At the start of the pandemic, I was not a stranger to Zoom. I have used Zoom for a number of years. I’ve worked on several distributed teams with members from all over the world. Zoom has given us a shared space to connect, collaborate, brainstorm, trade stories, etc. I had celebrated birthdays of distant friends on Zoom. And way back in the day before Zoom when we used Skype video, I even cooked entire dinners while “hanging out” with my adult daughter when we were separated by distance.
What I had not done on Zoom (or any other video conferencing software) before the pandemic is interact regularly with a three-year-old, and for long periods of time (e.g., an hour+). Before the pandemic, it would never have occurred to me to even think about doing that.
If you read my post on December 27, 2021 after my six month Writing Retreat blog hiatus, then you saw my promise to reveal at some point how I became a FaceTime puppet master. Well, the time has arrived…
It started simply…with whatever critters and creatures I could find around the house. How did I choose? They had to have personality, and they had to be small enough to fit in one hand while handling my iPhone with the other hand.
Meet Coyote Old Man, Hummingbird, Raven, Little Kitty, and the last needs no introduction. The two odd birds were my “bird lady” mother’s, the kitty was a gift to myself when I started Mindful Digital Life, and Coyote Old Man who is carved from an antler, just showed up one day and I let him in. We’ve been friends ever since.
These five shared one great talent…they captured imagination. I quickly discovered and leveraged a cool feature of the video camera on the phone. Held close to the camera, Little Kitty, less than an inch tall, becomes a big personality. With just a little help from me to give them voice (and believe me, to an outsider looking in, all the voices would sound the same), these creatures actually came to life and helped my granddaughter and I play across distance during the early days of pandemic isolation.
When Aya and her parents went to the East Coast for several months, I wanted to find a character or two to add to the creature community to help us connect in the digital realm. I was wary of the time and space between us. Enter Ms. Crow and Badger in the photo at the top. I’d scooped up the little Grasshopper and many of the tiny finger puppets (Rooster was the real comedian of the bunch) from a toy bin before they left. Ms. Crow and Badger were an awesome pair, coming to life over the weeks and months. Fox and the little owl are newcomers to the party. Now that Aya and her family are back in the Bay Area, the puppets have the thrilling opportunity to visit her in her home and she can visit them in their native habitat behind her grandmother’s desk.
Why now for this story you might ask? A few days ago I received a morning FaceTime call from my granddaughter. She was still eating her breakfast of waffles. She wanted to see the creatures. I “woke them up.” As soon as I woke the creatures, she set right to work preparing breakfast for them. And there we were, deep in play, each of us on two sides of an enormous bay.
Pandemic or not, the ability to play across distance between family, friends, and young humans, is an awesome and important skill. And it turns out, when deep in play across distance, distance disappears.
What I’ve learned
Imagination will always surprise you—give it more opportunities to illuminate your path.
The technologies we so often love to hate can be be used well in support of imagination and connection.
Experiment.
What I’m watching on President’s Day
The video, One Person, One Vote from Facing History, Facing Ourselves President’s Day page (2015). Students interview aniti-apartheid leader and former South African Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs. Scroll down to the section titled Watch It.
What I’m listening to
A new podcast—Into the Digital Future—from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.
What I’m reading
The Lost Words and The Lost Spells Explorers’ Guides
From the archives
The current frequency of words in the daily language of children—my 3.29.19 post that mentions The Lost Words, a collaboration between Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris.
