Like everybody this week, I was trying to get my head around what happened in Newtown, Connecticut. Not possible.
I was thinking of the children there who won’t have Christmas this year, or ever again.
It numbs the soul.
I’m gonna go out on a piney, tinsel-trimmed limb and guess that most of those kids believed in Santa. Had whispered a wish. Mailed a note to the North Pole.
A blizzard of emotion sets in. Mostly anger and frustration. But also hopes for our better angels — not necessarily for unity, but at least a little sanity.
Then somehow the notion of childhoods lost brought about reflections on my own Christmases past. And all of a sudden I was thinking about toys. Swept up in surge of nostalgia for long-ago joys.
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
while visions of Hot Wheels cars danced in their heads.
My imaginary View-Master conjured snowy scenes of our sprawling log home in rural western Pennsylvania and of sledding at the York golf course once we moved to southern Maine.
My mom must have shown me how to use wisps of cotton to send smoke wafting from the red chimneys of the cabins in my Lincoln Log village. And one year my dad bought a little old-timey train set that chugged around our tree.
We built and launched Lego space ships, manned by little rubber babies whose adventures took them — us — around the solar system and back home again.
For high-tech toys we had the Slinky — a modern marvel of coiled metal, winter’s most elegant spring. Capable of slinking down the stairs, end over end, it was even educational if you paused to consider its lessons in potential and kinetic energy, and the law of gravity. We, of course, did not.
In our stocking we would find a Super Ball, another invention we might have thought quite amazing — for surely it was composed of some miracle Space Age polymer — if we weren’t too busy bouncing it off the walls and occasionally, oops, off of our skulls.
PEZ dispensers, anyone? Make mine a Batman.
And don’t get me started on Silly Putty. Too late. Crack open that plastic egg and behold a blob of pure fun. Dad showed us how to press it over “Peanuts” in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, peel it back to see the images reproduced, then stretch it out for a droopy, distorted Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Years later I used it to make a Michael Jackson nose for a YouTube video. It even smells like childhood.
In our house, due to popular demand, there were always novelty gags — fake vomit, fake blood, fake severed hand, fake nail through the finger, fake dog doo, fake bug in the ice cube. Can I offer you a stick of gum? Ow, snap!!!
Of course, we loved our Matchbox cars. That is, until Hot Wheels came along and basically blew theirs doors off — snazzy Corvettes, Mustangs and Cougars, zipping along that bright orange track, hitting jumps and loops.
The Sand Crab, the Paddy Wagon, even the unbelievably stylish Red Baron (I still have one). These tiny American-made muscle cars still rev reverent memories for me.
Tonka trucks, too. How solid they felt in young hands when pushed through pile carpet or shoved through the sand.
Hours of fun crafting crude works of art with our Lite-Brite and Etch-a-Sketch, or shaping clunky sculptures with Play-Doh.
About as violent as it ever got was the Rock’em Sock’em Robots. An epic, plastic showdown of red versus blue — pound for pound one of the best toys around. Definitely more fun than a Barrel of Monkeys.
Those were days of slot cars and red wagons and Flexible Flyers.
Not even the Magic 8 Ball could fully explain what brought on these flashbacks about toys. But perhaps it is because there is something about child’s play — the awesome power of innocent imaginations — where the human spirit is most vividly on display.
— John Breneman