Toys Make the Man
I had always needed a train set. My first glimpse of a complete Lionel train layout was at Hudson's Department Store in their storied toy department. It became an unanswered prayer. My parents were of such poor origins that they regarded toys as superfluous, frivolous and worthless. I learned not to hit my head against that blank wall.But the yearning for a train set, a small layout with just a few cars, a tunnel, an overhead bridge, a small station and a train signal pole persisted. Simple. But the desire, the longing remained unavailing. I could forgo other toys and, acceding to my parents' core belief, I did.So I searched for friends who had a train setup and who I might visit under any available pretense so that I could play with the trains. Or at least watch the friend play. That little heroic effort eventually resurfaced in my children's book, Panzil.On the rare occasion when I might score a train set visit the friend's parent, usually a father, would be at the controls. Part of the joy of train set playing was the fantasies that ran with it. Usually, I would imagine being the engineer, stoking the motor, applying the brakes, tooting the whistle. But when a grownup took the controls my fantasies were muted and silenced into dull deference. The fun died..
"I started to notice and gradually felt a need for things I could comfortably describe as adult toys"
.The onset of puberty, coincidental with a sobering, even distressing experience, ended my long period of train set craving. Duncan, sixth-grade companion, hearing of my love of train sets, invited me to his house after school. On the way he began to retail his own vivid, highly detailed, seemingly well-rehearsed fantasy. Which involved grabbing girls while on horseback, taking them captive to a forest, tying them naked to a tree...and here my mind blanked. Nothing overtly sexual followed but the image was too crude, too foreign, too forbidden-seeming that I somehow let it just go. I found a way not to pay attention. Finally, we arrived at his house and while he let me play with his nicely elaborate train layout, he continued to voice his lugubrious fantasy. A year later a classmate informed me that Duncan had been sent away to a mental hospital.My passion for toy trains began to morph. I started to notice and gradually felt a need for things I could comfortably describe as adult toys: gadgets, working tools, and items that pass as seriously utilitarian. But born under those disguises were secret other uses. Playthings. Toys. Things to adore, collect, admire, love merely for the acquisitional joy they afford.I graduated to things mechanical, sometimes motorized, lately electronic and digital. Women are so often categorized as shoppers; they go unabashedly into stores to look around, to try on, to buy if an article suits them. Men are secret shoppers. We love to peruse catalogs featuring not clothes but things. We go to hardware stores, vast home improvement stores in search of a certain size nail head but, really, we go to shop the aisles and shelves, to ogle mere objects, things, doodads. Men subscribe to niche magazines about cameras or computers or cars to perv the photos, the long lists of specifications, the minutia about fabrication, materials, modes of operation. The hand manipulative appeal of these items become as irresistible, as gorgeously aesthetic to men as a Trifari diamond brooch fitted with pavé rubies and emeralds would be to women.I am mining a gender gap ruthlessly and without merit, I know. Poetic license, long expired.The shopping eye, for both men and women, I believe derives from our ancient hunting and gathering ancestors. They foraged for edibles to service our hunger and scrutinized dark forests and dangerous bushland for animals to hunt, kill and eat. These were relentless tasks. They learned to scan, to search, to shop their terrain in order to sustain their existence, and for protection from roaming predators as well.The march of civilization has pushed us far beyond the search within untilled, unpenned land for the fundamental, life-preserving, truly needed.Now the search, the felt need, continues. As conditions allow, that search has become aimed at the toys we ourselves fashion, the things that tantalize us with an analogous deep hunger. We need our toys. We always will.