collections

When I was younger I used to collect...

1) Keychains
I'm not sure if I ever thought they would have practical use, since I don't think I possessed any keys at the time. Nonetheless they were my go-to souvenir for family vacations big and small, as well as photos taken on roller coasters during Music in the Parks band trips.

2) Postage stamps
In this case, the collection was started for me by a great-aunt. And so for awhile I carefully cut out any interesting stamps from the corners of envelopes, watching the stamp price rise over a few years. (What are they up to now? I haven't mailed anything in quite awhile.) Anyhow, I carefully categorized the stamps and placed them into a large album...which must be around somewhere now...

3) Toothbrushes
I do not recall what inspired me to save each toothbrush when I was done with it instead of throwing it out. Perhaps I had gotten a bit attached after all those months - and some of them had cool designs (leopard print, anyone?). Either way, they accumulated in a drawer until, I believe, I was packing to move out of home after college. Yes, I did throw them out, but not without getting a good laugh and a photo of them first.

When I was little

I thought crutches were cool.  I sort of hoped I would break an ankle so I could walk around using them.  I even built a pair out of Pipeworks and tried them out in the front yard.

My brothers and I collected Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars.  Each one received a name--some as creative as "Box Truck" and "O. Race" (short for "Orange Race").  Some of them were grouped into "gangs", which were simply groups with a leader and a precise order in which they drove around together in a single-file line formation.  I drew by hand a large "mat" which included a whole neighborhood with homes, i.e. garages, for each vehicle, as well as destinations like stores with parking lots to which they could travel in groups.  Sometimes in the nicer weather we'd draw maps outside on the driveway with chalk and bring all the cars out there.

My parents had a friend from whom we bought (or maybe just received second-hand) an old foosball table.  Rather than a sturdy frame like today's tables, this one had aluminum(?) legs and the playing area board sagged towards one side.  The provided ball was too large to fit through into the goals, so we substituted bouncy balls.  My brother and I had crazy, crazy matches.  The table would be skidding all over the floor.  Most of the players were no longer fixed properly in place on the rods, and many would end up upside down or shoved into their neighbor amidst gameplay.  (We paused after each goal was scored to realign them.)  Oh, and we named the players...after the Matchbox cars.

A favorite warm-weather activity was to find a bucket and a paintbrush from the basement, fill the bucket with water, and "paint" the siding of the house.

My parents own a fairly small CD collection.  Perhaps the two albums to which I most loved to listen and dance (around the living room) were Michael Jackson's Thriller and Miami Sound Machine's Primitive Love.

I loved dogs.  I'd search the newspaper classified listings for dogs that were being given away for free.  In fifth grade I did a project that used surveys, statistics compiled from my own readings of dog breed books, and database queries (help from Dad there) to output which dog matched you best.  I had my favorite breeds: Labradors, golden retrievers, Dalmatians, beagles.  My parents never did take on the responsibility of a dog in our family, but I did walk my neighbors' dog for awhile and--though she was about as lazy a dog as I've ever come across--I loved her too.

I read books all the time.  I liked series... Sweet Valley Twins, Animorphs, The Chronicles of Narnia, the Amber Brown books.  And there were plenty of other books, in series and not, which I'm sure I forget at the moment.

There's a giant maple tree in my front yard.  It's beautiful.  I used to climb it and sit in it often.  I also found long sticks and collected them by storing them wedged between a split in the branches.

I was totally addicted to computer games.  Various titles enjoyed overlapping phases of different lengths in the limelight of interest.  Some of my favorites (most played) were: Chex Quest, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Hot Wheels Stunt Track Driver, and KidPix.  Others included Tonka Construction, Midnight Rescue, Crayola Art Studio, and a variety of Sim games from City to Copter to Farm.  These were of the Windows 95/98 era.  On Windows 3.1 I played lots of Tetris and a text-only game, all based on wordplay, known as Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It.  Before the Internet began to swallow all of my computer time, these games were what I would do with it.

In eighth grade I watched Pokémon on TV after school.  I've never watched TV much, but this is one show I was pretty faithful about following.  I also played the Pokémon board game with my brothers; we'd stretch a single game out across days of playing time so we could build up our arsenals of Pokémon.

I never ever drank coffee.  Somehow I thought even the decaf my parents drink would get you addicted, and always warned my brothers of this.

In the park down the road from my house, my town puts on a fireworks display every July 4th.  For many of those years I believed they shot off fireworks by pounding a packet of powder with a huge hammer.  Hence the "boom" sound was created--logical enough, right?

I built awesome things with Legos and K'Nex.  Some of them didn't come from the instruction books!

