Charlie Ravioli: a "Real Life" Mr. Marmalade

This excerpt is from The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/09/30/020930fa_fact_gopnik:

Adam Gopnik, "Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli," The New Yorker, September 30, 2002, p. 80

NEW YORK JOURNAL about the writer’s daughter’s imaginary playmate, Charlie Ravioli...

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 playgrounds-drawn, in particular, from a nearly perfect, mynah-bird-like imitation of the words she hears her mother use when she talks about her day with her friends...

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.)...

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...

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 Brontës 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...

The real question, I saw, was not "Why this friend?" but "Why this fiction?" Why, as Olivia had seen so clearly, are grownups in New York so busy, and so obsessed with the language of busyness that it dominates their conversation? Why are New Yorkers always bumping into Charlie Ravioli and grabbing lunch, instead of sitting down with him and exchanging intimacies, as friends should, as people do in Paris and Rome?...

We build rhetorical baffles around our lives to keep the crowding out, only to find that we have let nobody we love in...

I think we would have learned to live happily with Charlie Ravioli had it not been for the appearance of Laurie. She threw us badly. At dinner, Olivia had been mentioning a new personage almost as often as she mentioned Ravioli. "I talked to Laurie today," she would begin. "She says Ravioli is busy." And then it came to us, with sickening clarity: Laurie was not the patient friend who consoled you for Charlie’s absence. Laurie was the bright-toned person who answered Ravioli’s phone and told you that unfortunately Mr. Ravioli was in a meeting...

Writer tells about listening to Olivia mutter to herself about Ravioli...

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