Several years ago, Fuzzy's parents were downsizing their stuff in anticipation of selling their house. Their house is unusual in a lot of ways, and one of those ways is the amount of hidden storage in the place. There are closets and cabinets and storage rooms all over the place, which allowed them to hold onto anything they chose. This meant that the downsizing process was indeed a bit of a process. I think Fuzzy's father started to dread opening closet doors, because he knew they needed to find a new home for most of what lay behind them.
They would put categories out to the family regularly. Did anyone need dishware or pans? Did anyone need more holiday decorations? Was everyone good for extension cords/coolers/luggage/etc.? In some cases, they simply did not know how much they had until they put everything from one category together in one place. In other cases, having a lot of space meant that they simply did not get rid of things, because someone in the family might need them someday. Fuzzy's father fairly danced a jig when we would come to them requesting a piece of furniture from the storage room in the basement. They had worked so hard to find all those pieces that they didn't want to let them go, but they could happily go to one of the children or (even better) one of the grandchildren.
Fuzzy had fond memories of a few of the board games from his childhood, and so when the games shelf was being cleared, he mentioned this to his parents. He planned to swing by and pick out a few goodies on his way home from something in his empty car. His father seized on the opportunity, and Fuzzy came home with four big moving boxes full of every game his family had ever owned. The boxes took up residence in the empty spot in our garage while I stared agog.
Apparently, Fuzzy's family was even less skilled than my family at keeping track of all the little pieces from games, so, just like my parents, they had just thrown all the pieces they found into a box on the game shelf, intending to do a sort at some point. We now had a bunch of boxes that contained only a game board and a found-object-artist's wildest fantasy in the bottom of one of the boxes. We also had a couple dozen mostly-complete decks of cards. Apparently, every time they travelled, they bought playing cards and brought them home. To be fair, we did have some games that were complete, too, or just missing a piece or two.
A few nights later, after Kiddo had gone to bed, we started going through the boxes. Fuzzy shot down my idea of selling the loose pieces on eBay, and I shot down his idea of donating everything to the thrift store and getting ice cream on the way home. We reunited pieces to the games he cared about and started bagging up things we knew we didn't need. It turned out that there were games going back to the 1950s, so we figured Fuzzy's father had learned the "load it all in your kid's car when he's not looking!" trick from his mother. Some games are pretty much the same, whether you get a 1936 edition, a 1989 edition, or a 2020 edition. Scrabble, for instance. Other games do not age well, though.
At its heart, Old Maid is a simple game. You can just pull one of the queens from an ordinary deck to play it, but there have been special-printed decks for decades now. Sometimes you match couples, and sometimes you match duplicates of the same character. The characters are usually clichéd caricatures of occupations and such nowadays. There was a really old Old Maid deck in the mix. It wasn't thick enough to be remotely complete, so I quickly flipped through to see if there was anything fun that related to us, like a seamstress or a tailor that could be framed and displayed in the sewing room.
There were some things that were accepted a great deal more openly in the 1950s than they are now. Fuzzy's father's family is not racist from what I can see. Fuzzy's father and aunts were first-generation Americans because their parents had to leave their homes in Europe because of their religion. There are reasons that most of the white people who joined the Freedom Riders and other groups in the civil rights movement were Jewish. That being said, depictions of minorities and other nationalities were considered fair game for parodies and caricatures. In addition to ballet dancers and artists, there was Squanto. And the Squaw Maiden. And more insulting depictions of Black people, Irish people, Asian people, and so forth.
We ended up passing the cowboy cards on to one of Fuzzy's aunts, who decorates with western themes, and threw away the rest, rather than making the thrift store do so. Kiddo has had a few Old Maid decks through the years, and none of them has had any of those hurtful images. Can we call it cancel culture that tastes have changed, and we have less tolerance for these images?
We have a lot of past to clean up in our culture. Some of the people who are outraged right now about political correctness forget that the Irish were depicted as apes in the nineteenth century, right beside the former slaves. Entire ships of European refugees were turned away at American shores before and during World War II, just like the people who are being confronted at our borders today. The dominant culture of this country is made up of a lot of people who were the wretched refuse teeming from other shores. It's just that we got here earlier and had more weaponry.
And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street is one of Fuzzy's favorite books from his childhood. We bought a copy for Kiddo years ago, and because I was always busy keeping the words going, I hadn't looked at the illustrations much. Looking at them now, I can see the alterations that were done after the protests of previous decades, but there's still problems. We plan to discuss the book with the kids the same way that we did with the Little House series. This is how people who were different from us were depicted back then. It wasn't right then, but it's how some people thought. We know better now, and we do better now.
The Dr. Suess company made the call. There are a lot of books that are out of print nowadays for various reasons. These are not the first books to be pulled by a parent company because times have changed. We are always moving forward as a culture, and we have the right and the responsibility as a society to recognize where we've been is not where we are going.
Also, if my mother-in-law asks if you want anything from her house, consider it. She has nice stuff. Set boundaries, though.
No comments:
Post a Comment