Children usually receive toys on Christmas, birthdays, or special holidays. Unfortunately, around our house, the gift-giving has gotten a bit out of control. So much so, we now have an entire room just for toys.
No worries, the walls of T-Rex stuffies keep guard both day and night. But what happens to all those older toys when new ones arrive? Some are still there, being guarded by those T-Rexes, but others have been broken and discarded long ago.
“Papa, where do broken toys go?” asked our granddaughter, Little One, last week. Questions like that keep Big Papa here on his creative storytelling toes. Sit back, Dear Reader. The curtain is about to go up on the four acts of toys. And at the Grand Reveal, discover where all the broken ones go. If you like, feel free to use my answer with your little ones.
“The Pledge.” The curtain on this first act rises as soon as children unwrap their new toy. Doesn’t matter if it’s new or used; it’s new to them. Immediately they start to play, and our world fades away as they travel to that imaginative destination only a child can go.
Sometime during their play, the voice of a parent enters their realm and kindly warns, “Be careful. You don’t want to break it.” The child pledges not to break the toy and continues to play. Taking heart in the pledge given by their offspring, parents remember when they too were young, and know it’s only a matter of time before the toy becomes broken.
“The Turn.” It may take a day, a week, or even a month but the pledge soon starts to fade as playing with the now not-so-new toy gets boring. That’s when the second act curtain of the Turn rises, revealing scenes so creative they could only be imagined by a child.
During this act an ordinary toy is turned into something extraordinary. The durability will be tested as children make it do things it was never built to do. Inside our house, that means a T-Rex riding trucks or flying planes, a Slinky animal scaling a two-story Barbie dollhouse, or the Paw Patrol command tower being stormed by a swarm of angry bees from a board game.
Outside our house, the dump beds of our huge metal Tonka trucks usually carry sand or dirt, but during the Turn our dump trucks’ beds are empty of both. They’re filled with our granddaughters as they delight in riding down the grassy knoll in our backyard.
Not every Turn turns into complete destruction of a pledged toy. Sometimes dump trucks just lose a wheel. A Barbie doll could become armless, legless, or even headless. Even the indestructible walking T-Rex can mysteriously lose its tail. When a pledged toy becomes broken but not completely destroyed, the imagination of a child goes into overdrive. Pulling up the curtain on the third act – The Prestige.
Hardest of all acts for a child to perform is “The Prestige.” Extremely entertaining to watch, children take a broken toy, modify it, and continue to play with it. For example the mighty T-Rex’s broken tail gets replaced with a feather duster, Barbie’s missing head is replaced by a head from any other bodiless doll, and cars too broken to roll become stars in the “car crash” game.
Parents can add to the Prestige by donating their broken cell phones so children can call for police, fire department and ambulances. Still, given enough time, toys acting in the Prestige will become broken beyond repair. Which brings us back to the question asked by Little One, “Papa, where do broken toys go?”
The final act in a toy’s life is “The Grand Reveal.” That’s the story told by parents to their children explaining where all their broken toys have gone to get fixed. At our house with a 4- and 5-year-old, this time I don’t have to be creative in my storytelling because the story was molded a long time ago … in clay.
Everyone knows that broken toys children no longer want travel to the Island of Misfit Toys.
[Rick Ryckeley has been writing stories since 2001. To read more of Rick’s stories, visit his blog: storiesbyrick.wordpress.com.]
