Happy Thanksgiving, Mom
Swen Nater

Happy Thanksgiving. This year, I’d like to say thanks to my mother. There are so many reasons to show my appreciation but I’d like to focus on one. Thanks, Mom, for giving me an imagination.

Those with imagination can pretend. They imagine they are somewhere else, someone else, or themselves in a different setting or perhaps older. Imagination is when a little girl plays with a doll and pretends she’s a mother. It’s when a little boy plays with a toy fire truck and pretends to be a firefighter. My girls liked to play teacher with me as a student. They were bossy. I could hardly keep a straight face.

My mother always encouraged me to imagine. She didn’t do it by saying, “You need to imagine.” She did it by allowing me to play. That’s right. She let me play, like the little girl with the doll, the little boy with the fire truck, and my girls playing teacher.

When I was nine, I wanted to be Roy Rogers, the TV cowboy. She let me wear guns around the house and shoot pretend bad guys. As a young teen, I got deeply interested in the microscopic world. She took me to the second-hand store and they happened to have a microscope. She left me, undisturbed, to spend hours looking at salt crystals, worms, and flies. Then I wanted to be an astronaut. I asked her if I could make a cockpit under a little table. She helped me build the thing, complete with a covering blanket to enclose it. I spend hours on my back and my feet propped up just like John Glenn. And this one is going to show you how much she loved me. I got interested in playing the violin. The most disturbing sound in the world is a novice practicing the violin. She lovingly put up with my squeaking for three years.

My brother, Ibo, and I loved watching the Lakers on TV, with Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, and Jerry West. After watching a game, we were inspired to go practice what we saw those three do. She let us go to the park as long as we wanted to and pretend. It was cool.

When children play and pretend, they are developing imaginations. The six-year-old who plays with a doll is imagining being a mother. When she gets a little older and plays with a Barbie doll, she will pretend to be Barbie. When she grows into adulthood, she may use her developed imagination like Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie.

It was in the imagination, Albert Einstein saw relativity, Thomas Edison envisioned a light bulb, Alexander Graham Bell saw a telephone, and Marie Curie found her way to discovering radioactive materials. I have a hunch, their mothers allowed them to play.

James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, grew up in a small Canadian town and was raised by his uncle, on a farm, because his parents died when he was 8 years old. Life on the farm was full of hard work but his uncle encouraged James to play with the neighboring boys. They had no money for equipment so the boys invented games, using whatever they could find. As an adult, Naismith invented basketball using two peach baskets and a soccer ball. Was that an accident?

My mother taught imagination by example. Nora Hall is a master woodcarver (see www.norahall.com), arguably the best female carver in the world. Her father, Johannes Leereveld, was one of Europe’s best. When growing up, I watched her at the work bench. She created the most amazing carvings but she never did the same thing twice. She was always tinkering around. I remember her showing me how she discovered a new way to make a grape leaf look like it was really alive. It was made in Maple, but I could almost see it wave in the wind.

I’m teaching my grandson to imagine. This morning, I fed him cereal and fruit. He was in his high chair. As I spooned food into his mouth, I knew he was watching me carefully. I could tell he wanted to do what I was doing. So I gave him his own spoon. Most of the time he chewed on the rubber-ended spoon but once in a while he would try and scoop some food from the bowl. I helped him get food on the spoon but he fed himself. What a mess!

I’m not sure if this is true but, it seems to me, the current generation is missing out on imaginative play. Some would argue that video games facilitate imagination. I’m not so sure.

Thank you, Mom, for showing me your imagination and for allowing me to play so I could develop my own.

Happy Thanksgiving.