My Early Childhood Games and Tiger-Kangaroos
First of all, I wanted to note something from the last episode of the latest season of What We Do in the Shadows. Colin Robinson has the same philosophy of diaries that I do: “Oh, well, the great thing about keeping a detailed diary is, if you ever forget anything about your life, you can look it up.”
Now for my latest childhood memoir:
In kindergarten, we would sit four at a table. As I sat with Melissa and another girl or two at the beginning of the day, I would make little tigers with my hands. They actually looked more like the dinosaur-shapes I would later make with my hands. Then I started making kangaroos. Then I put them together and made what I called tiger-kangaroos. They’re formed by curling over your index finger to make the head, putting together your thumb and middle finger to make two arms and hands that are curved around and clasped together, and curving your other two fingers down to make legs. They would hop all over the table, and Melissa would try to catch them or bonk them on the head. It was a game for us.
Eventually, I developed a whole world around two tiger-kangaroos, one for my right hand and one for my left. They were named Sally and Hedreda (HED-jrih-duh), two sisters whose world of tiger-kangaroos had been destroyed, so they came to Earth. Sally was the silly and mischievous one, also my favorite, and Hedreda was the sensible one that acted as mother. They went through many adventures, some of which I wrote down. Sometimes, they even lived in my desk at school, among my books and papers and pencils and a big yellow box, with letters carved in it along with directions for how to make them, that held pencils and crayons and erasers and things.
Sally would “come on” my right hand and “help” me write, and would also run around inside my desk. This was my favorite of their adventures, capturing my imagination with thoughts of how they’d live in my little desk and come out at night when everyone was gone. I wrote a story about this, too. Sally would play with my pink erasers (possibly even use them as pillows or chairs) and pencils on my desktop, and I think she’d play with bees as well.
I had a whole repertoire of hand puppets, and not just the tiger-kangaroos. There was 8, who was in the shape of an 8, formed by curving four fingers around and then curling my index finger over the top, and plenty of others who, back in 1st and 2nd grade, would act out the song “Convoy.” Several of them were the simple hand-puppet, four fingers on top and the thumb on the bottom, acting like talking jaws, the common one almost everyone uses at one time or another to imitate someone who won’t stop talking. One of these was Rubber Duck.
I also had dog-characters, and curled up my first and fourth fingers to make ears. I thought the other common hand-puppet, the one in which the hand is the head and body and the index and middle fingers are legs, was amusing when I was in my crib, but after I made up the tiger-kangaroos I thought they looked nothing like real people. I thought my tiger-kangaroos were better representations of people.
Related to the tiger-kangaroos were some time-travelers. I had gone in my wardrobe, a tall, brown, cardboard thing that a great-grandmother had given or left me, back in time to the days of the dinosaurs. I would make little dinosaurs with my hands; these were creatures I myself had made, and, after praying that God would animate them (since only God could create life), I put them there. These little, intelligent creatures lived and breathed and had adventures in the days of the dinosaurs, which I would read about in a Childcraft book on dinosaurs.
While I was very small and had to walk to school, I invented a game that was mostly in my imagination. Usually my games would involve shuffling my legs like a choo-choo train, skipping like a gallopping horse, or hand puppets, or any of a number of different things that I did to make the long, 8-block trek more enjoyable. There was also what I called Rocky Alley, an alley full of rocks in which I found a strange, small, cone-shaped rock one day. To my dismay, I later lost it. But I had a whole collection of rocks taken from Rocky Alley. Horror of horrors, one day, in my later childhood or high school years, I walked down that way again and discovered that the rocks had been cleared out of Rocky Alley!
I then made up a game that I may have acted out some of, but mostly it was cartoon images in my mind, and I would say the lines each character had. These images were better than I could draw myself. The game was about The Duck of Death. He looked much like Donald Duck, only with an evil look and a black cape. He was much like a vampire duck. There was also a mild-mannered duck with a yellow cape who tried to fight him, but was scared of him. There was also a carload of teenage kids, boys and one or two girls. You can imagine my surprise, many years later, in my teen or college years, when a duck very much like my Duck of Death, and with a similar name, showed up in a cartoon! (Could’ve been DuckTales or Darkwing Duck.)