We were at our cousin's house for a big family gathering for shabbat supper. It was being held in their beautiful garden and the sun was already down as we drank in the cool evening air after a hot Cape day.
Ariella, my littlest granddaughter, was aware of my penchant for collecting rocks and stones. So she comes up to me holding out a stone - an ordinary brown common-or-garden piece of Table Mountain sandstone - saying, "Oupa, look what I found!"
Now, I know that the most hurtful thing that you can do to a kid is to belittle their imagination so I said, "That, Ariella, is - (thinking quickly) - "that is Eric". "Eric the Rock"
Solemnly she holds the stone to her chest and regards it carefully for a second or two. "Eric" she repeats. Then she proffers it to me again.
"Tell me about Eric" She says.
"Well, Eric lives on the mountain" I begin…
"Does he have a family?"
"Yes of course he has a family"
"A mummy and daddy?"
"Of course"
"And two sisters?"
"Sure"
You can see what's going on here. Eric the Rock lives in a family which is starting to bear a resemblance to her own. And why not? All rocks do that, don't they?
And thus began the amazing tale of the escapades of Eric the Rock. But it wasn't my tale - it was hers. All I did was provide the briefest framework and she filled in the details with great enthusiasm. Her eyes shone and her expression was earnest. She gestured, rock in hand, to illustrate Eric going here and Eric going there; Eric in school; Eric in a deep dark forest; Eric fighting with his sister; now Eric has a cold; and now he's well again.
I am saddened by the fact that children's imaginations have been stunted by TV, and TV games, and games on their phones (and even before that, when they're too young to have their own phones, by the phones which their parents loan to them to keep them quiet in the car, or wherever their parents don't want to participate in their imagination-games).
You see, something which I realised a long time ago is that movies and TV are not the equivalent of reading a book or listening to a story on the radio: they are a substitute for dreaming and imagination. They come with impressions of light and sound, emotive music and visual images. They are so forceful that they completely replace the creative faculty of an active imagination, and like muscles which are not exercised, those "muscles" wither away.
Yet every day our kids spend between an hour and up to four or five hours watching TV or playing video games, which replace their creative faculties. There is an actual case on record of a couple who became so absorbed in their video game that they played it continuously for more than 48 hours and their baby starved to death. They were charged and convicted of child neglect, and rightfully so.
Eric the Rock, however, had a full life, without a single prop. All I had to do was ask a question, give a hint, point the narrative in a particular direction, and her imagination would go careening off on a new adventure.
I told her that there were musicians in England called The Rolling Stones and Eric sang a song;
I told her there was music called Rock'nRoll, and Eric, the Rock, rolled all over the patio;
I told her there was an actor in America called The Rock, and Eric suddenly developed huge muscles and caught bad guys.
And all she held in her hand was a very ordinary stone.
Ariella is a five year old from the high-tech land of Israel. If she had been any older, she would have been too worldly-wise and blase to allow herself to be lead like this, with a simple stone. But she trusts me, and she is prepared to suspend her disbelief for just long enough to go with this silly little tale: and in doing so, she gets to stretch her imagination just a little bit more than she might otherwise have done - and she entertains herself. And the story wasn't some pre-digested rubbish generated by the cocaine-stoked minds of the entertainment industry: it was hand-crafted, as it were: she made it herself.
Perhaps, one day, she'll write something…
© Harry Friedland, March 2022
MY BLOG: MARIMBA: https://hjfriedland.blogspot.com/
