Battered, Beloved, Old Toys

My mother has a collection of toys some of which are more than fifty years old, not collector edition type toys, just old junky stuff like cheap plastic fire trucks, broken race cars, a metal tractor, a few green plastic army men, and a few leftover circus animals from a forty-year-old Fisher-Price Circus. The prize item is an articulated Tonto who is missing his right hand. He is forty-two-years old, and thankfully not anatomically correct since his pants are long-gone. Eight of the ordinal dozen ever-popular monkeys from a Barrel of Monkeys still survive along with partial can of battered pick up sticks. Except for the Barrel of Monkeys that belonged to my younger sisters, most were scavenged from my kid’s toys that were being tossed. Every grandchild and great-grandchild who has visited in the last forty-four years goes straight for this rag-tag collection and scatters them over Mother’s living room floor, no matter that most are in some stage of dilapidation. My nephew, age eleven, is pictured here playing earlier this week. Clearly, neither Mother, nor any of her descendants suffers from the sin of false pride.