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Look what Sean found in the basement! A plastic tub containing his blocks from back when he was a little boy. Shown above is only a small fraction of them. The rest are still in the tub.
You'll have noticed that these aren't ordinary blocks. Our friend, Gene Olmsted, was making wooden toys at the time, and he dropped off a huge bag of wood scraps, thinking we could burn them in our wood stove.
Instead, Sean and I built a towering edifice on the kitchen table (Sean did most of the design work; I was grunt labor), a mighty city hours in the making that involved every single wooden block we had. Then, when it was done, Sean placed an origami frog at its heart explaining that, "The city is so powerful that it can only be ruled by The Frog!"
Imagine Marianne's astonishment when she came home from work that evening.
And, as sometimes happens . . .
Years later, I met Pete Abrams, the illustrious artist-cartoonwriter of Sluggy Freelance. When he offered to draw one of his characters, I requested Frog, who is small, angry, very articulate, occasionally evil, and a frog. Then I told him the above story to explain why.
Pete remembered the story, too. I know because in a later comic, he claims a city, saying that "It is so powerful that it can only be ruled by the frogs!!!"
Alas, Frog's claim on the city only lasted for a panel or two. At the time, I very much wanted to buy the original of that particular strip but couldn't figure out how to get in touch with Abrams.
Oh, well. At least Sean and I got to make a small contribution to Web comics culture. I'm proud of that.
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What a delightful story! As a wee child, I had blocks made from odd ends of lumber, also, with which my father obligingly built a tower from floor almost to ceiling. I reserved one block, a large, chunky cube that was, if I remember correctly, the only one that had been painted -- it still lingers red and shiny in my memory. And I threw that big cube against the bottom of the tower to watch the whole thing tumble down.
ReplyDeleteMy mother was appalled: my father had spent *so* much time on this, out of love for me. How could I *do* such a thing? But, to me, the crashing down of the blocks was the whole object of the exercise. (Kids are destructive little critters.) Vague memory suggests my father was on my side in this. Block towers are built so you can knock them down again. I'd like to think he understood. Wish I'd asked him when I got older.
So. Sean's blocks survive to this day. Did the frog?