Tag Archives: toys

Stories

Maspeth Avenue, 6:05pm

A mom and grandmother push an angry infant in a stroller. A two-year-old girl with dirty blonde curls flails at her restraints. She arches her back trying to snap herself loose and expels primal howls of want.  If you had no visual and only heard her screams you would think the girl was either being murdered or was committing a murder. She doesn’t care that she looks and sounds crazy. Kids have to learn how to be sane.

I am a half a block away from the trio when the screams first catch my attention. I am walking the opposite direction. We will soon overtake each other. Once I spot them I feel my steps quicken. The little girl is a magnet of anger and id.

I have been where they are many times. Every parent thinks s/he can win a battle of wills with a two-year-old and every parent is proven wrong. You want to demonstrate you will not give a child what she wants just because she wants it. You want to instill some idea of patience and propriety. And then one day you’re out in public with your kid and she loses her mind over something trivial and suddenly your larger point is subsumed by the need for a few precious moments of peace.

The grandmother silently acquiesces to the little girl’s shrieking pleas. She reaches into a bag slung over the back of the stroller to produce the prize that will restore order to her universe.  What the girl wants is a tiny toy gun. Assembled in garish plastic of purple and yellow and green. Shaped like a 1950s idea of a Martian weapon. It is a gun all the same.

The moment the little girl has the gun in her hands she points it at the only living thing in her line of sight. That thing is me. I am five or six feet away when she aims the gun at me and looks down the barrel and jabs it in my general direction. She doesn’t say bang bang but the motion has the same effect. After each “shot” she jerks the gun back and sets it up again as if reacting to recoil.

She adjusts her aim as I get closer and continues to “fire” at me even as I draw parallel to her stroller. The mom and grandmother are relieved the scene she caused is over and say nothing.

I pass them by and continue on my way. The little girl continues on hers being chauffeured toward new targets.

NYC, Parental Guidance

Why You Should Never Buy Pricey Toys for Your Children

There’s one block of Flushing Avenue, right around Bedford, that’s completely torn up. And it’s been completely torn up since I started taking the bus to work.

The street is literally ripped open, with a huge, gaping hole cordoned off by an rickety wooden fence. You can see down inside, where months of rainwater have accumulated, leaving a lime green, radioactive scummy pond. Enormous segments of concrete sewer pipe lay on the sidewalk. They once had screens on their open ends that looked kinda like cheesecloth, but those were weathered away long ago, and their remnants flap in the breeze.

None of this crap has moved in at least 6 months. I don’t know who’s to blame: the city, or whatever slumlord started repairs and never finished them. But because of it, my bus gets trapped on this block every morning, thus making my commute far longer than it need be.

So this morning, while I’m stuck at this point, I see some Hasidic kids playing on the sidewalk. They’re taking cardboard box from the kosher grocery store across the street, and they’re trying to bale a puddle of dirty rainwater with it. They range in age from 4 to 8, and they look like they’re having the time of their lives.

I see this is in my own home. My daughter will play with a 10 cent hair scrunchie, or a paper towel roll, and have as much fun as she does playing with expensive Christmas presents. If not more.

So my parental advice is, exploit this childhood window while you can. Forget the Baby Einstein nonsense and get the kid an empty pallet of tissue boxes from behind the local Duane Reade. The kid won’t care, and you won’t have to cajole them to play with that hand-crafted wooden xylophone you wasted 30 dollars on.