A love (or obsession?) rekindled
Does any of this sound familiar? I’m a 40-something Dad, meaning I grew up in the 70s and early 80s. Some of my fondest memories of childhood involve Hot Wheels cars, whether it was racing them, crashing them, pushing them across the carpet or just thinking about them as I rode in the back seat of an AMC car or tried to go to sleep.
Now I’ve got kids of my own who are just emerging from the eat, sleep, change the diaper, repeat phase of life. I’ve put everything on hold for them and happily. Music career? Done. Novel I always wanted to write? On hold... indefinitely. Plans to become a nationally ranked triathlete? Okay, I never had those plans. But you get the idea.
A few years ago, for my birthday, my four-year-old-at-the-time daughter took a tube of cardboard from a roll of used wrapping paper, and made a ‘track’ for me for my birthday. It was set up when I came home, and I can honestly say it was one of the best birthdays of my life. It didn’t become ‘a thing’ for us because her little brother was on the verge of crawling, and, well, Hot Wheels = choking hazard. It was a one-and-done spectacular event.
But a few months ago, there was another magical moment. My two-year-old son got a hand-me-down wooden train set. He loved it and we spent hours pushing the trains around and setting up the track. Without any (conscious) prodding from me, he started taking the bridges, and arranging them so that it made a hill that he raced the trains down. I watched with pride as he tried different things to get the train to roll as far as possible. I bit my lip and wondered if the time was right...
This was just before Halloween, so on Nov. 1, I took the kids with all their candy to Target. I’d told them that they could trade their candy in for Hot Wheels cars. Somehow, my daughter thought this was an official promotion by Target, so after picking out nine cars (three for each of them and three for Dad) and a pack of track that met my experienced but rusty approval, we headed to the checkout. I scrawled “PLEASE, JUST TAKE THE CANDY” on a scrap of paper in my pocket, and had a stilted exchange with the 16-year-old working the register as I handed it to her and said while winking madly “We’d like to exchange this CANDY for these HOT WHEELS, which we are ready to PAY for.” The couple in front of me laughed hysterically while the young clerk figured out how to handle this reverse stick-up, and we walked out of there prepared to transform my parenthood experience for ever.
I won’t recount, today, the track that our family has raced down since that purchase, but plan to share the highlights through this blog. I hope that for at least a few folks out there, this will be an enjoyable trip to follow, and perhaps may even spark some family fun of your own along the way. I’ve discovered a world that I could barely imagine as a child, and I can’t wait to illuminate it for those who didn’t know they were looking for it.
