When I was a kid…building a  picking box tower in a lemon grove…

One of the best states of mind that one can be in is the state of mind where you are unconsciously submersed in “imaginative play”.   Let’s skip over the existential question of whether you are at your happiest when you are conscious you are happy, or when you are so happy you aren’t even aware about being happy. …

Instead, let’s consider  whether adults have the capacity to be as happy as children, and whether adults who may struggle with unhappiness can re-learn “imaginative play”.  

Kids can be involved – submersed – in imaginative play when they are alone, or when they are with their friends and siblings.    I think there are certain criteria necessary to create the overall  ambiance required for entering into the state of true imaginative play.    The first and primary criteria is that the mind must be deeply involved and engaged.   When the mind is cranked up processing lots of signals - coming in from, and going out to - eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, and feet  the entry to the land of imaginary play is near.   

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WHOA!

Let’s not get too serious and introspective here…let me recall the great time my brothers, neighbor kids, and I had building dangerously high fort-towers out in the citrus groves.  

 The building blocks for these towers were the sturdy wooden boxes which the fruit was put in after it was picked.   Each box was about 2 feet long, 1.5 feet wide and 1 foot deep.  The newer boxes were aromatic from the pungent pine wood.   Of course these empty boxes weren’t  available every day in the groves  - they were only in the groves a day or two before the picking crews came to the grove to harvest the fruit. 

So the kids in the neighborhood had to act fast.   I don’t know how the news that boxes had been distributed in a grove (about to be picked)  spread around among the kids so fast, but it did and we somehow showed up after school, or in the summer, soon after the boxes hit the ground.  

The first job was to collect boxes from all over the grove and carry and drag them to the location where the fort/tower was to be constructed.   Gathering them all into one location was about the only “damage” that was caused by our play – the pickers would have preferred that the boxes remain distributed throughout the grove so they would be close to their ladders as they filled their picking sacks with fruit off each tree.  

But never mind the pickers.   One by one, with the bigger kids bringing two at a time (they were pretty heavy), the boxes would be brought into the center of the grove. 

Just as a mason has different assembly patterns with brick, of course there were different assembly patterns with the boxes too.   Each box course/level had to be staggered in order to overlap the boxes and  lock the tower together as it increased in height.  Sometimes we would create internal spaces with the boxes which we could crawl into.  Other times we went for ALTITUDE as was the situation in the sketch above.   

I remember that tower.  

It was crazy high. 

My oldest brother was the alpha on top.

 We kept passing box after box up to him and he went round and round setting box on top of box.  After he finished a new higher row of boxes he would step up on top of them. 

Pretty soon he couldn’t reach the boxes we shoved up to him.  

 Since we didn’t have a rope to pull the boxes up we built a staircase out of boxes on the side of the tower.   As additional boxes arrived from the all-through-the-grove collection team, they were carried up the staircase and raised high up to my brother. 

Pretty soon the tower was so high – I’’ bet it was 22 feet anyway – that it began to sway back and forth as my brother continued to build it and shifted his weight from side to side. 

Now this was getting kind of scary…but we kept pushing boxes up to the alpha and he went higher and higher

Then someone got an idea – it could have been Jerry – let’s start taking the lower stairs away and sending those up to the top.   

So the staircase was dismantled leaving Jerry on the top of the last step about ten feet up.

Jerry jumped down into the soft dirt. 

My brother was now on the very top of the tower.  He was way up above the tops of the lemon trees and must have been able to see for miles.

  It began to dawn on me that the farmer could probably see my brother too.  

That might not be too good.    We could get into trouble and have to take all the boxes we had collected and spread them back out through the grove.

It seemed to me that Jerry was thinking the same thing…

“Let’s get out of here”  spread though the kids on the ground.  

But what about my brother? 

 How could he get down if we left? 

 The tower was much too high to jump down – and the tower would probably kick out and collapse on top of him if he tried to climb down the side of the tower.  

Some of the kids began to run off through the trees.  

Certainly I wasn’t going to be of any help to my brother because I was too small to hike far out in the grove to gather more boxes for another huge staircase.

But quickly my brother showed why he was the alpha.   I’ll never forget his elegant solution:

As the tower swayed back and forth, he got down on his hands and knees on the top of the top boxes and began to crawl around in circles.  As he went in circles he would put his fingers down between two boxes and tipped a box off the tower. 

Down went the box.

Then he would crawl down onto the level from where the one box had just been removed, and toss off the other boxes on that level.   There were four boxes on each level. 

Round and around he crawled.  

Boxes were raining down. 

It didn’t take him much more than a minute to get safely down to the point where he could jump the rest of the way to the ground.  

Off we ran after Jerry and the other kids.

When we caught up with them near the canal I remember that Jerry looked a little sheepish. 

We never did hear anything from the farmer. 

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Are these other types of adult activities “imaginative play”?:  war, work, professional sports watched on TV, golf,  video games, Nintendo, xbox, civic engagement, exercise (running), pets, traveling, preparing and eating food, domestic abuse, graffiti, reading….