Discarded…

I was throwing out some crap from my cramped and messy living quarters. A non-trivial amount of the trash was junk mail comprised of catalogs and various mailings announcing different wares on sale for Christmas. One such advertisement was for a toy store that rumors have it will file for bankruptcy soon. Before dumping the ad in the recycling pile, I leafed through the pages.

I viewed many new toys of which I had no connection. When I was a child, most of my toys were connected to some cartoon being shown on television. I had GI Joe and Star Wars action figures. I remember the Christmas of 1984 the most.

That year, I wanted the GI Joe F-14 Tomcat. It was an awesome toy. The aircraft was over two feet long. It came with six detachable missiles. The pilot seat came with a parachute. The landing gear retracted and the variable geometry wings swept backwards with lever action. This was the greatest thing on Earth as far as I was concerned. I was so consumed with the desire for this toy plane that I broke a rule in our family. My parents had divorced two years before that Christmas.

The rule was for my siblings and I to each ask for a big gift from my Mom and a different big gift from my Dad. In theory, each of us could get two “cool” gifts from our parents (inevitably clothing was the remainder of our gifts.) That year, I doubled down and asked for the plane from both.

I was so delighted when I opened my presents from my mother on Christmas morning. I was absolutely in heaven; she had to remind me to open the other gifts. I played outside all afternoon completely disregarding the nearly freezing temperature. In fact, the pilot action figure suffered what would ordinarily be a career ending injury.

My pilot, callsign Viper, noted two bogeys approaching at a high rate of speed. Viper painted the targets with his air-to-air combat missile radar. This scared off one his would be assailants but his wingman would not be so easily intimidated. The two opposing aircraft closed in on each other at over Mach 4. Viper’s gut tightened as he realized it would be comabat after all.

What was first just a blip on the screen, then transformed into a mere dot on the horizon, suddenly became a full fledged Soviet MiG zooming by like a charging bull. Viper’s blood ran to ice as he realized with whom he was about to dogfight. For this was no mere MiG; this was the widowmaker.

The ensuing dogfight was of epic proportions. Missiles exchanged to no avail. In one harrowing moment, the widowmaker got on Viper’s tail and peppered the craft with 20mm canon shot. Yet somehow, Viper remained aloft. After employing what surely must have been a 20G maneuver, Viper skillfully dispatched his crafty opponent with an air-to-air interceptor missile.

Only after having vanquished his highly skilled nemesis, did Viper realize the true dangerous state of his aircraft. Parts started to suddenly fly off in every direction. Alarms buzzed in an ever increasing cacophony of pending mechanical failure. Flames eating up the gyros, hydraulic pressure failing, and thousands of pounds of jet fuel ready to shuffle loose Viper’s mortal coil, the situation became hopeless. Viper calls out to the carrier his final position. The men in the blue lighted Command Center back on the carrier, who had been celebrating their salvation only moments earlier buzzed into action alerting the rescue helicopter crew to get airborne to go recover their hero. Secure in the knowledge that his rescue is on the way, Viper reaches up and pulls on the ejection seat handles.

At this point, I opened the plastic canopy, grabbed the pilot action figure and his ejection seat, then threw them up into the air as high as I could. What should have happened is the parachute should have opened and Viper would have gracefully floated back to the ground. What actually happened was further proof that what goes up must come down. I had somehow incorrectly tied the parachute and it never opened. To my horror, Viper met the sidewalk at full velocity. The ejection seat and most of Viper rebounded in one direction. Viper’s left leg, however, rebounded in a separate and wholly different direction.

At this moment, two different kinds of horror pulsed through my twelve-year-old veins. I was distraught that I had already broken my most favorite toy ever! This distress was only marginally larger than the fact that I was going to have to inform my mother that I had already broken her big gift to me. Being the good, conscientious child I was, I opted for the path of least resistance. I decided to collect up Viper and his amputated leg, hide the evidence, and tell no one.

My father called later that afternoon to tell us to be ready to load up into his car the next morning so he could take us down to El Paso (Texas) to spend the remainder of the holidays with him. The next morning, he seemed less than amused when I brought down my new pride and joy (amputee Viper hidden away).

I had never considered what I would do if both parents had actually come through for me and both of them bought me the plane. (My parents had a knack for not coming through for me.) More importantly, I never considered how I might piss off my mother, my father, and my step-mother by asking for the same, rather expensive gift. In all reality, I considered two F-14s to be better than one. The grown ups involved did not agree.

In the end, I did not care what the grown-ups thought. I had my planes. I even didn’t mind the amputated leg on Viper #1; it added to story. Viper #1 was Viper #2’s (I wasn’t very original with names back then) twin brother. Viper #1 had volunteered to go to ‘Nam to keep his brother safe from the war. Viper #1 lost the leg over Da Nang. This in turn caused some family turmoil as Viper #2 always thought he had to prove himself to everyone. Inwardly he never felt worthy of such a sacrifice…but I digress….

So why, you ask, do I have a picture of a trash receptacle with the title “discarded…” as the image for this post?

A few years later, my family moved from the house in which we were living to a much smaller apartment. I had to get rid of many things. I was told I was too old for the toys I owned. I remember the day we threw out the things which we had outgrown. The trash dumpster was full of crap. I still see my two F-14s and my Millenium Falcon sitting atop that pile of trash.

It is silly that I still feel intense remorse when I think about those toys in the dumpster from twenty years ago. (No it isn’t remorse that we should have given those toys to a shelter or something similary. I wish I could claim to be that charitable.) Instead I am thinking about all the toys in the ad which I am about to recycle. I wonder about the dreamed about gift which some child received a few days ago and the moment when that most desperately wanted gift will be discarded.
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