My daughter has this toy. Actually it is what remains of a toy. She calls it “the thing that can do everything”. Many happy hours, for both child and mom, have been wiled away with this green rubber stretchy thing.  She engaged in games that only a four year old could find enthralling while mom was happily accomplishing ……. well, okay, I wasn’t accomplishing  a damn thing but I was happily not doing so.

Like most preschoolers my daughter can derive more pleasure from packaging of all kinds and tennis balls she finds in the park than from the abundance of toys she owns. She has a green set of fairy wings and a pink plastic wand that  inspire her to make up stories and burst into song like a Disney character. But the “thing that can do everything” is a true wonder toy. Even in its diminished state, it is capable of wondrous achievements. It has been a bath toy, a slingshot and the centerpiece of innumerable games. It flies. It ties. It dances. In conjunction with the pink wand, it made the rain go away one day.

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had such a toy? A thing that could do everything? But of course we do, it’s just that as we age we stop using it. Our imaginations give way to reality and logic and allows itself to be grounded the tyrannous rule of the majority who dictate the possible to us. What would happen, I wonder, if we wore pink wings and burst into song every once in a while? Do you think we could make the rain go away?