I have astonished a small boy here. My son’s best friend R. likes to pretend he’s the flag-man at a race-track, while his little brother K. pretends to be a race car. (I haven’t quite figured out our son J’s part in these games, except that it involves a lot of running around.) But of course, any good race track has to have someone waving the appropriate flags, and it isn’t enough to announce “this is a yellow flag”; there must actually be a tangible, visible yellow flag. Paper colored solidly with crayons works, but isn’t quite satisfactory, so R. and K.’s mom went looking for actual small flags. She figured, reasonably enough, that if they were to be found anywhere it would be in Indiana. Even here, though, they were not to be found. She mentioned this to me, saying that her son had indeed resourcefully applied crayons to paper, and that he was taking very careful care of his flags, making sure they were put away so they wouldn’t get lost or torn. I agreed that that was cute, and thought little more about it until I was out shopping, and saw a bolt of cotton in the classic black-and-white checkered pattern, done in quarter-inch squares.
Flags are about the easiest things in the world, especially if they need be no bigger than a small boy can handle easily. Cut a rectangle, hem it on three sides, make the fourth into a pocket that will hold a short piece of a 1/4″ dowel rod for a “flag pole”, and presto, you have a flag. So my sewing machine and I had a 45 minute conversation, and R. was presented with his own personal bunch of flags. He’s thrilled, absolutely over the moon.
It’s fun to make things for kids. They’re so unrestrainedly delighted by such little things, like a bouquet of colored flags.