Serendipity

Someone once told me when I was younger that the word 'serendipity' means finding something you used to like by accident. Well, cleaning my room this afternoon, I found plenty of things I used to like by accident. One of these is a memory game which used to be popular in camp and in youth groups like NCSY. Basically, one person starts off by saying, "one hen." The person who is sort of like a contestant then has to repeat, "one hen." Then the one leading the game says, "one hen, two ducks" and the contestant has to repeat. It goes all the way until ten. This is the list (some things might be spelled wrong, this list is from a number of years ago, not that my spelling is amazing now, but anyway):

One hen
Two ducks
Three squawking geese
Four limerick oysters
Five corpulent porpoises
Six pairs of Don Elverso's tweezers (I have no clue who Don Elverso is)
Seven thousand Macedonian soldiers dressed in full battle array
Eight brass monkeys from the ancient, sacred crypts of Egypt
Nine apathetic, sympathetic, diabetic old men on roller skates with a marked propensity towards procrastination and sloth
Ten lyrical, spherical, diabolical denizens of the sea who haul and stall around the corner of the quo, the quay, and the quiver all at the same time.

Whew.

Anyway, one of the other items I found buried away in my desk drawers are six little figurines, bigger than Polly Pocket - about the size of Lego people, I guess, maybe a touch bigger. They came from a toy I had when I was younger, maybe six or seven years old, called Jenny's Tree House. It was a tree house and came with five of the little figurines, an orange-haired girl with painted on pink clothes, a brown-haired girl with painted on blue clothes, an orange-haired boy with painted on red clothes, a brown-haired boy with painted on blue clothes, and a blonde-haired girl in pigtails with painted on yellow clothes. At some point, I thought I lost some of them and my mom got me another set, but then I really did lose some, so I'm left now with the girl in pink clothes, two girls in yellow, two boys in red, and a boy in blue. I used to have, besides the boys, two yellow girls, two blue girls, and the pink girl, and I remember I named them after the quints in the Baker's Dozen books (whose names I can't really remember now - Rivka, Zahava, Tikva...that's all I remember). I used to play with them all the time, especially while doing homework. I remember I used to arrange them on my desk like students in a classroom and I would pretend to have them answer the homework questions, or do the readings out loud, taking turns of course (I would do a different kind of voice for each, and sometimes they'd be British, too) like we did in school.

That was aaaages ago. I mean, I was literally six and seven when I used to do that, maybe even until I was eight. So I was very pleasantly surprised to find them still tucked away in a corner of my desk drawer. They're the sort of toy I just can't bring myself to throw away - I have too many nice memories of playing with them.

I have to say, I love cleaning my room (well, sometimes). It's like going on a treasure hunt. You just never know what you're going to dig up!