It was one of those moments you can turn into something brilliant. Or, just as easily, one you can see yourself going down in flames. It happened over the holidays. I was suddenly thrust into the position of having to do some babysitting of our grandchildren at our daughter’s and son-in-law’s house. The three grandkids had finished dinner. Their parents had dashed off for some quality time away from the kids. And I had to come up with something creative for entertainment. I asked the eldest grandchild – the six-year-old – what she wanted to do.
“Let’s make something really cool,” she said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, “but let’s draw it first.”
If I had to draw it first, that meant two things. One, it meant that my drawing skills – which at the best of times leave something to be desired – would leave lots of room for interpretation; in other words, even if what we ended up creating was only close to the drawing, I’d be safe. And two, having to draw it first, that meant I had a bit of time to improvise. Isn’t that what babysitting is all about? Improvising? Sure.
At any rate, my granddaughter handed the modern equivalent of an Etch-a-sketch to me and repeated that I should draw what it was we were going to build first. Then, we could build it. I started to draw a boat, a steamboat, with decks stacked up like a layer cake. And there was a paddlewheel on the side and a smokestack on top. As I sketched, however, I suddenly had a flash of Kevin Costner’s character in “Field of Dreams,” Ray Kinsella, having to tear down a huge chunk of his cornfield just to build a baseball diamond, on the chance some of his heroes would come. I wondered whether this make-believe steamboat would look anything like a real steamboat. More important, I wondered how the heck we were going to build one!
Then, I remembered one of the toys my sister had given the grandkids for Christmas a few days earlier. It was called Crazy Forts. All it consisted of was a bunch of plastic balls full of holes into which the user could insert plastic sticks. And, depending on the imagination of the user (and, in this case, the dexterity of the grandfather) the sticks and balls could become just about anything … even a steamboat.
Funny, how the simplest of toys can sometimes yield the best entertainment. The balls and sticks building set, I guess, was the modern equivalent of pots and pans configured into Apollo 11 on the kitchen floor or the cardboard box from a brand-new household appliance transformed into Old Fort York.
Of course, what else came back to me, as we figured out the construction task at hand, were all those babysitters my sister and I used to have over when we were kids. Some of them only came once. The good ones came back often because we asked for them. Believe me, our babysitters had to be pretty creative if they expected to survive an evening tending kids at the Barris household.
There were the teenagers who could play floor hockey. There were the ones who could read stories expertly, using different voices for the characters when they read the dialogue. I remember an elderly neighbourhood woman we often asked for; not only was she creative when it came to inventing games, she was also a fabulous cook. We asked for her (and her French fries and baking) back for return visits a lot. And she also knew how to make her talents work for her.
“Either it’s time for bed or there’s no apple pie the next time I’m here,” she would warn us. And we knew she knew she could get us to do whatever she wanted, including go to bed on time.
But back to the steamboat and the Crazy Forts. Having managed to transpose the steamboat drawing to the toy set, my granddaughter and I managed to build the frame of a steamboat – complete with pilot house at the top and paddlewheel spokes at the side – in about half an hour. And the flurry of activity suddenly drew an audience.
The other two grandkids – aged five and three – suddenly wanted to get in on the act (just like Tom Sawyer painting his fence) and before long all three of them were coming up with ideas for the steamboat creation.
Then, to complete the job, all three kids were able to crawl into the frame of sticks and balls and imitate a steamboat crew – the captain, the engineer and the sailor in the crow’s nest spotting sandbars and reefs ahead on the imaginary river. It wasn’t long before everybody was tuckered out, the sticks and balls put away, and all three off to bed.
“Everything OK?” the grandkids parents asked when they got home.
“Just fine,” I said. “We just made something really cool.”