Toy Appreciation

Those bastards at Pixar are really starting to mess with my head.

Most people, including myself, would probably not deny the fact that I am nothing but a big kid. When Carol is asked how many kids she has, she often responds with three – a 3 year old, a 33 year old, and a 4 legged furry little girl. I probably should be offended at that depiction of my character, but instead I choose to embrace it.

I love the fact that I’m a big kid. Not only is it a relief from the stressors of my everyday life, but it also allows me to get away with things that most adults my age would face great consequences for doing. Because of who I am, I’m allowed to act a certain way without people thinking I should be locked up in a padded room. I’m also allowed to say things totally off the wall without people taking great offense to them. “Hey,” they’re thinking “it’s only Scotty being himself.” I love that I’m perceived that way but still held (I hope) in high enough esteem that I can be taken seriously when needed (No? Oh well).

One drawback of being a big kid, however, is the affect that toys have on me. I like toys. In fact, I love toys. I love going to the store with Ben, walking down the toy aisle, and pointing out toys to him that we can play with together once he’s a little bigger. I can’t wait to build the big Hot Wheels race tracks with him. I can’t wait until he starts watching wrestling with me and we can start buying action figures for him to go with the ones that I saved from my youth. And I can’t wait until we can start building castles out of Legos that take up an entire corner of his room.

My only problem is that I’ve now seen Toy Story too many times to take those toys for granted.

As a kid (up until about the age of 27), I used to talk to my toys. Why wouldn’t I? Outside of my family and friends, they were the things that I spent the most time with. I had names for all of my stuffed animals and played religiously with my wrestling and He-Man (By the Power of Greyskull….) action figures. I would spend hours in my room creating scenarios and plot lines that involved all of them and have a blast doing so. I think that may be why the Toy Story movies hit home for me (and I’m sure many others) so much.

Somewhere along the line I think I was supposed to lose that trait, but I never have. I don’t have many of my childhood toys left except for the wrestlers and a few stuffed animals, but those toys mean the world to me. When Ben was barely one year old and started playing with toys in a way that didn’t involve drooling all over them, I brought my wrestlers up from the basement in an attempt to get him to play with them. He honestly couldn’t have cared less. As much as I tried and I tried to get him interested (I really don’t know what I was expecting – the kid was barely a year old), he just wasn’t. I didn’t have the heart to put them away, but luckily Carol gets me (or was just sick of seeing them), and she moved them back into the basement.

I’ve also had the same experience with Steven.

Steven is a small yellow teddy bear that I got when I was really little. I have no idea who gave it to me, when I got it, or why in the hell I chose the name Steven. All I know is that I used to sleep with Steven every night. Between Steven, Buster and Buddy (my pound puppies), and a brown rabbit who has what looks to be a glob of brown poop on his eye (which has never been confirmed – or removed), I had a troupe of stuffed animals that have followed me through my years. Ben has been given all of them, but once again, could care less. The pound puppies and the rabbit have been put away in an order to save space, but Steven remains in Ben’s room. Every night as Ben is picking out which stuffed animals to sleep with (it always ends up being Spongebob and his Toy Story characters), he passes over Steven and I get sad.

But I don’t get sad because he doesn’t want to play with the toys of my youth.

I get sad because I don’t want Steven to be lonely.

As I mentioned before, I used to talk to my toys. As a result, they became almost lifelike figures to me and I considered them to be friends. Now, don’t start thinking that I was a big loser who had no friends and had to turn to his inanimate objects for companionship, because that was not the case. In fact, I had a lot of friends (I think). But those friends couldn’t always be over at my house. They couldn’t be in my room with me when I was sent there as punishment (which happened a lot). Those friends also couldn’t sleep over every night of the week – but my toys sure could. As a result, I formed a bond with these toys that can and will never be broken.

But being my friends, however, gave them almost human like characteristics to me. I used to imagine that when I was at school they would sit around and discuss things like me, the other toys, and various current events. Occasionally when I got home I could never remember where I had left them, but I was almost sure that one or two of them was out of place. That’s why the Toy Story movies hit home so hard with me. The way the characters act and think is exactly how I imagined my little band of misfits acting when my room was unoccupied. It’s the same way I imagine Ben’s toys to act when his room is unoccupied.

So, seeing Steven laying on the floor and not being played with breaks my heart a little.

But that’s also where the big kid in me comes out.

Last night, Carol, Ben, and I had a dance party in his room. It was about 30 minutes before he had to go to bed and Carol had just gotten done deep cleaning his room. We all happened to wander in there at the same time and I got the crazy idea to ask Ben if he wanted to have a dance party. Well, being the dancing fool that he is, he certainly didn’t say “no,” so I took his Spongebob CD, put it in his radio, and the three of us danced around like idiots. And we had a blast.

Shortly after we began dancing though, I noticed that Ben had left a few of his stuffed animals – including Steven - laying on the floor. Thinking back to my youth and how I played with my toys and then thinking about the Toy Story movies and how all the toys wanted was to be played with, I reached down, grabbed a few, and began dancing with them. At one point I had Woody on my neck riding piggyback while Buzz Lightyear was holding onto my hands as we turned round and round in circles. Ben was getting a kick out of it and, to be honest, I’m pretty sure that I saw a little twinkle in Buzz’s eye as well.

After I put those two down though, I leaned over and picked up my beloved Steven. The poor little guy has definitely seen better days; his fur is matted down, his nose has long been missing, and he has a little hole right where his belly button should be that has been begging to be sewn up for years. Looking down at him he just looked sad and I knew why. In an attempt to make him (and maybe me) feel a little better, I picked Steven up and we began dancing. We spun in circles, pretended to be dizzy and almost fall over, and then we did it again. By this time Ben had moved on to wanting to play his (and eventually my) drums, but this wasn’t for Ben. This was for me, for Steven, and for every other toy I’ve ever had in my life that has given me joy. We danced for awhile more and then I, reluctantly, set Steven back down.

We often take the time to thank the people in our lives that mean a lot to us, but we never thank the little things. I’m not saying that I believe toys come to life when the room is empty. I’m also not saying I believe that inanimate objects have feelings. What I’m saying is that if you suspend your beliefs of what is real and not real for just a few minutes and think that maybe, just maybe, those toys you played with when you were a kid had as much fun playing with you as you did with them, don’t we owe them a little bit of gratitude? Don't we owe it to ourselves to stop being an adult every once in awhile and just resume that childlike wonderment, even if only for a few moments? I certainly think so.

Thank you Steven – for everything.

And thanks for reading.