T is for Toys—A Road Back to Childhood

Toys was an easy pick for my letter T in the A to Z Blogger Challenge. I did consider writing about the tornado that wiped out my husband’s entire family farm when he was a teenager, but those memories are documented in a past post. That tornado—his family’s second—killed 24 people, injured over two hundred, stayed on the ground for 39 minutes, and carved a 14‑mile path of destruction. It was also the reason my husband spent his entire adult life trying to buy back the toys of his youth. And then some.

If you’ve ever seen the TV series Hoarders, you already know that most hoarders have major losses in their lives coupled with untreated depression. Their common thread is loss—loss that drives them to surround themselves with whatever they collect, be it trash or treasures. Another contributing factor is insecurity so deep most of us can’t understand how they can live that way.

Don was not a hoarder like you see on that show. But he could have been—would have been—if he hadn’t had years of treatment for depression. His thing was collecting: road maps, coins and currency, gas and oil memorabilia. And his gateway “drug” was buying back the antique toys similar to what he and his brothers once owned, the ones that flew over the fields and woods the day of the tornado.

By the time we met, I was collecting antiques too. I started with furniture I restored and used, then I moved on to smaller things—like filling in the missing pieces of the dish set my folks used at their cottage. I also had (and still have) marbles, Cracker Jack toys and wooden nickels. By the time I moved out of the house after Don died, we had a library room full of well‑organized “smalls” in showcases and collector boxes. Some might have called it hoarding; most people labeled us collectors because everything was clean, researched, and neatly displayed. Visitors often said coming to our house was like going to a museum. A friend once gave Don a retractable pointer as a joke because he loved giving tours of our “museum.”

After Don died, it took me two years to downsize—two years of selling things on eBay, hauling boxes to an auction house and selling through an antique mall where we’d been vendors for years.

But I will say this: we never met another vendor who didn’t have at least a few hoarder tendencies. Don’s basement and garage before we married were stuffed, but never as bad as the hoarding situations you see on TV. Don had a method to his madness, and I can already hear someone in the cheap seats of Bloggerland saying, “Sure. All hoarders say that.” But not many hoarders can say their widows sold one bread‑box‑sized item for $19,000 and a half dozen more for $4,000 to $7,000. He studied the collectibles he loved and had the disposable income to buy what he knew would go up in value.

Not everything did go up, of course. As kids we both collected stamps, and it was hard to even get face value out of those. I ended up donating a box of newer commemorative sheets to a place that uses them to teach kids about history. The moral of that story: never, ever buy anything sold as a collectible. No one lives long enough for those “investments” to pay off.

All collectors have a backstory—whether it’s the good stuff with actual value or they have houses overtaken by plastic recycling, rotten food and human waste. I’m grateful my obsessed collector was the former (sentiment‑driven) and not the latter (insecurity‑driven). If he hadn’t stood watching old license plates, pedal cars, live chickens, and ten‑gallon milk cans spinning upward, Don probably wouldn’t have spent his adult life trying to buy back his childhood toys and the family pieces handed down through generations. His grandfather’s pocket watch, for example, was lost to the tornado but after Don died he had a dozen I had to sell.

He couldn’t pass an estate sale, garage sale, auction or antique store without stopping. And we had fun doing it. We even managed to find most of the toys he’d gotten out of cereal boxes in the ’40s. And I still have his Captain Midnight decoder ring, signal‑mirror ring and bomb rings. Small trinkets, but they come with a large box of memories. ©

 

 

Photos: At the top of the post is one of the showcases in our library for our smalls. The photo here at the bottom is of one wall in our garage for Don's signs. The center picture is of Don showing his friends his gas & oil smaller items. Another wall had 1920s, fully restored gas pumps with the glass globes---can't find a photo of those. But you get the idea. Don was a hoarder but I was an organizer so it all worked out. 

S is for Stories—the Ones I Didn’t Tell

I came up with four words for the letter S in the A to Z Challenge: secrets, stuff, snow and serendipity.

Serendipity was the first to go. It’s one of my favorite words in the English language, and I’ve had plenty of serendipitous moments in my life, but none of them fit my theme of the humans, habits, hidden joys and heartaches that shaped my world. Still, who doesn’t love a story about the universe lining things up just right? That thought reminds me of the day I got myself in trouble at book club by using the word serendipity in the wrong company.

The book was My Mrs. Brown. As the facilitator went around the room, women offered comments like, “It was a sweet book,” and “It was a feel-good book.” When it was my turn, I said I thought it was mostly boring. Someone laughed and said, “We can always count on Jean to have a different opinion.”

Then the next woman gushed about how the book was full of divine interventions. “It was so inspirational!”

Say what?

I asked her for an example. She said it was a divine intervention that the main character took a job packing up the house of a wealthy woman who had died. Finding a dress in the closet was a divine intervention. Someone giving Mrs. Brown a book about fashion was a divine intervention.

I couldn’t help myself. “I’d call all those things serendipity. How do you define a divine intervention?”

She bristled. “I don’t believe in serendipity. Everything is divine intervention!”

I took that to mean only non-believers use the word serendipity. Since I’m an agnostic and it’s one of my favorite words, I would have let it drop before we wandered into religion—but someone else asked if I thought serendipity was always happy little events. She threw me a life-line.

