Pop & Play

🦙The Llamas in New York City 🦙
By Sahana Narayan & Tran Templeton

Sahana: I feel like a lot of adults often think that kids don’t know anything because they’re kids. And because they’re kids, adults don’t really need to pay attention to them. But sometimes kids can actually be directing you to something or teaching you something you didn’t know before. But you might never know that you didn’t know that before because you never listened to them.
Tran: Mmm, that’s a challenge too in terms of knowing that you didn’t know something.
Sahana: I mean in general I feel like adults should pay a lot more attention to what kids like, cause sometimes kids will be playing with something and then the adult will take it away or say “Oh, you don’t know how to use that properly. You’re just young.” But maybe they have a different idea of how to use it.
In our conversations leading up to this writing, we continued to flesh out some fundamental ideas that we had talked about with Nathan and Haeny on Pop & Play: that children should be heard, that they see beauty in things that adults might not.

Detectives and Columbo
By Mark Maynard

Up until about the age of 10, I was a member of a small, suburban gang of kids in Atlanta. Our time was spent riding around shirtless on dirtbikes, listening to Kiss, throwing lit firecrackers at cars, and doing our best to avoid getting beaten up by the knife-wielding teens who were always smoking in the woods. Life back then was a chaotic and sweaty endeavor, fraught with risk. And it was wonderful. That period of my life, however, ended abruptly when I was about to enter the fifth grade.

My parents, for reasons that must have made sense to them at the time, decided to relocate our family to rural New Jersey. And, just like that, I stopped leading what I thought of as a normal life. I went into a kind of pupal state for about five years. There were no bikes. There were no friends. There was just me, sequestered in my room, curled up with a geriatric sheep dog, watching the black and white television I’d been given by one of my more sympathetic grandparents.

Collecting M.U.S.C.L.E.
By Morgan Boyd

Only recently have I started actively collecting M.U.S.C.L.E figurines. While I had several of these little two-inch flesh colored toys as a child in the mid 80s, my objective in those days was not to complete a set, but merely to play with these non-poseable figures. And that is exactly what I did, devoutly, for about a year until another product came along (the Nintendo home entertainment system), and successfully diverted my attention away from the little pink Mattel toys. During this upheaval, my M.U.S.C.L.E. men were cast aside, lost to adolescent antiquity, given away, or possibly thrown away, alas, never to be seen again. The memories that these M.U.S.C.L.E. had afforded me for a brief period of my childhood were thus forgotten and locked away in a safe somewhere in the recesses of my mind.

My M.U.S.C.L.E. memory vault laid hidden deep in my subconscious for over thirty years, but the safe was finally dredged to the surface of my consciousness, and cracked open by the most unsuspecting of tomb-raiders: my four-year-old daughter. Watching her play with Barbie, LOL, Sesame Street stuffies, and Legos swung wide the door of nostalgia, flooding me with a deluge of childhood recollections. Memories of He-Man, G.I. Joe, Transformers, GoBots, and of course those most glorious little figurines, M.U.S.C.L.E awakened acres of forgotten nostalgia-laden landscapes in my mind. Anybody who has witnessed their child’s first holiday glee, knows exactly what I speak of, and has undoubtedly felt the resurfacing of this potent strain of nostalgia upon watching their offspring open gifts.