Category Archives: Random Toy Box

Posts on the general topic of family.

Memories in cardboard

When I started Kindergarten, we were introduced to the alphabet through a program that assigned the letters human traits. Hence, Mister M had a munching mouth. I think Mister T may have had tall teeth and Miss I might have suffered from some sort of uncontrollable itch. I don’t remember the characteristics of the other anthropomorphic letters, but I will always remember Mister M.

I didn’t like him then. I love him now.

Mr. M's munching mouth

He seemed like more of a serious individual when I was five.

I recall Mister M so well because he was the first letter-person we met. I’m pretty sure he was, although it seems like it would have made more sense to start with Miss A. Oh well, 1972 was confusing time for a lot of folks, and I’m sure there was a method to the madness in the way we were taught our MBCs.

Mister M’s image was presented to us on colorful placard. We practiced our M sounds for a little while, whereupon Mister M’s card was hung up on the wall, where we could all see and admire his glorious munching mouth and be inspired by it to bite each other in the legs.

When I got home from school after Mister M’s arrival, my mother asked me about him. “What does Mister M have?” she quizzed.

It must have been a long, stressful day of Kindergarten for me, because my response showed much more surliness than imagination. This was out of character for me, as my reputation indicated that my imaginativeness should nearly equal the level of my rotten disposition.

“Mister M don’t have nothing,” I said. “He’s just a piece of cardboard.”

I don’t remember this discussion. My mother told me about it when I was older. It is one of the few snapshots of my childhood, taken from the point of view of one of my parents, that I keep with me. There is no telling how many like snapshots are lost forever.

toy tractor

A boy and his tractor in the black and white days before Mr. M.

My parents have been gone for many years, and with them have gone most of the glimpses of my childhood wisecrackery. I never got the chance to talk to my father man to man, and I had far too few years of adult conversations with my mother.

That is why is write this blog.

It’s not the only reason, and it’s not even the main reason I had for starting. But it has become the primary reason over time. My boys won’t remember the majority of events chronicled here. They won’t see any of these happenings through their dad’s eyes.

When I’m gone, I want them to know how much I was amazed or tickled or made thoughtful by their childhood antics.

Yes, I could record these events without blogging them, but I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t get around to it. Blogging makes it a responsibility of sorts. It gives me deadlines for turning my memories into words before they slip between the fingers of my mind.

Like typical digital parents, we take tons of pictures of our kids. But pictures can lack context. There are some emotions that only a story can show. Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures.

Whatever happens tomorrow, I can be happy that my boys have this link to their yesterdays. I can’t give them everything I want them to have, but at least I know I’ve provided them with some treasures of their own making. If nothing else, they will always have a handful of their own Mister Ms.

 

Nothing lime can stay

Kids today have lots of stuff we never had. More options might make life easier. More options don’t make life simpler. I don’t know where the prefect balance between easy and simple lies, but there are simple pleasures from my childhood I hope my boys can still experience:

Healthy competition:

When I played Little League, we won some and we lost some. Consequently, we felt happy after some games and dejected after others. Either way, a pat on the head, a soft ice cream cone, and an hour of swimming it off put the game into perspective as a minor piece of our lives.

Today, we seem to have taken competition to extremes. In one corner we have Ma and Pa Jockstrap. They can’t keep their spittle out of the umpire’s face because they will not allow anyone to stand in the way of Little Jimmy Jockstrap’s ascent into the Hall of Fame, regardless of Jimmy’s average skills or even his lukewarm desire to play the game.

In the other corner, handing out trophies to every kid in their zip code, are Mr. and Mrs. Overprotective, who fear that the loss of a T-ball game will rob their four-year-old of the confidence he needs to be just exactly as successful in life as all of his peers.

Nobody else can make you better than you are; nor will life allow you to be a winner every single day.

Arithmetic:

Rise of the machines

How do you insert the graph paper?

Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like it is no longer necessary to learn arithmetic in order to do math. I’ve never owned a graphic calculator; I don’t even know what they do. But I once was real friendly with graph paper, also with protractors and compasses. We didn’t have any math beyond basic calculus in my high school, but we could handle this (+) and this (-) and these (x), (÷) with pencil and paper, or on our bony little Hillbilly fingers. We didn’t need Excel to add columns for us.

Nowadays, if a kid can do basic addition in his head, they put him on Good Morning America so everybody can gawk at his freakish talent. I hope my sons learn basic arithmetic because I want to hang out on the set of The Today Show. Besides, (and I’m just doing the math here in my head) there may not be enough money in the back to school fund for graphic calculators.

Lime flavored stuff:

An all time classic

You can never go home again.

Back in the day, green lollipops were to die for. Whenever you put some kind of green candy into your mouth, you knew you would be rewarded with a robust lime flavor. There used to be things you could count on, and one of those was that green equaled lime.

