Andy Smallman

(As a holiday gift in December 2022, Chloe, Ella & Alex provided me a gift subscription to something called Storyworth. Each week in 2023, I’m being provided a writing prompt designed to get me to reflect on some moment in my life. At the end of the year, my reflections will be printed in a bound book as a family keepsake. I have the option of editing or even selecting the prompts, as do Chloe, Ella & Alex. Here’s my fifth reflection essay, the idea of which came to me while reading an article.)

According to Julie Lumeng, M.D., a developmental-behavioral pediatrician at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, many kids learn to tie their shoes by age six, though some aren’t comfortable with it until they’re closer to eight. And in case you need a little refresher, age six corresponds to being in first grade and age eight to third grade.

So imagine my embarrassment when I hadn’t mastered the task by fourth grade.

I really don’t know why, looking back. What I do recall is preferring slip-ons, especially a pair of cowboy boots that I loved (except for the year I was a jockey for Halloween and rather than spring for a new pair of black boots, my mom put black fabric around the outside of my cowboy boots – c’mon, mom!) so it may have simply been a matter of me not getting a lot of practice. Or it could be that as the third of three kids, someone older quickly tied my shoes for me on those rare occasions when I had to wear laces.

As it pertained to school, this wasn’t any kind of problem since I wore a pair of lace-free Hush Puppies to school. I could just slip those babies on in the morning and no one would be the wiser at my inability to tie my shoes. But in fourth grade, we had to change our shoes in the classroom before going to the gym (being the creative sort, we called the shoes we wore to the gym “gym shoes”). They, of course, had laces. I can readily recall the stress over not knowing what I was going to do when it came time to change into our gym shoes at school.

Let me pause here to encourage you to reflect on when you learned to tie your shoes and maybe even how. My hunch is that most of you don’t remember much about it other than maybe a faded memory of a mom or a dad or an older sibling saying something about wrapping the lace around a “bunny ear.” You probably learned the task without stress and your muscle memory kicked in to the point that you haven’t had to think about it since. If so, lucky you.

I recall that our desks were in rows and that our gym shoes were kept in some kind of closet on one side of the classroom. A few minutes before heading to the gym, we’d be given permission to get our gym shoes, return to our desks, and put them on. It was during these few minutes that I was afraid my incompetency would be revealed and that someone would make fun of me. As a highly sensitive kid, getting made fun of was especially torturous. Not only would I endure the embarrassment of whatever I was being teased about, my face would invariably turn bright red and someone would point that out. In other words, I got embarrassed for getting embarrassed. And this kind of embarrassment didn’t have just a doubling effect. I think it may be how I came to understand exponents.

In my row, the desk in front of mine was occupied by a girl named Susan Kline. I don’t remember what she looked like – nothing about her height compared to mine, the color of her hair or eyes, the shape of her nose – nothing. The little recollection I have is that she was a good student, like me, but otherwise she was just a girl in my class. But I remember her name, even the spelling of her last name (Kline, not Klein). And I remember Susan Kline’s name because each time we had to change into our gym shoes, she would tie mine. And eventually, over time, she taught me how to tie my shoes.

I also recall that when Susan Kline tied my shoes she was on the floor opposite of me; basically, we were face to face. I think most kids learn to tie their shoes while sitting in an adult’s lap, meaning they will have the same vantage point. Susan Kline being opposite of me meant that I learned to tie my shoes “backwards.” While she made the “bunny ear” with her right hand and wrapped it with the lace in her left, to mimic her I made the “bunny ear” in my left hand and wrapped it with the lace in my right. It wasn’t that long ago that someone saw me tying my shoes and told me I was doing it “left-handed.”

You know, it would make a nice ending to this story by saying that Susan Kline and I stayed in touch, that we were each other’s date to the prom, or that at some point I tracked her down to at least say thank you. Heck, maybe that’s the version of the story that Hollywood would like told. But, no, my family moved across town near the end of my fourth grade year and then less than a year later we moved from Omaha to Seattle. Susan Kline disappeared from my awareness, other than being the girl who taught me how to tie my shoes.

Still, what might Susan Kline be doing today? What kind of embarrassment has she saved other people from experiencing over these last 50 years? I wonder… A quick Google search of “Susan Kline, Omaha” doesn’t lead anywhere. Maybe, though, I should try again, this time substituting “shoe tying expert” for “Omaha.”

Wherever you are, Susan Kline, shoe-tying expert, thank you! You made the world a better place for me.

