Why Toys Matter and the World That Makes Them
February 23rd, 2026
My Mawmaw, Debbie, very unfortunately died five years ago this January. She loved nothing more than experiencing her family and her four grandchildren, not just watching us play, but playing with us. And she was good at it.
She flew off tubes in the Alabama Bay. She paraded through sand. She fought currents. She clinged onto the bow while we crawled through poignant boat graveyards left behind by Katrina. She pulled sails and steered both big vessels and little ones. She got down on the floor with us.
Her hardwood, soft-fireplace, clean-air, sweet-potato, hand-sewn-quilt, music-filled home was adorned with hundreds of Boyd’s bears, alongside crickets and frogs and kitty cats, both real and figurine. An antique baby doll carriage and always eye sparkling surprises left behind by little girls who came before me. In the honest eyes of a child, it was obvious that her house encouraged magic.
I cannot speak for my cousins, but I was often gripped by my imagination as a child. Pleaaaaseeeee! Can we ____? At my insistence, Mawmaw and I crept into the arduously dense attic to retrieve fifty vintage Barbie dolls. We paraded into the overgrown woods to visit the Sugar Shack, a tiny abandoned cabin where my great-grandmother and many others once lived at the beginnings of their early marriages. I went through a peculiar developmental era where I was hyperfixated on everything that had to do with Claw Machines. For my birthday, she drove me to around 5 or 6 seperate places that housed machines around the city. I played the claw all day.
She had a long and earnest career in medicine, and she took no shit. She could be stern. She was absolutely opinionated. But she never mistook firmness for rigidity, especially with the grandchildren. She delighted in giving us our way. She beamed watching us absorb and invent, experiencing our mitosis-ing consciousness with us.
I will always remember my Mawmaw as a very smart woman. She had a way of knowing when the time for something was right and when it was not. Something consistent that she always reinforced was a child’s right to their imagination and creation. I can still hear her say, “A child’s work is play.”
Every way that I described Mawmaw, can be said for my dear Granny, Auzlia, who is both living and enamored by children. She enjoyed her career as a Kindergarden teacher for 29 years in Bay Springs, Mississippi. She hand sewed clothes for their plays. She sang to them. She, too, nurtured my other four cousins and I - teaching us to read as soon as we could see the page, 3 years old, to sing, to play the piano and to cook. Riding with us on the golf cart to cut down a small pine tree from the woods with cutting pliars, for my cousin and I’s “house” (The storage house on the property)’s christmas tree. On a whim, always, wherever as a child, I could draw. In the church pew, and spontaneously she would spread a sheet across the kitchen table. Play-doe. She would hoot and holler for football and cling two forks together to cheer, she’d hand me one and there we’d be, clanging and dancing in the living room. She had so many colored shape blocks that I could dump across the floor and build. She visited my first grade class and read a book to us. Every single child in my class lined up all the way pushing into the hallway to hug her when she finished. She took us to the park and she did not sit and watch from the bench. She followed us around the park, playing with us, watching us climb, Granny do this, Granny do that. My Granny, above anyone else in my life, was right there with me, playing with me as my peer. As I grew up, I realized how my granny always spoke to me appropriotely, still as my Granny, but as a peer. She respected our intelligence.
Children are the moment embodied. At ages 2-5, they are learning how to have inhibitions, and they’re at a uniquely earnest spot in their development. They still are mostly themselves, concerned with their experience. Other children contribute to their experience in a way that is supplementary, but not yet permeating so much of their Being.
With these women being who raised me, it’s not a shock that I have now contributed to three seperate positions in childcare.
Blue boy and pink girl
Psychology about why children play. My friend Tristan is a microbiologist living in a souped-up double wide trailer in the woods of Mississippi. Tristan is a magical man, and has no shame in enjoying nature’s gifts. Always on our walks, he carries in tow a big, lucky stick. Have you noticed how good it feels to hold a stick? My fondest memories with him are treading out to the frozen pond in the freezing southern winter, an unbearable 20 degrees farenheit! Reaching the frozen, mystical pond surrounded by collected long-passed deer skulls and hand-crafted benches, decorated with real-deal fossils and lights on twine. Stepping out on to the very thin, but still frozen ice, slipping and giggling and sliding on his belly. Talking nonsense, engaging with your intuition. Grabbing trees that are better described as sticks emerging out from the water to guide our exploration, tickled and only mildly frightened at the idea of falling in. Tristan and I’s favorite part of our relationship is that with one another, we can share the pureness of a child’s play again.
As adults, we encounter so many walls keeping us from a type of earnesty that we relate to ourselves easiest with. They emerge slowly but surely as we learn socialization, a million tiny erupting schemas, emergent from our learned realities and behaviors. With Tristan, there are times where this feeling somehow is able to converge in one of its most recognizable and tangible forms, and I know that to be a human is defined so much by being something that plays.