Lime is the Latin of flavors now, a rare novelty to the tongues of the modern world. Some companies (I’m looking at you, Starburst) have cut green pieces out of their original lineups altogether. Others have replaced lime with off-green flavors like sour apple and watermelon – flavors that make a mockery of the color. I go out of my way to find popsicles that include lime among their flavors. I do it for my boys. Because a world without lime might as well be a world doused in strawberry syrup.

What things from your youth do you hope your children will experience?

How Daddy’s reading comprehension skills died a slow death

Parents of multiple children can’t help but compare and contrast their offspring. I like to notice the ways my two boys are alike, because noting their differences often leads to the temptation to wish one could be more like the other, and if I’m going to pressure them to follow another child’s model, I want more well-behaved examples to point at.

There is a world of difference between the habits of a one-year-old and those of a four-year-old. Despite the age difference, there is one activity in which my boys take common delight.

Pulling out the bookmark

Colorful tabs were just made for pullin’.

Apparently, children of all ages find endless joy in pulling the bookmark out of the book their father is reading and replacing it between randomly selected pages in the book.

I am, or rather, I was, an avid reader. I used to tear through history books like there was nobody tugging on my arm or crying in my ear. I used to devour the classics like a man who need not condemn anybody to bed at an unjustly early hour, and then hear fifteen different appeals of the sentence as the night wears on.

One summer, I devoted a couple of months to reading Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy. If I tried to tackle those thousands of pages today, it would take me longer to read The Civil War than it took Lincoln’s reluctant generals to fight it. I would be a sorry historian to declare that The Civil War lasted eight years. But there were lots of extended breaks.

Civil War set

For childless readers only . . . unless you want to end up as just another casualty.

The irony is that before I had children, I didn’t rely so heavily upon bookmarks as I do now. Back then, I read so often that I could easily remember my place without a flag directing me where to resume. Now, I might go weeks between reading sessions. I need bookmarks not only to remind me what page I was on, but also which book I was reading.

There must be something about a little nub of paper or Mylar, or even a strand of lint, sticking out of a book that hypnotizes a child with the desire to pull it out. It does not matter how plain the bookmark appears, it still portrays itself as a magical tab that must be pulled. I might as well install buttons on my books and expect little boys not to push them.

In the end, a bookmark is a boring plaything. The boys rediscover this as soon as it is free of the book. Little brother might toss his disappointment to the four winds or hide it somewhere within the book, as the mood strikes him. Big brother has been yelled at enough that he covers his tracks by replacing the marker between pages, any pages.

Thus, I find myself wondering why some books are so repetitive, while others seem to leave huge gaps in the narrative. I’ve read a few books over the past several years in which the sequence of events was downright bizarre. Some men my age have mid-life crises. Not me. I’m just going through my post-modern phase.

Eavesdropping on the class of 2026

Kids have the best conversations. If you ever fall into the habit of eavesdropping on kids when they discuss the world with each other, you will discover vast storehouses of knowledge. Between them, kids having a conversation know nearly everything, even if much of that knowledge is manufactured on the spot by their collective imaginations. There is only one thing kids in conversation will never know, and that is just how funny their conversation is.

The other day, I spent the afternoon with my four-year-old son and his five-year-old friend. We were driving home from the museum when we passed our local university’s beef cattle research facility.

5YO: “That’s the place where they butcher cows for meat.”

4YO: “Wait a minute. I thought we get milk from cows.”

5YO: “There’s different kinds of cows. There are cows we get milk from and cows we eat.”

4YO: “And cows that wag their tails.”

5YO: “Those are horses.”

Taft's pet cow

And then there are the smart ones who go to cowlledge.

(Further reading about cowlledge here.)

Later, at a red light, my son spotted a man waiting to cross the street. The man was wearing a McDonald’s cap and a polo shirt with a McDonald’s logo on the breast. He was holding a McDonald’s bag.

4YO: “Hey, look, there’s a McDonald’s man.”

5YO: “Yeah. He works at McDonald’s. He’s carrying a McDonald’s bag too.”

4YO: “He probably got fired. Then he said, ‘Well, at least I can get some food before I have to go home.’ That’s why he’s got some hamburgers.”

5YO: “Yup, he got fired.”

Get your burgers and go.

“Your severance package is frying up as we speak.”

When we got home, the kids started playing with an army tank and a helicopter. This is the conversation the tank had with the chopper.

TANK: “Hey, Buddy, you wanna go out to lunch?”

CHOPPER: “Okay, where should we go?”

TANK: “We can go to Wendy’s.”

CHOPPER: “Yeah! And we can have [soda] pop!”

TANK: “Actually, I don’t know if I can eat anything. I don’t really have a mouth, just some guns.”

Tank and helicopter make lunch plans.

“I’d love to have lunch with you but I have a problem. You see, I’m orally challenged.”

I only wish I could remember some of the other entertaining exchanges between them. I’m tempted to follow them around with a tape recorder, except that when I play it back I’d have to fast forward through all the fake fart noises and ensuing hysterical laughter. That would take way too much time.