(As a holiday gift in December 2022, Chloe, Ella & Alex provided me a gift subscription to something called Storyworth. Each week in 2023, I’m being provided a writing prompt designed to get me to reflect on some moment in my life. At the end of the year, my reflections will be printed in a bound book as a family keepsake. I have the option of editing or even selecting the prompts, as do Chloe, Ella & Alex. This was a suggested prompt and I made it my fourth reflection essay.)

I had many favorite toys as a child and the more I think about this question, the more that come to mind. I better start writing and ease up on the reminiscing or this essay will be book-length!

The first toy that comes to mind is my slot car track. This is an electric toy in which small cars are placed on a track, held in place by a device on the bottom of the cars that is set into a slot on the track. You power them around the track with a hand controller. This was something that was a neighborhood activity when I was a kid, both in Omaha on 69th Street and after we moved to Bellevue. This toy was so significant that I recently acquired a small vintage set for my office in our recently remodeled Seattle home. It’s become a talking point with some of my online students.

The second toy that comes to mind is my rod hockey game. To play, two players sit opposite of each other with the game in between. You each control five rods, one for each player on your team, and a slider for the goalie. You pull and push the rods to move your players up and down the “ice,” the game’s tabletop. You quickly twist the rods to pass and shoot the oversized puck, and you move the goalie side to side to try to make saves. I loved, loved, loved this game, so much so that I included it in the mental fire drills I practiced when my fertile imagination of worry got the better or me. When (not if) our house caught on fire and I was trapped in my bedroom because of the flames, I would first throw the game into the firefighter’s net to keep it from burning. After it was safe, I would then jump.

Note to readers – our house never caught on fire.

The third toy are the Walkie Talkie sets my brothers and I had. These days, what with the ubiquity of cell phones, the idea of Walkie Talkies must seem quaint. But to me as a single-digit-aged kid, they were the epitome of cool. You’d have this little battery-powered device that allowed you to talk to someone else with the simple push of the button. Imagine! I could be upstairs in my room and Steve could be down in the basement and we could talk to each other. The actual toy, though, the specific Walkie Talkie that comes to mind now is a Christmas present I got one year. It must have been around the time of “Get Smart,” that silly TV show about spies and a spoof of the popular James Bond movies. My gift was a plastic briefcase that had a built-in Walkie Talkie. I pushed a button, talked into the briefcase, and could be heard on one of those hand-held devices. I could also hear someone talking back to me through a built-in speaker. Too cool! I remember the inside of the case was red and that the toy had a pretty distinctive plastic smell. I don’t think it was made too well, though, as I have a recollection of it not lasting too long.

The other toy that comes to mind, and the one I’m most significantly writing about, is my stuffed animal, Bunny. I believe I got him in a large Easter basket, the kind that involves plastic grass, candy, and a stuffed toy, all covered in colored cellophane. While I don’t trust this memory as being accurate, where I was when I first got him was in a car in a large empty parking lot, the kind that might be part of a high school or church. Why we were there and who I was with, I don’t know, my mom, perhaps. I was in the backseat and got to remove the cellophane, thus uniting Bunny and me for the first time. And while I ended up having a lot of stuffed animals, so many that I successfully lobbied to have a double bed in my room after Steve moved out because of my night terrors and our bunkbeds being separated, Bunny was always my favorite. Pooh and Kanga may have gotten married, but it was Bunny who performed the ceremony.

Like the famed Velveteen Rabbit, my Bunny grew super-flabby, dirty, and worn. While he could sit up on his own, he really didn’t have any hind legs and only two small stubs for front legs. The way he sat and the way I played with him made his front legs seems more like stunted arms. I bounced him around on his soft backside by holding his neck in my hand, my thumb on one side and four fingers on the other. Over time, this pinching action caused his inner filling to separate and his neck to flop to the left. The fur on his neck all rubbed off and eventually the fabric wore down, first to threads like the knees of my jeans, and then to a hole. I would try to replace the lost stuffing with Kleenex in order to prop him up.

Bunny went everywhere with me, including on vacation. Once, while on vacation, I nearly lost him. As a kid, if I ever wanted to take my breath away with one of those fear-based “What if?” stories, all I needed to do is remember this event. We were driving, from Omaha to either Colorado or Wisconsin to visit a set of grandparents, and stopped at a rural gas station to refill. I went to use the bathroom and when I came back, Bunny was on the ground under the car. Seeing him there really shook me up. What if I hadn’t found him? That worry (of something that didn’t actually happen, mind you) could put me in a tailspin of concerned panic at any point in my childhood thereafter, sometimes keeping me up at night. To this day, I can still recapture that anxious feeling in my stomach when I think about it.

