My Favorite Toy

I was asked to name my favorite toy from childhood.

Arrgh! Questions like this drive me crazy. I resisted for a couple of days, but I finally broke down and answered.

Ask most Americans to name their favorite color and the response is likely to be red or blue or whatever. Ask a Brit and the response is often something like “Favorite color of what?”

So I’ll answer like a denizen of the UK: “Favorite toy to play at what?”

But there are some toys I remember more than others.

I had a red 3-speed bicycle my grandfather gave me just before he died. My father had a flat tire one day and I wanted to be just like him so I pounded a nail through a board and drove the bike over it. He figured out what I’d done and wouldn’t fix the tire for weeks. I’d probably still have that bike except that one of my sisters accidentally drove a tractor over it. At least I think it was an accident.

I had a Radio Flyer wagon. A great toy too, but I decided it needed more carrying capacity and built a huge wooden box on top of the metal base. It was so heavy I could hardly pull it. I didn’t want to admit that I’d been dumb enough to paint myself into the corner of a figurative room, so I waited until nobody was home one day and I killed it. Really. I got my uncle’s 12 gauge double barreled shotgun, loaded it with two double-ought magnums, and blew the thing to bits. The shotgun was too big for me, I was only ten, and it slid under my arm as I pulled the triggers - yeah, both at one time - and broke my nose. That didn’t matter though, because I had to put the shotgun back and clean up the bits of wood that littered the yard. I hadn’t finished yet when my parents and sisters returned home. Nobody ever asked me why my nose was bloody, why there were bits of wood all over the yard, where the wagon had disappeared to, or why my clothes smelled like cordite. I guess that was just normal stuff for ten year old farm boys. I hear these days that guns are locked in cabinets. Wow! And, no, I haven’t owned a gun in decades, so your wagons are safe.

I had a brown teddy bear that I wore out with love. One day the fabric just split open and white fluffy stuffing spilt across the kitchen floor. I cried for an hour.

I had this cool camera once. It used a film size called 620 so it was fairly large, and it was made of pink plastic. Mostly I took pictures of anything that didn’t move out of the way. One day I read about how balloons had been used in the Civil War for reconnaissance so I decided to give aerial photography a shot. First, I made a mechanism from an old windup alarm clock that would ring the alarm bell and trip the shutter simultaneously. Then I practiced with the clock/camera contraption until I could reliably predict a one to five minute shutter release window. Lastly, I taped the entire thing to a box kite - not those wimpy little box kites you find in a store, but a 2×2x5 monster flown with 30 pound test braided fishing line and built as a Boy Scout project - and then found some wind. It took most of a full day to get it to work but after the film came back from the drug store I had a beautiful photograph of the barn roof from 300 feet up. That was the end of it though, because when I tried to repeat my achievement a strong gust parted the fishing line and my kite was last seen crossing the Canadian border. I’m probably responsible for a spate of UFO sightings.

I built a crystal radio. It really amazed me that I could hear people talking and listen to music simply by putting the parts together in the proper order. It was magic.

I had a beautifully illustrated copy of Alice in Wonderland. I read it out loud almost every day and stared into the illustrations until I felt like I was falling into them, just like Alice falling into the well.

But favorite? Any of these? No. My favorite toy then is my favorite toy still; that wonderful toy between my ears, that lump of meat that houses the I that is me, and connects me to the universe, the most stupendous playground of all.