Compartment 10

While looking for 16mm film reels to play on the film projector, I found this wooden box with a bird painted on it reading ‘Nature Study Blocks’ – I showed it to my grandmother Judy and she lit up. Apparently, it was her favorite childhood toy.

It sat in the linen closet in her hallway, just a few feet from her bedroom door, probably for decades. As far as I know, she never goes in that closet. She doesn’t ever really walk quite that far down the hallway. She mostly moves between her bed, her bathroom, and the sitting room next to her bedroom where she eats her meals and watches TV.

For a long time, the majority of my life, she has more or less lived this way. There was a period of a few years in my childhood, however, when she ventured out more and actually traveled a bit. She joined our family on a trip to San Diego when I was around 10 years old. She attended her son Dan’s, my uncle, wedding to my aunt Saori in Hawai’i. I was also at this wedding, though I was only two years old – too young to remember it. I have a vague dream of a memory of my grandmother showing me an informational placquard about volcanoes. I feel that this is an essence of a real memory, perhaps my first ever.

Anyway, the box of bird blocks was her favorite childhood toy. They certainly don’t really make toys like that anymore. The blocks seem to have stamped prints on them but appear to maybe have been colored in with paint by hand. The box seems like it could have been hand painted. Her favorite block was the cardinal, which I couldn’t find in the box. Maybe it’s in a pile of stuff in her house or maybe it was left behind in her childhood home in Worcester, since it was her favorite and she played with it more than the others.

Also on this shelf are some other old wooden toy blocks, with paper glued to them showing printed illustrations of nursery rhymes. They are somewhat creepy. I feel like they might have belonged to my grandfather Henry, but nobody in my family knows for sure where they come from. I found them wrapped in paper towels and taped together. They were in the same closet as the Nature Study Blocks – maybe Henry made a shelf of his and Judy’s childhood toys in their second floor linen closet, where they also stored a lot of their photos and slide reels.

Next to the nursery rhyme blocks stands a broken model rocket, one of my uncles’ and dad’s toys. These were popular in the 70s and 80s. This one is broken. Undenearth the blocks are some computer games from the second floor study, including some spelling games and a dinosaur themed game. I think it’s likely that my cousins and I played these games as children, but I don’t remember doing so. I only remember playing the computer games Snood and Zoombinis.