Plastics

I had two false starts today--the kind where I was like a page in and then thought to myself "this is boring and shitty and not worth revising into something mediocre." I'm much more okay with this draft and, while I'm not going to post every draft of I produce on here, this is a victory over the sub-par free-writes from earlier today. I should add that I plan to keep sentimentality to a minimum.

2/10 Flash Memoir ("Maybe Boo Radley Had the Right Idea")

Aunt Jan sent me a Power Rangers action figure for Christmas when I was twelve because dad had told her I liked “action figures.” He didn’t specify what kind (Star Wars) so, Aunt Jan, all the way out in Ohio, picked one she thought I would like. It maybe wasn’t my first choice of toy but I had a very inclusive community of Star Wars action figures in 1998 so the Red Ranger found a place in my rogue’s gallery of aliens and bounty hunters.

I have a set of oil pastels Aunt Dot sent me from Kentucky when I was nine. I drew her a picture once when I was maybe five and she said it looked “just perfect” framed next to her Calder print. It wasn’t one of those big, extensive pastel sets (it just had the eight colors main colors of the color wheel) but it came with this little booklet about blending the colors to make those eight into eighty-eight.

For every Christmas until I was fourteen, Uncle David sent me a book he thought I would like. My childhood bookshelf is full of Milne, Christie, Doyle, and Stevenson--books I regret not reading as soon as the wrapping paper was off but, for a lot of those years, I was working on building and playing with that inclusive community of Star Wars action figures; I’ve always favored the instant gratification of a plastic spaceship.

Christmas of 2009 was the first year I received more gift cards than than anything else. The Christmas colored plastics were accompanied with notes reflecting the passage of time and my maturity and how I was old enough to want to just pick out something I really wanted. For old time’s sake, I used one of them to buy an action figure. The lonely little plastic robot sat on my desk looking bored; all of my other toys had long been put into storage--along with my children’s books and art supplies.

I spent most of the rest of the afternoon looking at facebook and reading blogs.