Perception Is Relative... Innit?

The above cartoon came from MAD Magazine #68, which was cover-dated January, 1962... which means that it actually hit the newsstands in late 1961. I don't think I was actually reading MAD yet, so I must have seen that cartoon for the first time somewhat later, when I encountered an old copy of #68.

It's so true. Why would a child want an actual toy fire engine (no matter how big) when he could have that box?  As the cartoon shows, the box could indeed be a fire engine, but it could also be a fort, a car, a tank, a submarine, an airplane...

The following two photos are of a toy known as jacks. In my entire life, I never once played that particular game. But I had some when I was a kid (probably hand-me-downs from my older sister), and I found a use for them in my playtime.

You see jacks. This is what I saw, back when  I was five, or six, or seven...

Next, we have one of the many styles of curtain rods that exist. This is the style my mother always bought.

Those, too, could be anything I wanted them to be. One of them could be a rifle, a blind man's cane, or even (if held aloft the correct way) a submarine's periscope!

Next? How about those beverage holders you stick into your yard? There are several styles. The ones my family had when I was a child resembled these:

This is how the members of my family used them.

But myself? I looked at the "swirly" part and saw something more along the lines of this:

Which means that I ran around the yard pretending I had one of these:

And last, but certainly not least, here's a toy canoe made by Marx in the 1950s and 1960s. I had one just like this. But I didn't use it as a canoe, of course.

Y'see, around the age of five or so, I had a real "thing" for cows and bulls!

In fact, one day my family was riding somewhere in my home state of Massachusetts, and we saw this 3D billboard!

Predictably, I was fascinated! My mom even had an enlargement made of the above photo, which has been in my possession for well over fifty years (hence its somewhat rough shape).

For many years, I had absolutely no idea where this photo was taken. Not until relatively recently, that is, when I Googled the partial information shown on the first photo, and... Well, maybe I'll tell you about that some other time!

So, you may be wondering what the hell that yellow toy canoe had to do with cows and bulls? Well, at the tender age of four or five, I convinced my mother to sew that canoe onto (of all things) a blue-and-white checkered cap. Not a so-called baseball cap, but something that looked more like this:

Hey, it was the most appropriate hat I owned for my idea! That, idea, of course, was to wear the cap with the sewn-on canoe, because to my four-year-old mind, it was the closest thing I could get to something that would let me pretend to be a bull!

So, you see, after all those inspirations during my formative years, writing my own stories years later was a walk in the park!

Oh, by the way, I should probably mention that I didn't have to use my imagination to obtain any of my toys. (Well, maybe the bull headgear...) My parents bought me almost every toy I ever desired. No, I wanted to exercise my imagination. Just sayin'.

Thanks for your time.