thinking about Mr Ravioli

from 'Bumping Into Mr Ravioli'

(by Adam Gopnik, originally published in The New Yorker, anthologised in The Best American Essays (2003), pp 103 – 106, ed. Anne Fadiman)


My daughter, Olivia, who just turned three, has an imaginary friend whose name is Charlie Ravioli. Olivia is growing up in Manhattan, and so Charlie Ravioli has a lot of local traits: he lives in an apartment “on Madison and Lexington”, he dines on grilled chicken, fruit and water, and, having reached the age of seven and a half, he feels, or is thought, ‘old’. But the most peculiarly local thing about Olivia’s imaginary playmate is this: he is always too busy to play with her. She holds her toy cell phone up to her ear, and we hear her talk into it: “Ravioli? It’s Olivia… It’s Olivia. Come and play? OK. Call me. Bye.” Then she snaps it shut and shakes her head. “I always get his machine,” she says. Or she will say, “I spoke to Ravioli today.” “Did you have fun?” my wife and I ask. “No. He was busy working. On a television” (leaving it up in the air if he repairs electronic devices or has his own talk show).

On a good day, she “bumps into” her invisible friend and they go to a coffee shop. “I bumped into Charlie Ravioli,” she announces at dinner (after a day when, of course, she stayed homed, played, had a nap, had lunch, paid a visit to the Central Park Zoo, and then had another nap). “We had coffee, but then he had to run.” She sighs, sometimes, at her inability to make their schedules mesh, but she accepts it as inevitable, just the way life is. “I bumped into Charlie Ravioli today,” she says. “He was working.” Then she adds brightly, “But we hopped into a taxi.” What happened then? we ask. “We grabbed lunch,” she says.

It seemed obvious that Ravioli was a romantic figure of the big exotic life that went on outside her little limited life of parks and playground – drawn, in particular, from a nearly perfect, mynah-bird-life imitation of the words she hears her mother use when she talks about her day with her friends. (“How was your day?” Sighing: “Oh, you know. I tried to make a date with Meg, but I couldn’t find her, so I left a message on her machine. Then I bumped into Emily after that meeting I had in SoHo, and we had coffee and then she had to run, but by then Meg had reached me on my cell and we arranged….”) I was concerned, though, that Charlie Ravioli might also be the sign of some “trauma”, some loneliness in Olivia’s life reflected in imaginary form. “It seems odd to have an imaginary playmate who’s always too busy to play with you,” Martha, my wife, said to me. “Shouldn’t your imaginary playmate be someone you tell secrets to and, I don’t know, sing songs with? It shouldn’t be someone who’s always hopping into taxis.”

We thought, at first, that her older brother Luke might be the original of Charlie Ravioli. (For one thing, he is also seven and a half, though we were fairly sure that this age was merely Olivia’s marker for As Old as Man Can Be.) He is too busy to play with her much anymore. He has become a true New York child, with the schedule of a cabinet secretary: chess club on Monday, T-ball on Tuesday, tournament on Saturday, play dates and after-school conferences to fill in the gaps. But Olivia, though she counts days, does not yet really have days. She has a day – and into this day she has introduced the figure of Charlie Ravioli – in order, it dawned on us, to insist that she does have days, because she is too harried to share them, that he does have an independent social life, by virtue of being too busy to have one.

Yet Charlie Ravioli was becoming so constant and oddly discouraging a companion – “He cancelled lunch. Again,” Olivia would say – that we thought we ought to look into it. One of my sisters is a developmental psychologist who specializes in close scientific studies of what goes on inside the heads of one- and two- and three-year olds. Though she grew up in the nervy East, she lives in California now, where she grows basil in her garden and jars her own organic marmalades. I emailed this sister for help with the Ravioli issue – how concerned should we be? – and she sent me back an email, along with an attachment, and, after several failed cell-phone connections, we at last spoke on a land line.

It turned out that there is a recent book on this very subject by the psychologist Marjorie Taylor, called Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them, and my sister had just written a review of it. She insisted that Charlie Ravioli was nothing to be worried about. Olivia was right on target, in fact. Most under-sevens (63%, to be scientific) have an invisible friend, and children create their imaginary playmates not out of trauma but out of a serene sense of the possibilities of fiction – sometimes as figures of pure fantasy, sometimes, as Olivia had done, as observations of grownup manners assembled in tranquility and given a name. I learned about the invisible companions Taylor studied: Baintor, who is invisible because he lives in the light; Station Pheta, who hunts sea anemones on the beach. Charlie Ravioli seemed pavement-bound by comparison.

“An imaginary playmate isn’t any kind of trauma marker,” my sister said. “It’s just the opposite: it’s a sign that the child is now confident enough to begin to understand how to organize her experience in stories.” The significant thing about imaginary friends, she went on, is that the kids know they’re fictional. In an instant message on AOL, she summed it up: “The children with invisible friends often interrupted the interviewer to remind her, with a certain note of concern for her sanity, that these characters were, after all, just pretend.”

I also learned that some children, as they get older, turn out to possess what child psychologists call a ‘paracosm’. A paracosm is a society thought up by a child – an invented universe with a distinctive language, geography, and history. (The Brontes invented a couple of paracosms when they were children.) Not all children who have an imaginary friend invent a paracosm, but the two might, I think, be related. Like a lonely ambassador from Alpha Centauri in a fifties sci-fi movie who, misunderstood by paranoid Earth scientists, cannot bring the life-saving news from his planet, perhaps the invisible friend also gets an indifferent or hostile response, and then we never find out about the beautiful paracosm he comes from.

“Don’t worry about it,” my sister said in a late-night phone call. “Knowing something’s made up while thinking that it matters is what all fiction insists on. She’s putting a name on a series of manners.”

“But he seems so real to her,” I objected.

“Of course he is. I mean, who’s more real to you, Becky Sharp or Gandalf or the guy down the hall? Giving a manner a name makes it real.”

I paused. “I grasp that it’s normal for her to have an imaginary friend,” I said, “but have you ever heard of an imaginary friend who’s too busy to play with you?”

She thought about it. “No,” she said. “I’m sure that doesn’t occur anywhere in the research literature. That sounds completely New York.” And then she hung up.


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The rest of the essay goes on to examine the aspects of modern urban life that turns so many of us into 'Mr Raviolis' who hardly have time for the people who really matter, who are always 'catching' each other on the way to something bigger, busier, more important. And, more subtly, it offers an interesting theory on how New Yorkers turn this busy-ness to their advantage, make it into an assertion of independece and achievement. And by the end of the essay, the reader is left with the feeling of being caught on the horns of a difficult dilemma: Adam Gopnik loves New York, loves his daughter - must a choice be made?


A couple of thoughts:

1.
We need more writing like this. Writing that says something, that uses what happens in everyday life to make an important, or at least interesting and illuminating, point that has never been made before.

2.
i wonder what sorts of invisible friends Singaporean children dream up? Do they also rush around from one appointment to another, grabbing kueh pai tee and tandoori chicken for lunch at the foodcourt, having entire sms conversations while simultaneously talking to three other people about the latest unbelievable clearance sale?
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