Ten or so years ago, I was hanging out at a neighborhood park while my daughter Ella was at her weekly soccer practice (learn more). Wandering around, enjoying some alone time, I came upon a telephone pole with one of those “Lost” posters on it. I assumed it would be for a lost dog or a cat, certainly cause for sadness if I imagined a family missing their cherished pet. What it was for, though, was a missing stuffed animal. Bam, I was back in that car on my family’s vacation, caught up in how awful I would have felt if Bunny had gone missing. I’ve seen similar posters a couple times since. Each time, my heart breaks a little bit for the child missing their beloved toy. I can’t stop myself from imagining them at bedtime, lost and forlorn without their sleeping companion, much as I would have been without Bunny. As an adult and parent, my empathy extends to the parents, too, who undoubtedly are trying to cheerlead a replacement, “Maybe Bearie can sleep with you tonight?” Clearly, any parent who takes the time to help their child create a “Lost” poster for a missing stuffed animal is worthy of my attention.

There was always a downside to having stuffed animals, too, at least for me as a boy in the 1960s and 1970s. First, I don’t remember either of my older brothers having them, something that convinced me that stuffed animals weren’t “boy toys.” Supporting this, I don’t recall any of my friends having them, either. Their sisters, yes, but not any boys I knew. As such, I was embarrassed that my friends might discover that I played with “dolls” and begged my brothers not to tell anyone about them. Seeing how important this was to me, I think they by and large honored this. More accurately, they probably didn’t really care about it and it was more in my head than something they thought about.

Still, this didn’t keep my brothers from giving me a hard time about my stuffed friends in the privacy of our house. One time, perhaps the first time our parents didn’t hire a babysitter (I can only imagine how long Scott had been lobbying for this), the three of us were home alone. I was supposed to take a bath but was busy doing something else. Somehow, eventually, Scott got me in the tub. But once in, I didn’t want to come out. I mean, how much fun is it to be in a tub of water with a bunch of toys and a washcloth parachute? Besides, I’m sure I sensed the power I had in NOT coming out. Something I could hold over my big brothers, look out!

Steve, as I recall, even though closer in age to me than to Scott, was a lot more mature than I was and liked being Scott’s partner in moments like these. So as long as I stayed in the tub, I had some semblance of power over both of my brothers, holding their attention, as it were.

I can’t say which brother came up with the idea but before too long, my stuffed kangaroo, Kanga from Winnie-the-Pooh, was being dangled above the bathtub by one of my brothers. They were threatening to dunk her if I didn’t get out of the tub. Why they chose Kanga, I don’t know. Maybe they realized that holding up Bunny would be too traumatic for me. More likely, she was the first one they saw when they went to get one of my stuffed animals off of my double bed.

I started screaming but it was really half-hearted as I knew this was a bluff. The penalties they’d face for dropping one of my stuffed animals in the tub were simply too great. So how what happened next actually took place, I don’t know. I suspect it was an accident, that they really didn’t mean it to happen, that perhaps one of them bumped the arm of the other who was holding Kanga. What I do remember is Kanga moving in some kind of slow motion flipping action, like a replay of an Olympic diver on TV, before splashing into the tub.

All hell broke loose then, Scott, Steve, and me each lunging for her. The longer Kanga stayed submerged, the more water her stuffing would soak up. I was out of the tub at this point, naked, wet, and cry-screaming. Scott was trying to reassure me that she’s fine, his new life of no-more-babysitters undoubtedly passing before his eyes. He’s got Kanga in a towel, I’m yelling that he hand her over, him being reluctant to do so, and Steve being torn between supporting Scott and soothing me. What I actually remember quite vividly is Scott telling me that Kanga is super lucky because she’s going to get to take a ride inside the dryer and no stuffed animal has ever been this lucky. It’ll be like going to Peony Park (a nearby amusement park), he said.

How the rest of the night went, I’m not sure. Clearly, we all survived this ordeal, Kanga ending up the worst for wear. Her fur was forever matted, never the same. I was a bit traumatized about her bouncing around inside the dryer but it was more show at that point, me testing to see where I held some sway. I think I did gain something, at least for a little while, some power with my brothers who I think felt genuinely bad about what had happened. Still, that didn’t prevent other forms of elder brother-imposed terror on my stuffed animals, like when Scott held Bunny to his backside and farted into him.

While I can still see his face while he did it, I’ll save that story for another time, although I do want to add that pouring your father’s Old Spice after shave on your little brother’s favorite stuffed animal doesn’t mask the smell, it just creates a new one. And Old Spice plus flatulence is not an aroma I’d recommend.