Playing Games

A much cooler troll doll than the ones we had!

I grew up in a large Catholic family. There was always someone around who was willing to play checkers, parcheesi, or Monopoly. We played card games: rummy, hearts, or war. My younger sister and I, who shared a room, played with our troll dolls, making them endless simple outfits out of cloth scraps that neighborhood women gave us (our own mother didn’t sew). We made the trolls houses out of cardboard boxes, decorating them with leftover gift wrap for wallpaper and constructing beds, chairs and tables. We made plates and mugs for them out of homemade “play dough” that Mom would cook up on the stove. In summer,we would pack a sandwich and a bottle of water or Kool Aid in a paper sack and wander the woods near our house for hours. With the neighborhood kids we would play hide-and-seek outside, and when it grew dark, the reverse game called “Ghost in the Graveyard” where one person hides as the ghost and everyone else has to search.

And I read books voraciously. Books passed down from my older sister, such as “Carrie Woodlawn”, the Little House on the Prairie series, and later, “Gone with the Wind”. From my older brother, I borrowed “Kon-Tiki”,“The Call of the Wild”, and “White Fang”. My mother would drive us to the local library twice a month, and I would return with stacks of books, as many as I could carry. I was especially taken with book series about animals: the Black Stallion series and the dogs of Sunnybrook Farm, beginning with “Lad, a Dog” and continuing for generations of collies.

Then, of course, I became an adult, and play took a back seat to school, then work and the endless round of grocery shopping, cooking dinner, packing lunches, and planning the next day’s meals, while running one or two loads of wash a day, overseeing baths and homework, and trying, often unsuccessfully, to keep a relatively clean house. I was always stressed, always one second of inattention away from dropping all the plates I was juggling. As my kids matured and became more independent, my career responsibilities increased. I was habitually working 50 - 60 hour weeks, and, as email and Blackberry became commonplace, it felt as if I was on call 24 hours a day. I began planning an early retirement, long before the FIRE movement (financial independence, retire early) was a thing. Through careful planning and some serendipitous actions on the part of the corporation I worked for, I retired in my fifties, young for back then, but old by current FIRE standards, where people are retiring in their twenties and thirties.

Once retired, I rediscovered the joy of play in the luxurious abundance of free time I now had. I started to read again, rereading old favorites and finally reading books I had always intended to read but never had time for: Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, and War and Peace. (Okay, I admit I’ve still not finished War and Peace, but it is on my nightstand. ) I discovered that my library allows one to download audiobooks and books on Kindle, without even physically visiting the library, which was extremely useful during the pandemic. Since I am reading once again only for my own pleasure, my reading spans the gamut from fiction to biography to personal development to science. I am constantly amazed by how little I know and how much there is left to discover.

Also during the pandemic, I had the time alone to finally construct the LEGO Capitol building that had been in a box under my bed for several years. When my oldest puzzle-loving daughter, Mariko, comes to visit, we often tackle a LEGO model or jigsaw puzzle together. She is currently visiting, and we are working on a challenging three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of King Arthur’s Camelot.

Camelot in Process

There are games and opportunities to play everywhere. Anything can become a game. All you need is a sense of joy and playfulness. The longer I am retired, the more active that openness to play has become. Day by day, I find myself more relaxed, more willing to try things and explore subjects for their own sake, with the sense of play and curiosity I had as a child. Perhaps the dreaded “second childhood” is not a thing to be feared, but to be embraced.