Showing posts with label Toys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Toys. Show all posts

Saturday, February 15, 2020

Christmas, Part 2


One year I was enthralled with a racetrack toy I’d seen on TV. I’d watched as the cars rounded corners at breakneck speed, and knew I had to have one; I don’t know why, I’d never owned a tracked set of any sort, trains or otherwise. I must have harassed my parents about it, because they bought it for me. I have no clue how expensive it was. It couldn’t have been cheap. Christmas morning came, I dug into my gifts, and there it was, that same racetrack set I’d seen on TV. I couldn’t wait to play with it. My father helped me set it up in the rec room. I recall thinking it was much smaller than I thought it would be. There was a controller for each car, with only a speed lever on each. Thumb off, stop, thumb pressed full on, full blast. Simple. We made a trial run, and both tracks, both cars worked. Then I pushed my car to its speed limit and it flew off the track as it rounded its first corner. I reset it and it flew off again. My father’s car went happily round and round, if at a much slower pace. Dad told me to control my speed, but I wanted the cars to fly around the track like they did on the commercial. I thought his track might be better, so we switched. His new car, my old car, went happily round and round, so did mine, until I pushed my lever to the end, and my car hit his, taking both off the track. I was an impatient child, I threw a fit, and stormed away from the set, never to play with it again. I’m thinking I was a bit of a brat. But I did learn an important lesson that day: sometimes commercials do not present things as they truly are.

Piranesi

  “The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.” ― Susanna Clarke, Pirane...