My family belonged to a couple of pool clubs over some years.  The one where we spent most summers was the Holmdel Swim and Tennis Center.  There was the "big pool" and the "medium pool", a baby pool, and a diving tank.  I was always very slow getting into the cold water, a problem I've carried into my beach days now, of course.  But I loved swimming, playing with my brothers, and making those perfect pencil dives to touch the bottom of the 13-foot-deep diving tank.

I sold Girl Scout cookies to my neighbors.  Since I showed up every year they all knew the deal already.  My mom always accompanied me on the walks.  For delivery we'd pile the boxes into the red wagon and pull it around with us.

An odd combination of toy sets my brothers and I used to make was "farm and construction".  We had a barn house with various appropriate animals and a farmer and family, and a set of construction vehicles and guys in hard hats.  I would make up a storyline as we went and these two sets would interact.

Another strange amusement we came up with was that which we code-named "Suman Huitcase".  This was simply a swapping of first letters to refer to "Human Suitcase".  It involved putting one of us in the largest family suitcase, zipping it up, and moving the encased person to someplace else in the basement, whereupon they were to guess their new location.  Yes, this was a slightly nervewracking experience, but I guess we trusted each other enough.

We used to eat these couple of cereals I really loved--Cracklin' Oat Bran and Just Right--until Mom stopped buying them because she deemed them not healthy enough.

Foosball is for lovers [1]

Foosball seems a little obscure to me. Or at least, it's a thing of (un)finished basements that host mix-of-family-and-friends birthday gatherings. But I have a couple of personal connections with the game.

Maybe love is obscure these days. I'm not having an easy time of finding it. It's all over books and movies, but as much fun as it is to think so, those aren't real life.

One goes back to...well, I'm not sure if it would be middle or elementary school. My brother and I were the ages when we would play with toys together - Matchbox cars, "farm and construction", Legos/K'Nex, and maybe the horse barn sometimes... Yeah, I was kind of a boy. Oh well.

Playing games, telling stories, making things up. Things you might do when you're talking, smiling, laughing with someone - time to forget the world for the sake of two.

We acquired the foosball table from a family friend - she used to babysit for us, actually. I looked through pages and pages of Google image search results, but could not find any that looked remotely like that secondhand table. It was completely unsturdy on four kind-of-thin metal-tube legs, and the "table" part was a thin board that sagged towards one end. (The sagging probably made it the games a bit unfair, but I don't recall being bothered by that.) The goals were white plastic little crate-like things that stuck out from the ends with a red slider for the score, and oddly enough, the provided plastic ball (a la ping pong ball, but with yellow and red soccer-ball patterning) did not fit through the holes into the goals. We often substituted a "bouncy ball" (whatever happened to those things? 90s fad or something?). Dude I totally remember these two-colored ones! The color pairs were usually kind of ugly...

The beginning. He wasn't there. Funny that would be the case. I got really into it, though I wasn't very good. And then I had to go.

The plastic players were actually little figures - there was the red team and the yellow team, and I was usually yellow, my brother red. Some of the players were cracked across the stomach where the rod went through, and some slid along the rod so you could yank the rod way out from the side of the table. p.s.: The [one] goalie was not able to spin a 360-degree rotation - he hit the end of the table and got stuck. We didn't bother to use him much. :)

Before I left (and before he'd gone for a bit), we were together often. Days, walks, sun. Laughter, and sometimes, a moment.

My brother and I played the craziest games with that foosball table. In a one-on-one game you gotta manage 4 rods of players by yourself, so there's a lot of switching around hands and the ball movement was rather all over the place. (Only now do I see people playing with strategy in two-on-two games.) Since there wasn't much to the table, we'd be jerking it all around. If the ball got stuck in the caved-in corner, we merely gave the table a jump. We spun players like crazy except the goalies who got stuck. Before dropping the ball in after someone scored, we'd take a minute to realign the players who'd gotten inadvertently rotated on their rods during playtime. Oh and we assigned names to the players, but not people's names. We actually named them after names we had given our Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars. My yellow defenders were London (a black London taxi) and Tel. 4 (a yellow cherry picker labeled as belonging to Telephone Company No. 4, I imagine). I think the offense were a few of the race car "gang".

Things really used to drive me crazy, like my shyness, and watching him. Going up to the roof deck, and oh, those touches, because maybe they were nothing, but I liked to think they meant everything. I wondered all the time. I feared we were stuck and the reason was, well, out of our hands. How many times did I imagine?

I think we trashed or gave away that table years ago. We have a new, nice one now. I have hardly touched it for all the years since the games with the old table. All of life was going on for all the years that I didn't really play.

He didn't keep in touch much. I tried more than he did. I figured it was the way he is and mostly let it be that way. All of life was going on, anyway.