In my day, 4-year-olds didn’t carry cell phones

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

March 3, 2011

It’s the most timeless and ageless of toys, isn’t it? It’s not the rocking horse or the dollhouse. It’s not even the iconic Yo-Yo. It’s the cardboard box, big enough for a child of any age or size to crawl into and spend an afternoon.

Take a marker to the side of it, and it becomes a spacecraft or race car. As children, we spent days after Christmas or birthdays inside these vessels, transported to different worlds and faraway continents even as the actual toy or appliance it once housed sat nearby, ignored, utterly forgotten.

But that was yesterday. That was last century in the 1970s, when I was young enough to be struck wide-eyed by the gaping maw of a cardboard cave. It was also an era when things — television sets and stereos — were large enough to fill a box that could then become a lunar module. Everything now is smaller, flatter and encased and shipped in packaging more friendly to the environment, though not the imagination. Who wants to ride to the moon in a biodegradable spaceship, pretend or otherwise?

From what I can tell these days, the new cardboard box, the discarded refuse-turned-plaything of the 21st century, is the obsolete cell phone. The box it came in is certainly too small to climb into, but I’ve watched my 4-year-old daughter walk around for days with a slim flip phone cradled to her ear, lost in her own world and babbling on and on … (read more)