The Great Pretender

I suppose it is the privilege of most children to have immediate and unlimited access to an inexhaustible imagination, though I can really speak only for mine, and in the case of my Frazier I can say this is undeniably true.  He is unencumbered by convention and the possibilities for anything are infinite.  It's a beautiful thing to witness.  He was always one to see how many ways any given object could be used and whether or not they could be used in tandem with something seemingly unrelated.  Even when he was very young he could focus on one thing long enough to fully exhaust the possibilities.

These days, he is the master of pretend.  We can stay home all day long and Frazier has no trouble entertaining himself for the entire day.   I fear 28 years in the world has diminished my imagination so that I am of little use except for the preparation of snacks and an occasional chocolate milk.  At any rate, he prefers to do most of his pretending alone and though he tolerates my intrusion on occasion, I feel I am only in the way.  He is always busy setting up little dioramas in the windowsill or speeding vehicles along the carpet or packing picnics.  He sets up a variety of guests at his playroom table and serves them pizza.  He makes my treadmill a firestation- all his firegear at the ready.  Then he puts on his hat and boots and coat, slides down the sidepost, jumps on his firetruck and tells me he is off to fight a fire.  He moves the barstools and helps himself to fruit, he can open the back door himself even if it's locked.  He goes outside and plays in the sandbox or runs around the yard like an airplane.  Every evening I return everything to it's proper place so that he can start over the following day.  I take the trains and the veggies out of the picnic basket, the aliens off the birthday cake, the playdough out of R2D2, the firemen and the frogs off my bed and my mixing bowls out of the playroom.  All the while I wonder what scenarios these things saw that day.

What I find even more impressive is that he is a no-toys-required kind of pretender, too.  Once when we were baking, he sat at the counter and played with a stick of wrapped butter and my dough hook.  They talked and ran along the countertop together and then suddenly the butter tripped and fell and the dough hook helped him/her up.

Once we were going around the block in our neighborhood; I was on foot, Frazier on his tricycle.  As he rode, he periodically flicked an invisible bell on his bike handle and made a vocal "brrrrring" sound over and over.  I smiled down at him and said, "We need to get you a real bell, huh Buddy?"  and he looked up without pause and said, "This is a real bell."

The other day we were at looking at produce at the store.  I'm scoping out the stuff in a refrigerated case and he's doing whatever it is he does somewhere at my side.  "Here's you some money, Mom" he says suddenly with an outstretched fist.  I put out my hand and he deposits nothing into my open palm.  I thank him and then go right back to my shopping dropping my hand without thinking.  "Mom!" he cries falling to his knees and picking up the imaginary money. "You dropped it!"  So the second time he handed it to me I put it in my imaginary pocket.  Live and learn.  Something else I have learned?  Frazier carries a grocery store's worth of imaginary food at any given time and I am expected to do so as well.  You know, just in case there's an occasion for imaginary peanut butter and crackers.  Or scrambled eggs.  Or pie and pizza with blueberries.

I love it.  I admire it.  And I envy it.  I hope he never really outgrows it.  I hope the possibilities are always endless and what convention dictates for the majority is something he always considers merely one option among many.  I hope he always has something imaginary in his pocket...just in case he should need it.  I hope he never only sees things simply for what they are, but always for what they could be.  That's why when he runs around with a stepstool on his head, I don't tell him it isn't a hat.  Because there will be enough people in his life who do...and really, who's to say it's not?