A build-it-yourself, wire-it-yourself, modular dollhouse toy for encouraging little girls to play more in the realm of engineering, math, science, and architecture from an early age. Found thanks to the wonders of Pinterest.
Oh lord I would have fucking died and thought I'd gone to heaven. (I used to design and sew not only doll clothes, but I used to squirrel away cardboard and tape to construct doll houses and furniture--but when I went to school, inevitably I came back to find it tossed into the trash.)
Aaaawww! Sympathetic head-pats for your childhood self. My parents, bless them, had their share of faults, but failing to support my creative and artistic efforts when I was small are not among them. I had masses of Lego when I was small, and various other building toys, some of which I shared with my brother. And while my mother did encourage me to give the extremely elaborate frontier trading post diorama I built for my social studies class to the teacher when he asked, when I decided to keep it, she dutifully stored it away for me. (Of course, she later told me I shouldn't pursue engineering in college because I wasn't "practical" enough -- the woman had obviously not met a lot of engineers -- so with the good, also some not so good. But no one in my family ever told me I shouldn't or couldn't try something because I was a girl.)
My folks were both very, very young, and very conventional. I don't blame my mom--she wasn't even out of high school yet when I came along, so she didn't exactly have much practice! But in that time in the fifties, especially in blue collar neighborhoods like mine, being conventional was a big deal, and I was always such a weirdo.
Yeah, it probably helps some that I'm a bit younger than you (grew up in the '60s and '70s), but mostly I think it helps that my family were Swedes, and especially on my mother's side, pretty unconventional. I'm like a third generation atheist/agnostic. Maybe fourth -- I'm not sure about my great-grandmother. I don't remember anyone in the family regularly attending church, that's for sure. We were working class folks too, and my grandparents kept a tidy house and garden, but in many ways my grandmother was quite the freethinker, and my mother even moreso
( ... )
Maybe a bunch of the conventional Swedes came over here? (My grandmother was daughter of two pioneer Swede families, all staunch Lutherans. My grandmother was considered by her Minnesota town unconventional with her leanings toward Catholicism, which later became high church Episcopalean. But then she also got pregnant as a teen, due to being out on her own at twelve because of the Depression.)
Yeah, I'm not sure what is up with the Swedes who came to America. You'd think they would be unconventional in some respects because it takes some serious breaking with tradition to pull up roots and transplant yourself in a new country (though they did tend to congregate in places that were as Sweden-like as possible when they got here). But two things one reliably finds among 2nd and 3rd generation Swedes in America is that they tend to be way, way more religious than their Scandinavian born counterparts, and they harbor a sort of mythic, indeed epic, nostalgia for the land of their forbears that is almost Irish in its fervor. Those tendencies, both religion and cultural nostalgia, incline one more toward hewing to convention, I think.
Yes! I had some Swedish trinkets, worthless to anyone but family, that my grandmother hoarded. She used to drive with my mom to Solvang (a tiny Swedish tourist town) nearly 100 miles for the St. Lucia celebration. And she treasured the few words of Swedish she knew, and the one or two songs she had been taught as a kid. They really did revere the old land--and when she finally traveled to Sweden in her sixties to visit the relatives now several generations removed, it was like Old Home Week, apparently.
Oh, I know Solvang -- we spent our wedding night there, as it happens -- not least because it's the nearest 'big' town to the boarding school where Hal attended high school. (The nearest town, full stop, is Los Olivos, though perhaps the biggest 'landmark' these days is Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch, which he built just across the road from Midland when the Bones family sold their ranch
( ... )
I strongly suspect it's the idyllic stories handed down, in opposition to the grim hard work of a farm (especially a farm run entirely by women, who have to do all the staggering amounts of manual labor themselves.) My grandmother thought the height of riches was an indoor toilet at the end of the hall of single apartments, when she was in her twenties.
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment