reversal of Noah's flood,
our utopian world and floating chickens were gone.
Grandma Kinnee took the chickens, which she fattened
up and roasted. Mountains, villages and entire mono
sexual communities were erased. History was changed
and the monthly Olympics never occurred again.
Some of Charles Simonds' small, vanished civilizations
have been washed away by wind, rain, and snow. Others
are preserved for posterity.
Secret drawings, deep in geologic caves and lesser
drawing which may or may not be underneath floorboards
are safe from discovery. All else is swept away.
Even the trash man doesn't know what he has removed.
P.S.
I look back on this today and see that "The
Sims" fill the need today for constructing
a personal model of the world. We play at utopia
building with toy men or Sims but we are foiled,
always, by the giant chickens.
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