“Yes,” I said. “I just don’t think God has time to help someone find a dress when there are more important things going on in the world.”

“So you’re saying divine interventions are more like miracles,” she said, clarifying my words.

Bingo. She won the Kewpie doll.

Next I tried snow as my prompt, but that went nowhere fast. Long-time readers know my husband plowed snow for over forty years and I did it for seventeen. It’s well documented in this blog. But newcomers might enjoy hearing about a game we occasionally played in the middle of the night when conditions were just right. We called it Rat Hockey.

Yes, real rats.

They’d venture out onto the mall parking lot and we’d escort them across it with two or three trucks, turning our plows back and forth to make the rat slide across the icy surface. We’d “steal” the rat from each other mid-slide, and you scored if you were the one who ran it into a snowbank. As far as we knew, none of the rats were harmed. We’d see them dig their way out of the snowbank and look around as if to say, “What the hell just happened?” It’s a wonder none of us ever collided. Imagine explaining that to an insurance adjuster.

Then I moved on to stuff, but that got cut too. I’d just watched a couple episodes of Hoarders, and I didn’t want readers thinking I had—or ever had—stuff in that quantity or quality. But lately I’ve been scaring myself with my inability to throw out three glass jars that once held Meijer-brand peaches. They’re such a pretty shape. Surely I can find a use for them. I’m almost afraid to go to Meijer this week for fear one of those peach jars will jump in my cart like a stray kitten no one could leave behind. If I buy peaches every two weeks, you do the math. Hoarding has to start somewhere.

The last word I crossed off was secrets. As much as I up-chuck my life online, one could assume I’ve already dissected every minute of my time on earth. I haven’t. Not by a long shot. One secret in particular I've been keeping since 1969. I finally told my youngest niece a year ago. She said all the right things—“I’m so sorry that happened to you” blab, blab, blab—but it didn’t make me feel better. It wasn’t cathartic. Remembering that made me realize I can’t write about secrets. Not this year.

Having eliminated all my S word prompts I have nothing left in my writer’s tool box! I guess I’ll have to skip forward to my T topic for tomorrow. Please come back. ©

R is for Romance—And the Kindle Under My Pillow

Why did they put all the hard letters near the end of the alphabet, making the A to Z Blogger Challenge harder as we go along? My prompt word for the letter R was an easy choice, but looking ahead to V, W, Y, and Z has me shaking in my proverbial boots. You may have noticed that I overuse the word proverbial. But then I also lean on trite little sayings like “shaking in my boots.” So the root solution is for me to quit being lazy in my writing.

Okay, I’ve filibustered enough. Time to explain why I picked Romance for my word prompt. I have three answers.

One: I was boy crazy in my teens. I mean really, really boy crazy—so much so that if one so much as looked at me, I’d break into giggles that telegraphed the fact that I was jailbait. I’m sure my mother appreciated that.

Two: I was hooked on reading romance novels in my 40s and 50s. I don’t remember how I found my first one, but I do remember being shocked at how fast I could read in my 40s compared to college. My mom always had Regency romances in the house, so maybe that was my gateway “drug.” But that sub-genre reminds me of Hallmark movies where the main characters don’t kiss until the last five minutes. I quickly moved up the sensual ladder where I discovered historical romances. (Don't tell anyone but I even tried writing a historical romance once.) 

Like men who claim they bought Playboy for the articles, I was quick to say I liked historicals for the history. But all kidding side, they often sent me to the library to fact-check because I didn’t always believe what I read. Soon I learned which authors did solid research and which ones didn’t. When I downsized nearly five years ago, I had hundreds of romance “favorites” to dispose of. I kept only three: Morning Glory by LaVyrle Spencer, The Outsider by Penelope Williamson, and The Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux. The next time I downsize, I’ll only keep the latter. Not that I’d need to—I have it on my old Kindle, which I keep under my pillow. 

Until recently, I used to listen to bits of that book to fall asleep. I’d set the timer for a half hour, and when I got up in the night to pee, I’d reset it for ten minutes so I wouldn’t start thinking about the day past or the one ahead. I’ve logged so many hours on that book that Amazon sends me emails that translate to: Hey, lady-in-a-rut, Jude wrote other books. We think you’d like such-and-such.

Three: While I might be old, I still enjoy looking at eye candy in the form of good-looking men and occasionally daydreaming about what it’s like to be young and in love again. I blame it on being artistic. In college I had to take a lot of figure drawing classes with nude models. Now, I might admire a man’s chest or well-chiseled arms, but only because I can imagine drawing his form in pastel chalk. Are you buying that? You should, because I’m not a cougar type who wants to touch what catches my eye.

And please know that the ages of my preferred eye candy have changed over the years. When I was in my teens, any male over twenty scared the pants off me (another overused expression). And here’s where I should probably admit that eye candy has more to do with sexual attraction than romance. Oops. Forget I wrote this paragraph.

That was fun. Now I need to get serious and explain why I have such fond memories of reading romance novels and how I owe the genre for giving me an amazing turnaround in my love of reading. I shared in my post for E is for Education that I’m mildly dyslexic, and although I still won’t read out loud in public—some words still don’t compute in my brain—I’m no longer ashamed to admit my past struggles with the written word. And maybe that’s the real gift romance gave me. I may not chase romance anymore, but I still chase stories to blog about — and that’s enough of a happily‑ever‑after for me. ©