When I was “a kid,” I don’t know, probably 10? 11? 12? I had a prodigious cap gun collection. There were revolvers with plastic ring caps (8-shot or 12), pistols with plastic strip caps, derringers and other retro-themed oddballs with the caps on rolls of paper you tear off and stick on individually under the hammer. There was even at least one cap rifle (which features in another pigeon, actually).
Mom, being the one who gave me my allowance and also the one to drive me to the toy store, knew all about my passion for ersatz firearms, so one time when she and my stepdad had gone to some posh destination (maybe Charleston?) on one of his lawyery business and/or pleasure trips, she brought me back a gun as a souvenir. Strolling through a cutesty artisanal shopping district, she had come across an old fashioned toy shop, where they made rustic, nostalgic, wholesome stuff. So she bought me this gun.
Upon presenting it to me, she said that my stepdad had said “He’s not going to like that wooden gun. It doesn’t even make a noise!” And it’s true, it did not — it wasn’t a cap gun, it was simply a wooden carving of a gun. There was a trigger guard but no trigger, a barrel but it was solid. No moving parts. It was literally a piece of wood, carefully carved, with good old-fashioned craftsmanship, into the shape of a gun.
It’s not that I “didn’t like it” per se. It’s just that it didn’t do anything for me. It was inert. (To make an anachronistic analogy, you can build blocks into the shape of a ship in Minecraft, but it can’t go anywhere because it lacks the magic of the programmatic “boat” designation.) My stepdad was correct, of course, but I couldn’t let my mom know that, so I did what any good boy would do — I lied and said that I did like it. When she said to him, “See? I told you he would like it!” I’m sure he was fully aware that I was lying, and approved of the lie. We both wanted her to be happy, though that’s not something we would have ever talked about explicitly.
But also I didn’t want the toy gun to be unhappy.
I was never “religious” but there was a short time when I used to sort of “pray,” when I was really young. My nightly prayer amounted to “I want everyone to be happy and OK.” And that explicitly included all animals, too. Implicitly, it included inanimate objects as well. Different pigeon, but when my mom increased my allowance from $5 to $10, I felt bad because I didn’t want the original $5 bill to feel inadequate.
When my kids were very young, whenever we would play the jungle-gym game where I was the monster chasing them around, C– would always get frustrated by L–’s inevitable tendency to stop running and hug the monster. She didn’t want the monster to feel ... like a monster, I guess.
I think I eventually made a rubber-band shooter out of the wooden gun. My stepbrother had shown me how to do this with a glued-on clothespin and a carved notch at the end of the barrel. You push down on the clothespin (it has to be the spring-loaded kind, obviously) to release the rubber band. Very satisfying. We had rubber-band-gun wars all over the house. Dense scatterings of rubber bands marked where the heaviest battles had taken place. I even made a double-barreled rifle with two clothespins and a scrap of 1 × 2.
The shape of the gun is a story. The real gun is real life. (Allegedly.)
And yet, what is a real gun but a toy something else?
Pretend guns, pretend ships, pretend swords.
My dad taught my brother and me how to make sword blades out of dowel rods; half a whiffle ball for the guard. Later we discovered in the garage at mom’s house my step-dad’s abandoned golf clubs; sever the head off one of those, and you’ve got yourself a great rapier.
A 10-foot john boat with oars was my ship. The little lake behind mom’s house was the sea, with neverending ports of call, expeditions, battles. Distant civilizations. Tree-stump islands.
My stepdad used to say the way you could tell the difference between a boy and a man was by the price of his toys. How old are you if your toys are free?
Some kinds of pretending, I want to nurture. Other kinds feel less fulfilling: pretending to know something, to have an opinion, to be qualified to profess. Pretending the money’s gonna come from somewhere, eventually, to make up for my bad decisions.
I dreamed I was getting ready with a handful of other people to go to a war, or something like a war. They had issued me a revolver, but it was old and dirty and didn’t work. When I swung the cylinder open, it fell out. It was almost time to go and I was thoroughly unarmed, holding useless pieces of metal in my hand. I asked someone if I could get a more modern, working weapon, but I woke up before I found out for sure if I was going to get one.
If pretending is all you have, then creative mode equals survival mode.