From Sanctuary to Memorial

Amelia and I have two kids. But we have a four bedroom house. The fourth bedroom was set aside long ago as the play room. The left side of the room was set aside for Philip and the right side of the room was set aside for Chloe. But the play room is starting to change.

Chloe’s side of the room has been the site of heavy girl playing. In the corner is a large basket full of girls’ dress-up clothes. They include ballerina and princess outfits. But none of them fit any more and she hasn’t replaced them. Last weekend she gave away the smaller half of her dress-up clothes to a three-year-old girl who visited the house. Instead, Chloe now collects flower girl dresses that she hangs in her closet. There is one which was her own, but she outgrew that. From her allowance money, she purchased the same dress in a larger size for fifteen dollars from the oldest flower girl at the same wedding. She has picked up other flower girl dresses at garage sales.

The most unchanged feature of the playroom is Chloe’s fashion dolls. They fall into two categories. There are the statuesque head-and shoulders on platforms that let Chloe and her friends endlessly comb hair and apply makeup. And there are the tiny flexible dolls that can change in and out of clothes quickly to be placed in fold-out houses, fold-out RVs or pool party scenes. Inevitably these dolls all end up naked and strewn across the carpet until chore time, when Chloe tosses most of them into the naked doll pale.

Philip’s side of the play room was devoted solely to building toys. Today, all his simple building toys have long since been donated to one charity or another. There are still several plastic tubs of not fully separated and organized building themes. And lastly there are his most complex building toys which he finally mastered some time around age eleven. They cover the complete surface of a three foot high cabinet. It is a battle scene between two fantasy world armies. Each army rallies from their own fortress built about a scale twenty yards from the other. It is as if the feud between Fred and Barney slowly evolved and escalated over generations from the stone age to medieval times, complete with Dino’s descendants now mutated into Dragons. Over time, dust has coalesced with girl hair to add wasteland tumbleweeds to the scene.

Philip hasn’t touched his tween fantasy battle scene or done any play building in perhaps two years, except to fix what inevitably gets knocked over from time to time by Chloe and her friends. About once every six months we ask him if he is ready to take it down and donate his building toys. But he still says no. The left side of the playroom remains a memorial to Philip’s childhood.

Philip has changed so rapidly in just a few months. During the party he hosted in August—the one during which he met Layla—he enjoyed no shortage of Guitar Hero rounds with his friends. But during the party he hosted just two months later in October—one where Erica showed up—he stayed in the back yard listening to an eclectic mix of hip-hop and alternative while talking and drinking soda. A few feet away other peers were playing Guitar Hero inside. They seemed to be the ones too frightened to talk to Erica and the other girls.

Philip now showers every day, wears deodorant, spends more than one minute combing his hair, has multiple sources of income and needs to start shaving. The time he spends on his laptop that was once devoted to a fantasy game is now replaced with browsing Facebook and YouTube. Only occasionally does he play any kind of video game—all of which are mindless shooting and fighting. And even that is getting less and less frequent. When Philip and I go for evening walks, he no longer wants to talk about his ideas for fantasy novels. Instead he wants to dissect and analyze the latest words and actions of Erica or some other girl. But with Christmas just ahead, we asked him about the building toys on the left side of the fourth bedroom. He didn’t hesitate with his answer. He still wanted to keep them as they were. “I like to come in here and look at them from time to time,” he said. And so, for at least another six months, the left side of the fourth bedroom will remain a memorial to a time in Philip’s life that is still cherished: His childhood.