My father, for reasons known only to him and perhaps to my mother, decided to go to graduate school in Sociology after nearly a decade as a Presbyterian minister, first in Montana and then in Missouri. As a kid, it never dawned on me to ask why, nor was it apparent that the decision to go back to school had any impact on my life. Ten year olds are far more aware of theme songs on Saturday morning cartoons than the inner workings of their parents minds. Now, nearly 50 years later, I can appreciate the financial impact his decision had on the family’s bottom line, and even more, my parents’ creative response to Christmas.

In 1967, at the advanced age of 10, I was busy memorizing every song on the radio (all of which I joyfully sang out of key), pretending to be a rock star and strumming on a beat up old tennis racket, and trying to practice piano. While my piano teacher thought that I should learn Minuet in G, I was more interested in the Beatles, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Like most kids, I spent hours during the lead up to Christmas, pouring through the Sears Wishbook and writing and rewriting  the list to my parents. I also knew, however, that what ever I received wasn’t likely to come from the catalog.

Beside the obligatory set of Legos, Matchbox cars, and the geology and chemistry sets I couldn’t live without, the vast majority of my presents were made, not by Santa or Sears, but by my parents: a dollhouse, a kitchen including hoosier cabinet, trucks, planes, blocks, and, in 1967, a Paul McCartney marionette, complete with guitar.

In many respects, the presents were magical…especially for the other families in the neighborhood and for families deep in the Ozarks where my father served as a minister. The family a couple of doors down with four kids and less money found a box of trucks and a cloth doll on their doorstep Christmas morning. Another family, catty-corner across the street found a small dollhouse (they had two daughters).

The presents came, not from my father but my mother. J.D. Basket, the contractor who built our house and who lived behind us, would drop off scrap lumber (mostly pine) from his job sites. Nearly every kid in our neighborhood had something made on my mother’s workbench either from JD’s wood or from cloth scavenged from yard sales. While I was at school, she would set aside her miniatures and work on toys. According to Jim, by the week before Christmas, she had produced boxes of toys: cars, trucks, sailboats, cloth dolls, stuffed critters, blocks, ring-toss games, you name it.

Not only did her toys go to kids in the neighborhood, they also went to my father’s churches to be given away to families along with boxes of food and canned goods and oranges and nuts. There is no way of knowing how many toys she made between 1954, when she started, and 1969, when they moved to Virginia. I’m not even sure she kept count. But for a substantial percentage of the kids in my father’s congregations, he was married to Santa.

A Summer Sale at the Cambria Toy Station, located in the historic Cambria Depot (Christiansburg Station)

I should start by noting that my background is in Art, English, and Geography (Environmental Planning), and, aside from a semester slogging through an accounting course and another through Introduction to Economics, both taken more than 30 years ago, I am not a business specialist. There are business practices I really don’t get. I have never understood why you mark everything way up, so you can mark everything back down to something akin to the manufactured suggested retail price. Why have sale after something is over?  This one particularly irked me at Christmas when I was on the other side of the checkout stand.

That changed this summer when our space was overrun by summer stuff. Very cute, very cool summer stuff, but summer stuff none the less. We even dismantled the front entry to accommodate all of the brightly colored hoes and rakes and sand toys and kickballs and kickboards and games and….

Now we need to clear space to use it for other things, like the museum displays and all of the new stuff we have coming in for the Fall and walking room. . I know there is someplace to put the new castle and the display kitchens and the science kits, the Keva Planks (one of our favorites) and the Dover books, the new art kits and games and puzzles, but where?

So we are having a seasonal sale, half way through the season. So if you are in the neighborhood, including driving by on I-81, for that summer trip to the beach…stop in.  Save some money on some great stuff and help us clear some space.

If you are out and about on July 14th (assuming that the weather allows such activities), the Historic Cambria Depot and friends are sponsoring Historic Cambria Depot Day, a celebration of community. While there are no fees charged for booths, every vendor/exhibitor must have some free activity or “give-away” for kids. It is the only rule.

It is the quintessential “small town” street fair. The folks from the police department will be doing a child safety seat check and handing out stuff for kids; the fire department will have the “Cambria” fire truck down for kids to see; the master gardeners and the town and the museum and assorted other organizations will be here.  This year, the folks from Buffalo and More will be selling food, or you can walk up the street to our local restaurant and enjoy Italian and a cold ice tea. There are all sorts of activities for kids and things to see and do.

We are closing Cambria Street (at Montgomery) and Depot Street, (at East Main and the rear end of Electrical Supply)  so plan on a bit of a walk. Parking is available between the two depots and along Cambria Street.

A summer vacation bucket list.

I am not a fan of humid summer days. As the humidity starts to creep up, I hibernate. Until I moved to Springfield, Missouri to teach at what was then called Southwest Missouri State University (it has since lost the geographic modifier in the name), I though Virginia was the single most humid place I had ever lived. Not so. Springfield holds the distinction of having the highest annual humidity rate in the country, a fact I discovered my first full summer there. The air was thick, heavy. Natives laughing referred to an afternoon stroll around the block as going out for a swim. Just before the end of my first spring term, a colleague in my department (English) advised me to create a bucket list of indoor activities I always wanted to do, but never had the time. I didn’t take his advise, thinking he had somehow slipped a cog, forgetting that my mother, who was raised in the Kansas Flint Hills did the same thing. By mid-July, as I sat at the kitchen table, squarely in front of the air conditioner, I understood his suggestion. Hot weather is as likely to keep folks inside, seeking cool, as mid-January weather.

Each year, sometime around the end of tax season, I write a summer bucket list. Mine always includes finishing Joachim Johanson and the Pari-mutual Pigs, a novel I started some twenty years ago.

