MindSpinner

I am not one of those women who collect dolls, or tea sets, or whatever else it is that people collect. I don’t collect anything. I am not a fan of knick knacks. I see them as obstacles impeding speed dusting, as visual clutter. They do not make me say, “Aaaah, I’m home” when I walk into a room. Instead, I need simplicity to lower my blood pressure and dissipate stress - the kind of simplicity that you see in some magazines but almost never in real houses because real people have to have a place to put stuff that doesn’t necessarily look good in a photo shoot. Or they have kids besides.

It is therefore difficult to explain the toys. Every once in a while I buy a toy, the sort I would have picked up ten years ago in hopes of delighting my children. When I come home with one, these same children (or perhaps utterly different ones switched out when I wasn’t paying attention) now look at me as if I’m out of my mind.

There is the small bevy of circus push puppets (not a collection, mind you, a bevy) that I bought last year because they were bodaciously whimsical and colorful. They made me happy and reminded me of my father, who first showed me how a push puppet worked when I was a little girl. I haven’t the faintest idea where to put these.

When I push their buttons (which isn’t often - that’s good, right?), they wobble and sway, their joints all loose. If I push harder, they flop over completely. But just as soon as I release the pressure that loosened their strings, they pop back up again erect and alert. I think I could pull that off, too, that popping back into form, as a matter of fact, anytime life gets its big old thumb off my buttons long enough ;->.

My latest toy lapse, if that’s the term for it, came today at Kroger. Some sort of lapse was inevitable. If it hadn’t been a toy, it probably would have been a gratuitous magazine, something with pictures of people recreating outdoors amid fall scenes - bicycling or canoing or hiking or just having a picnic. I blame this on FEMA, mostly. We had emergency management training yesterday at school, courtesy of that governmental agency. That experience will be a post unto itself after grades are posted. Couple FEMA training with a four-hour grant meeting today, a homecoming parade, and grades being due, and you have a woman bent on decompression by the time she makes it to Kroger to buy the makings of a cookout because, by golly, if she cooks tonight, it will be out.

The Beanie Babies were over in section where stuff that doesn’t belong in a grocery store is sold. There were artificial tabletop Christmas trees and wire Santas sure to ruin Christmas even earlier than usual this year, videos for $9.98, and a small box of generic-looking Beanie Babies.

My kids and I loved Beanie Babies. We loved them before everybody else loved them and after everybody else forgot about them. We still have a bin full of them sealed up in the garage. Amid the ubiquitous horses and bears at Kroger, there was a mottled purple dragon with wings of cadmium yellow and splotches of ochre and brown.

I have a weakness for dragons, one which can be traced back in all directions to all sorts of sources - Beowulf (most delightful in Anglo-Saxon), Jack Prelutsky’s children’s poems in The Dragons Are Singing Tonight, Busch Gardens’ Land of the Dragons, a place my children loved when they were very small, and God knows what else. This fellow at Kroger was a little gargoylish, roundish dragon with a piercing avuncular gaze. It’s hard to look like an analyst and a little purple dragon at the same time, but if you can do it, you get to come home with me.

Perched on my dresser, the dragon seems serious and perhaps a little sad, and one ear is longer than the other, but I’ve righted its drooping wings so that it looks as if it could fly. It has already given the cat a fright.