ALAN writes:

My first Christmas was in 1949.  I can’t remember anything about it because I was mostly unconscious.

Fifty years later, my mother and I sat in the comfort of her apartment and watched the 1934 motion picture “March of the Wooden Soldiers.” The story takes place in Toyland. Victor Herbert’s song “Toyland” was, for me, an acute reminder of my boyhood years and the fact—which I could not have imagined in those years—that the end of life was now coming into view.

Not a Christmas went by in the 1950s without toys under our tree:  Coloring books, board games, jigsaw puzzles, water guns, cap guns, a paddle ball, Little Golden Books, a “Learn to Draw with Jon Gnagy” kit, and a plastic map of the United States in which 48 pieces represented the States, a map that I disassembled and assembled so many times that it taught me the proper location of all the States.

Of course I took it all for granted.  Only decades later did I begin to think about those years, prompted one day in the 1970s when I listened to a recording of “Toyland” by Doris Day.  The tone and texture of that song caused me to think about what the toyland chapter in my life must have meant to my mother.  For the most part, she enjoyed it immensely.

We found the 1934 movie to be richly entertaining, partly because it was so well-crafted, partly because of Victor Herbert’s music, partly because it featured Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and partly because it incorporated an iron moral code in which there is no compromise between good and evil.

There were also the excellent performances by Charlotte Henry, Felix Knight, Virginia Karns, and Henry Brandon, names that are now forgotten or entirely unknown.

As the characters in the story came on screen, my mother and I tried to identify them with the nursery rhymes we had learned as children.  Each of us could remember some of them.

When I was ten years old, my mother took me with her on a vacation trip to California.  We walked through a part of the Zoo in San Francisco that was called “Storyland”.  It included the same nursery rhyme characters depicted in the movie, and my mother took 16 color slides there.  One of them shows our friend Joe feeding a squirrel.

Alan with his mother at “Storyland.” June 1960. Photo by our friend Joe K.

Now, in the lonely hours late in life, I like to remember those things because I know my time is growing short. Simple and insignificant things, you say? Right on the first point, wrong on the second. They were simple things that were significant to me because it was in such things that my mother conveyed her sense of life; things like the spontaneous playfulness, cheerfulness, and laughter of uncorrupted children. Those days and ways belong to me, and I to them.

In On the Shortness of Life in 49 A.D., Seneca wrote:

“Life … will make no noise, it will not remind you of its swiftness. Silent it will glide on…..”

How right he was.

And indeed it did glide on silently, and all those years and all those Christmases went by so unobtrusively and imperceptibly that decades evaporated without my realizing it. I regret that, not for my sake but for the sake of those to whom I owed gratitude or apologies or both.

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