Why do people love miniatures so much?

When I was a child, I used to imagine how wonderful it would be to have live, very miniature people under my control. Where in the world did that idea come from? Did I want something to put in the doll house we had, something much more real and chic that the unimaginative plastic pieces they used to include?

The Art Institute of Chicago has a collection of miniature, historically correct rooms of famous places called the Thorne Miniature Rooms. It is almost a voyeuristic experience. You peep into gem-like rooms that look exactly like the originals, except they are tiny. Marie Antoinette would have to be about a fourth the size of Barbie to fit in those rooms.

I've seen movies where people pay to peep into rooms where the people are life size. Can you imagine how much more money they could get for that if the rooms were, oh say, from Versailles with a different clientele?

Had I already read Gulliver's Travels? My mother read to us quite a lot when we were children. I remember the extreme pleasure I felt when she would gather us into a warm clump, open the book and begin to read. It was delicious. It was seductive. It was among the top wonderful things in the world, and I thought just about everything was fascinating, exciting and inviting because I knew so little.

That's just the kind of kid I was, nutty goofy, and laughingly happy. You can look at photographs of me, my sister, and my brother back then, and we are gleaming with smiles, looking for all the world like we could not stop wiggling long enough to have our picture taken. You could say that we were born that way.

These days, with miniature capabilities of cameras, even things that you would not have noticed or things which sound awful, like stink bug eggs, can look ravishingly beautiful.

I am often sad to think that I do not know any children like that now. They are out there somewhere, maybe, but I do not know them. The children I know play video games and whine shrilly often about not getting their own way. They are stage children with stage parents and drains in their constantly aching ears.

At Christmas time, I see Gingerbread Villages, miniature shops and houses for sale. They have snow on the shutters and sparkles and "hobbity" details.

Now, with videos replacing make-believe games, The Haunting of Hell House with a sink full of blood, the slaughtering couch overflowing with gore, the Mad Welder dehydrating the food with his blow torch, Little Man Tate thrown in the trash after an overdose of Ducolax and sundry other soul shriveling fare, I suppose I would whine too.

Our dreams are miniaturized by all these things, but, most often, not in a wonderful way.