She flew off tubes in the Alabama Bay. She paraded through sand. She fought currents. She clinged onto the bow while we crawled through poignant boat graveyards left behind by Katrina. She pulled sails and steered both big vessels and little ones. She got down on the floor with us.
Her hardwood, soft-fireplace, clean-air, sweet-potato, hand-sewn-quilt, music-filled home was adorned with hundreds of Boyd’s bears, alongside crickets and frogs and kitty cats, both real and figurine. An antique baby doll carriage and always eye sparkling surprises left behind by little girls who came before me. In the honest eyes of a child, it was obvious that her house encouraged magic.
I cannot speak for my cousins, but I was often gripped by my imagination as a child. Pleaaaaseeeee! Can we ____? At my insistence, Mawmaw and I crept into the arduously dense attic to retrieve fifty vintage Barbie dolls. We paraded into the overgrown woods to visit the Sugar Shack, a tiny abandoned cabin where my great-grandmother and many others once lived at the beginnings of their early marriages. I went through a peculiar developmental era where I was hyperfixated on everything that had to do with Claw Machines. For my birthday, she drove me to around 5 or 6 seperate places that housed machines around the city. I played the claw all day.
She had a long and earnest career in medicine, and she took no shit. She could be stern. She was absolutely opinionated. But she never mistook firmness for rigidity, especially with the grandchildren. She delighted in giving us our way. She beamed watching us absorb and invent, experiencing our mitosis-ing consciousness with us.
I will always remember my Mawmaw as a very smart woman. She had a way of knowing when the time for something was right and when it was not. Something consistent that she always reinforced was a child’s right to their imagination and creation. I can still hear her say, “A child’s work is play.”
Every way that I described Mawmaw, can be said for my dear Granny, Auzlia, who is both living and enamored by children. She enjoyed her career as a Kindergarden teacher for 29 years in Bay Springs, Mississippi. She hand sewed clothes for their plays. She sang to them. She, too, nurtured my other four cousins and I - teaching us to read as soon as we could see the page, 3 years old, to sing, to play the piano and to cook. Riding with us on the golf cart to cut down a small pine tree from the woods with cutting pliars, for my cousin and I’s “house” (The storage house on the property)’s christmas tree. On a whim, always, wherever as a child, I could draw. In the church pew, and spontaneously she would spread a sheet across the kitchen table. Play-doe. She would hoot and holler for football and cling two forks together to cheer, she’d hand me one and there we’d be, clanging and dancing in the living room. She had so many colored shape blocks that I could dump across the floor and build. She visited my first grade class and read a book to us. Every single child in my class lined up all the way pushing into the hallway to hug her when she finished. She took us to the park and she did not sit and watch from the bench. She followed us around the park, playing with us, watching us climb, Granny do this, Granny do that. My Granny, above anyone else in my life, was right there with me, playing with me as my peer. As I grew up, I realized how my granny always spoke to me appropriotely, still as my Granny, but as a peer. She respected our intelligence.
Children are the moment embodied. At ages 2-5, they are learning how to have inhibitions, and they’re at a uniquely earnest spot in their development. They still are mostly themselves, concerned with their experience. Other children contribute to their experience in a way that is supplementary, but not yet permeating so much of their Being.
With these women being who raised me, it’s not a shock that I have now contributed to three seperate positions in childcare.
Blue boy and pink girl
Psychology about why children play. My friend Tristan is a microbiologist living in a souped-up double wide trailer in the woods of Mississippi. Tristan is a magical man, and has no shame in enjoying nature’s gifts. Always on our walks, he carries in tow a big, lucky stick. Have you noticed how good it feels to hold a stick? My fondest memories with him are treading out to the frozen pond in the freezing southern winter, an unbearable 20 degrees farenheit! Reaching the frozen, mystical pond surrounded by collected long-passed deer skulls and hand-crafted benches, decorated with real-deal fossils and lights on twine. Stepping out on to the very thin, but still frozen ice, slipping and giggling and sliding on his belly. Talking nonsense, engaging with your intuition. Grabbing trees that are better described as sticks emerging out from the water to guide our exploration, tickled and only mildly frightened at the idea of falling in. Tristan and I’s favorite part of our relationship is that with one another, we can share the pureness of a child’s play again.
As adults, we encounter so many walls keeping us from a type of earnesty that we relate to ourselves easiest with. They emerge slowly but surely as we learn socialization, a million tiny erupting schemas, emergent from our learned realities and behaviors. With Tristan, there are times where this feeling somehow is able to converge in one of its most recognizable and tangible forms, and I know that to be a human is defined so much by being something that plays.
The art of a good toy in relation to the best ways to play
What makes a toy good?
My favorite type of toy: When and why the Teddy Bear was invented.
I first met Maggie at 29 W. 25th St in New York, New York, in between 5th and 6th avenues. She was amongst a family of others with her likeness. scattered across a cluttered table at the Chelsea Flea Market.
How toymakers have lost their spirit and succumbed to capitalism