What was your favorite toy as a child?
All of them, but the one that stands out is the hula hoop.
My mother brought one home from a shopping trip in Austin. A surprise. I worked until I got it operating correctly.
I never managed to keep several hoops going at once, or to twirl the small hoops, a surprise gift from my father, with my arms while twirling the large one around my waist.
I don’t know what happened to the hula hoop. Maybe it was lost in a move a couple of years later, maybe stolen from the back porch. I missed it, but by then the fad was past.
When I was in my fifties, I bought another one, lighter weight, which made it harder to control, and loud–a formerly perfect toy re-designed to be annoying.
And I couldn’t make it work, in part because of the light weight, in part because I wasn’t willing to put in the time and effort. It kept falling down, and I got tired of picking it up.
But I failed mainly because I no longer have the straight-up-and-down body of a seven-year-old. Hula hooping is difficult when the user is lumpy.
If I’d never stopped using one, however, all those lumps would now be in the right places.
Kathy Waller 