A summer bucket list for kids is one of the best ways to prepare for the inevitable “I’m bored” comments that creep into conversation sometime during the week after July 4th. Sit down one evening before the summer starts and talk to your kids about what they would like to do or learn over the summer. Given that it is summer, the emphasis will probably fall on fun, but don’t overlook the opportunities to strengthen of improve skill sets from the previous school year. We started the “Creative Play” pages on the Cambria Toy Station website to provide parents and kids a variety of activities good for days too cold or hot to allow for lots of outdoor activity. We organized the materials under different subjects to make it easier to find the perfect activity. Most of the activities involve little or no cost (yes, we are a for profit store, but we also recognize that some of the best activities are those that involve stuff you probably already have on hand).

There are some great resources and activities provided by the different Parks and Recreation departments and the public libraries. While the parks and rec departments have yet to release their list of summer activities, check to see what all of them are offering. The parks and rec programs generally require a fee; the public library activities are generally free of charge.  There are three branches of the Montgomery-Floyd Regional Library (MFRL) in Montgomery County: Blacksburg, Christiansburg, and Meadowbrook (Shawsville). MFRL has an excellent calendar available on their website.

Another excellent resource, especially for  adults and kids 12 or 13 and older, is the YMCA at Virginia Tech’s  Open University. They offer a broad range of classes, although most have an emphasis on the arts. The classes do have a nominal fee. Their summer schedule is not yet available, so you may need to check back periodically.

If you are looking for a day or weekend project, stop by the Cambria Toy Station for your art supplies, art and crafts projects, sticker mosaics, and science project and robotics kits and pick up a copy of our “cool things to do this week” newsletter or download a copy on our website.

While you are at it, put your name in the jar of our monthly “$25 gift certificate” drawings (June 1, July 1, and August 1). Also check out our summer “construction” challenge. We are still working out the details, but we should have the kinks worked out by the middle of May, and the details will be announced on the Cambria Toy Station website.

(mhd)

Great toys are toys that change with a child’s imagination, that allow for adaptive reuse. Toys, especially toys that allow for the flexibility of imagination and use, rarely stay as they were originally intended. It is the beauty of both a child’s imagination and a parent’s willingness to allow uses to go beyond those that were predetermined by the object or the object’s creator.

When I was five, my mother took time away from making miniatures for collectors to make a dollhouse for me for Christmas.  It was by all measures a magnificent dollhouse with wallpapered walls, hardwood floors, and Victorian furniture. At the time, she was building a reputation as a miniaturist especially among west coast collectors, so the dollhouse was something beyond what one would normally give a five year old who was more interested in Matchbox cars than Victorian love seats and Hoosier cabinets.  My grandmother, an ardent doll collector, gave me a couple of Barbies to go with the house (they were way taller than doorways) and was appalled to discover that I was using the livingroom as a garage for my Matchbox and had stored everything Victorian in the attic. In later years, during the “Lost in Space” phase of the dollhouse, the rest of the furniture migrated to the attic, a pink Barbie convertible took on a new life as a spaceship for Captain Action, and the rooms were filled with Lego chairs and consoles.

Over the course of its life, the house was a space port, a spy agency, a detective agency, and the Ponderosa, readapting each time my interests changed. Whatever my mother thought of the transformation, she never said a word. When I outgrew the dollhouse and my interests shifted to playing air guitar to the Monkees and Paul Revere and learning how to play softball, the house was given to a cousin’s daughter. Shag carpets made out of towels replaced the hardwood floors and the walls went from muted wallpaper to electric colors.

 The house is back on the workbench, once again being rehabbed before heading west to another member of the family in another generation. New dolls require new furniture and a whole new interior, but the house remains two rooms and a bathroom upstairs, two larger rooms downstairs.  The house reaches its 50th birthday this coming Christmas, so it seems appropriate for it to enter a third generation of use. I hope Nora and her daughter and on to the next will get as much as the two earlier generations.

mhd

There are those much more rare people who never lose their curiosity, their almost childlike wonder at the world; those people who continue to learn and to grow intellectually until the day they die. And these usually are the people who make contributions, who leave some part of the world a little better off than it was before they entered it.- William H. Sheldon

“Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why.”  ~Bernard Baruch

When I was a kid, National Geographic was a big deal. Where else could you learn about mountaineering in the Alps and line dancing in sub-Saharan Africa. I especially looked forward to the issues with the maps. I used National Geographic for my reports for school and for entertainment on snow days. It could be 20 degrees outside and blowing snow, but I was exploring Tahiti and the Great Barrier Reef and dreaming of warmer climes.

Now, I’m a Google Earth Junkie. Where else can you go and find all things geographic…and historical…and wierd.  In the same way that Google’s art museum project may be the coolest thing to happen to art history, Google Earth is simply the coolest way to explore the world.  You can learn all sorts of stuff: from the design of the new base at the South Pole to the road and tunnel network in the Faroe Islands (I’m a planner by training, so road networks are one of those appealing geek things).

What does Google Earth have to do with a toy store in an old railroad depot? Everything. Great toys invoke curiosity and exploration. Whether you are trying to build the Eiffel Tower out of Kevas, writing a new play for wooden spoon puppets, mastering the art of crocheting or quilting, or learning about volcanoes in your kitchen or aerodynamics in the family room, toys and kits are a great way to learn new skill sets and explore how we see the world.

For more information on cultivating curiosity, spend a few minutes perusing the materials from the folks at Curious Mind, including their free materials for parents, and stop by the Cambria Toy Station for some excellent ideas on how to spark creativity and curiosity in both children and adults.

Other great sites for information on stimulating curiosity include:

• Creating Minds
• Curiosity (from the folks at the Discovery Channel)
• Curiosity Counts
• Curiosity in the Classroom