I wore this patch on the back pocket of my jeans and then I believe I moved it (including the pocket) to a jeans-material backpack. I guess I was into castles.
It’s just one of thousands of things I have that I just cannot part with.
When I was young and visited my grandparents home in Elgin I loved the room with the books. It was off the dining room and while the adults played poker at the dining room table the kids played with toys or read books in the book room. They had only a few books that kids would like, most were my grandfather’s books with titles like “Have Gun, Will Shoot”.
While I liked the Rupert Bear annual from maybe the 1930s, I always gravitated to the huge Ripley’s Believe it or Not book. First printed in 1929, it held illustrated stories of the strange, the next to impossible, the macabre. In its pages I learned about the man with two-foot-long fingernails, that Saint Patrick was not an Irishman, and I learned about shrunken heads. To this day I think about this book when reading clickbait headlines on the Internet.
My delight in this book was tempered with a small bit of shame. It seemed naughty reading this book and looking at the illustrations which were often off-putting. Close-ups of people, like the illustration of the actor who could make his hair stand on end or the man who buried his head in the sand for 9 hours.
And while thumbing through the book I came across something that I repeated to people as true fact throughout my childhood. I’d completely forgotten about until just now.
Maybe every era had its fake news…
I grew up in a town not far from Chicago. Chicago has several museums and in grade school our classrooms visited them often. My favorite museum was the Museum of Science and Industry. Its exhibits were memorable including the coal mine where an elevator took you “below the earth” (actually you started up high and it only seemed you were far underground) where a train awaited you and took you on a tour of the mine and the, now gone, room of fetuses in glass jars and cross sections of a human body that were preserved between two pieces of plexiglass.
My favorite exhibit, however, was Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle. I could stand for hours looking into that exquisite dollhouse at the tiny rooms filled with miniature furniture. I imagined myself suddenly becoming tiny enough to wander through the fairy castle, napping on Sleeping Beauty’s bed in the princess’ bedroom, bathing in the princess’ silver tub, eating at King Arthur’s table in the dining room.
I loved it so much that I bought myself a souvenir booklet describing the dollhouse so I could see inside the dollhouse from the comfort of my own home. I still have that booklet and I still look through it now and then. And still, fifty-something years later, I like to pretend I’m small enough to live in the castle, but now I visit the magic garden and library too.
Clutch Cargo Lips 