Experiments on Children: How Our Imaginations Were Shaped
I’m not sure when I realized I was part of an experiment, but it definitely had to do with the Memory Game. Memory edition 4664 released in 1968 by Milton Bradley is one of the strangest games I’ve ever seen. It imprinted on my psyche as deeply as the gritty giant-bird-inhabiting block of Sesame Street.
Though it was presented as a simple matching game — turn over the cards and remember where you saw them last to make matches — this game was clearly designed by child psychologists. Or so it seemed.
My first husband and I, on a visit to his childhood home in Cleveland, unearthed his copy of the game one Christmas. We had both basically forgotten it, but he immediately talked about “the scary smokestack.” We brought the game home and entertained nieces and nephews by having them show G. the card with the smokestack on it, at which he would shudder and avert his eyes. Scared grown men are very funny to children.
For me, the most mysterious image was of “running girl.” The surprised look on her face and the way her pigtails stuck straight out behind her — in fear or because she was running so fast — signaled danger of the kind usually faced by fairy tale characters.
Her companion (though of course not her match) was “blue pajama girl,” whose pigtails turned up in a smile like the one on her face and who might have been skipping.
If asked, I would have said my favorite card was the one of the EZ strike matches. Four matches. I guess I was supposed to confuse them with the illustration of the brown and black lines. As if anyone would confuse those cards — one a photo and one a drawing.
The amazing thing about this game was the variety in styles of the images — and there were so many — 108 cards for 54 pairs! There were photographs of vegetables and of half an apple on a fancy plate. There was the inscrutable cartoon of the Chinese boys (?) running on air toward the roof of a very small house. There was the stenciled strawberry and the felt church with a round cupola and clock. There was “the brown girl,” third of the girls and by a different illustrator than the first two. I always imagined she lived on an island. There is something in the top left of the image — part of a swing? I imagined a parrot was sitting on it, though there’s nothing tropical about the image.
As a kid, I found many things mysterious that were probably not meant to be. I always felt there was way more to the story of this Memory deck of cards than the adults were telling me. It was like a Rorschach — “Which card is your favorite?” “What do you think is happening to Running Girl?” I imagine G. seeing some documentary on t.v. about the Holocaust, or hearing something about it, and associating it with that smokestack. Or maybe it was just first awareness of pollution, such a major theme in the 1970s that I wrote my first long poem about it. That black smoke pouring out into the environment would be enough to make a seven-year-old in 1973 shudder.
I can’t help but think how well fed our imaginations were as we were growing into language and life in the 1960s and ’70s. Sesame Street combined my favorite thing in the world, letters, with fascinating creatures and song and kids who lived in New York City. I’d say Sesame Street also introduced me, in a strange way, to film. Every once in awhile there’d be a short film, without introduction or explanation, sometimes narrative and sometimes not. I watched intently for those moments.
The book The Snowy Day by Jack Ezra Keats introduced me to the strange world of apartment buildings. Families — little boys — could live in apartments! And we’re not talking about rich kids like Jody and Buffy on Family Affair but “regular” kids like me.
When I rediscovered the game with G. in 2000, I had a hard time finding a copy. If you type in “The Original Memory Game” you will find lots of copies of a 1990 version — which is very different. I’m not sure if Milton Bradley ran into copyright issues for pillaging various illustrators’ and photographers’ work for the 1966/’68 edition or if times just changed, but the 1990 version is not the same cultural artifact at all. For one thing, all the illustrations are done by one clearly underpaid artist. And they are images made “for children.” They are childish in the worst way. I can’t imagine anyone wondering what the story is behind that game’s ice skates or chicken.
One of the things I’m doing these days is tutoring Somali immigrant women in English. Yesterday I was using a set of flash cards with one woman to help build her vocabulary but even more to help her work on pronunciation. I sifted through the cards for words that would have some relevance to her life. I mean, does she need to know the word “pineapple”?
One card was a cartoon of the sun. It was beaming — I mean it was smiling. She looked at it and said, “Smile!” I looked at it and yes, smile. We went from there to talk about the sun and weather — Americans love to talk about the weather, you know. I realized also how much aversion I felt for those flash cards.
They are, of course, made for children learning words. But they’re all silly illustrations. They are so flat. They make it seem like the English language has no depth. They make me feel like language is a silly game.
There is an illustration of a smiling sun in the Memory Game, too. But this sun has pursed lips, and her eyes are closed, and she has dramatic eyelashes and eyebrows. What is she thinking? What is she feeling? The illustration is not like any of the others in the deck.
These images made me feel like the world had more depth — everything had a story or context. If I learned the word “sun,” someday I could tell its story. If I turned over the other sun, the world might make sense, and I might win.
