Remembrance of toys past

Garrison Keillor is our homegrown, heartland Proust. He appeals to Boomers of a certain age as he meanders down the paths of warm memory to a time that in hazy recall seems kinder and gentler, though in reality the Americans of the forties and fifties had a stiff courage we seldom recognize today.

Keillor has a meditation in Salon on Christmas dinner conversations then and now, and on the small presents that seemed so large and wondrous when we were children:

For Christmas one year I was given a toy garage, the Acme Car Garage, with an island of gas pumps and a rooftop parking ramp with a hand-cranked elevator to take the cars up and down. There was a hoist, too, for grease jobs, but no grease. I also got a printing press with movable rubber type, and that was so much more fulfilling. You could print official notices (This Room Off-Limits Until Further Notice) and letterheads (G.E. Keillor, Esq.) and even a short story of 50 words or so ("The Mysterious Interloper"). And so the twig was bent, and I abandoned auto mechanics for the pleasure of tinkering with sentences. It all happened one Christmas.

The toys of our youth have an evocative power that puts Proust's madeleine into the stale cookie category.

I suspect that one of the prime functions of eBay for some people--i.e., myself--is to track down and re-acquire some of that magic. Some of my first searches on eBay were for the tokens of my personal lost childhood Eden.

My first hunt was for a lithographed tin, Hercules ferris wheel manufactured by Chein, the first toy I remember vividly. Perhaps that was because I cut my little four-year-old ankle badly on one edge and bled profusely, but I also recalled every little detail of color, pattern and sound. You could wind it up and it would ring a small bell as it turned, and the six gondolas would swing and sway as they carried the pretend passengers. It was glorious, and I found it and paid exorbitantly to recapture that feeling. Alas, it is beautiful and resides on display in my house, but the primal magic is gone. One can recapture the object, but not the feeling.

The next search was for a Tiny Tears doll. Tiny Tears had a long life as an American Character doll that was manufactured in several sizes and styles over the years. I was given mine one Hanukkah when I was six, and it was simply the best surprise ever, either before or since. I had been chafing at the lack of decorated trees and Santa surprises that my Christian friends enjoyed, and my parents contrived to make me hunt for my gift, as if it had been dropped magically by some secret Hanukkah Angel into my arms.

Here was magic beyond imagining. I had been wishing and hoping for months for this wondrous baby doll that could cry and pee when you fed her water from her own special bottle. I loved her without bound, and she nurtured every tender, maternal instinct in me as I nurtured her.

I still had my Tiny Tears, but her rubber body had rotted irreparably over the years. Mildew had attacked her delicate features, her eyes were stuck at half-mast and cracks threatened her limbs.

After a long search, I found her twin. She had to have the soft, curly caracul hair and the size and weight that I recalled as if it were yesterday. But once again, she is a ghost that limns memory but cannot replicate it.

What memories of toys past will our children hold dear? I suspect that after they rip into the Christmas and Hannukah presents, the things that will stay with them for years won't be the X-Boxes or the battery-powered junk that costs too much and does so little. My own daughter, now a young lady, remembers most her funny-faced Cabbage Patch baby, a little baldie weighted with plastic pellets and named Willow. She took Willow and the tiny, stuffed Kitty-Kitty-Kitten that purred when you rocked it, to bed every night. They cost practically nothing, and meant the world.