Wholly family
Ranly, Ernest
WHOLLY FAMILY Ernest Ranly Every family has its own genius and that genius is largely cultivated in play. Massproduced games and fantasies can never replace homegrown ones. When I was...
...With Magdalen, we made up our families from scratch...
...Then we guarded our little packages in a secret place until the creation of a new chapter in the unending Magdalen saga...
...Who would be my mother...
...When playtime was over, each of us would carefully gather the cutouts and fold the brown paper inward, so that all the figures were safely protected...
...Under the pretext of playing with her baby sister, a girl could play until her early teens...
...The name came from a great-aunt on my mother's side, whom I never knew...
...We had to make up, each of us, our own family...
...When I was growing up in the 1930s in rural Ohio we had a family game by the name of Magdalen...
...To play Magdalen, each child first got a large piece of brown wrapping paper, in which catalog purchases from the past year had arrived...
...We did that by studying, very carefully, all the people pictured in the old catalogs...
...No one could remain indifferent, passive, or aloof from life when playing it...
...D The Reverend Ernest Ranly writes from Lima, Peru...
...We saw pictures of dollhouses and all their miniature contents in the catalogs, but that was a fantasy world for us...
...Then we had to furnish the house, picking out sofas, kitchen ranges, and iceboxes, the likes of which we saw only in the houses of our city cousins...
...But I think Magdalen helped us gain self-identity and self-confidence, without becoming insolent or overbearing...
...The game would begin afresh each winter when two huge mailorder catalogs (we called them Monkey Wards and Sears and Sawbuck) arrived...
...Sometimes, one family would visit another...
...A boy could play Magdalen, retaining his machismo, until about the age of eight...
...Commonweal 31 December 21, 2001...
...This time, what sort of father did I want...
...One dressed in a business suit or coveralls...
...We gave names to all the members of our "family...
...Instead, Magdalen had us act out each role in a given family in its various complex relationships...
...But that would be a contradiction...
...How many children...
...It was a great day when we found a new catalog lying aside the mailbox at the end of the lane, and we would come puffing up the hill by the barn with it...
...The game, by definition, was active...
...Through Magdalen, we probably unconsciously acted out our personal life dramas...
...It was a means of "playing house" by using paper cutouts from the mail-order catalogs of the day...
...We cut with great care, not only so that our own people would be prim and neat, but we were not to ruin too much of the catalog because the other children still had to cut out their choices...
...The word is pronounced with a long German ah...
...The game was a well-established tradition in our family that I simply accepted...
...The very essence of Magdalen (and all good family games) is that it is spontaneous and, in a strict sense, unique...
...One could play Magdalen alone, but usually it became a group game with several of us on the sitting-room floor, looking over at the others to see how their family was doing...
...Play would begin, say, when Father came home to eat, Mother had dinner ready, and all the family sat around the table in the area designed as the kitchen...
...The paper was smoothed out, turned over, and marked off with our house of dreams, much like an architect's sketch of a one-story ranch house...
...Unlike much of pre-packaged play for children today, our domestic dramas were free from monsters and cosmic conflicts...
...One by one, we made our selection and cut this year's family from last year's catalog...
...Thank God, no family therapist was observing us...
...We drew rooms, doors, and windows, and sketched out where we would place furniture...
...What age and what sex...
...The new catalogs were carefully protected, but last year's became common property of all us kids...
...We had no TV, not the violence of cartoons, not the good shows like "Captain Kangaroo" and "Sesame Street...
...Sometimes I think Magdalen would be a great game to market to today's children...
...The possibilities were unlimited...
...And then began the creative part...
...One could create a real soap-opera situation...
...There would be family talk among all the cutouts...
...I see something inherently healthy in all this...
Vol. 128 • December 2001 • No. 22
