Remembrance of Wifflebats Past
I wandered the forgotten, half-stocked shelves of the back corner of the low-end department store like a ghost, weaving through a graveyard of display model car seats and pressboard cribs. On the walls hung plastic wrapped in plastic, pink and light blue devices, the last bastion of comic sans font. I waded through reams of onesies with messages like “First Round Draft Pick” and “Daddy’s Little Angel”, with disdain my machete. We were still in book, I thought to myself. The nursery was painted, the ultrasounds studied with burgeoning horror, our diaper philosophy established. All was proceeding.
I had long since lost the reason for being there. My wife unseen called out questions from the southeast, but I was far away, back in my own childhood. Growing up in 1980s suburbia, where crime waves consisted of vandalism, my parents would allow me to explore alone the wide, beige-tiled aisles of the local general store, and I would stare at all that colorful plastic and the potential that was vacuum sealed within. I coveted it all: wind-up pocket toys, board games, sports equipment. With my little senses I drank in the untapped fun.
I’ve failed, in my own little liberal arts degree way, to live up to the economic status of my hardworking parents. I’ve long grown accustomed to my own poverty, and since my wife volunteered herself into our collective cause, she’s accepted her own lead crown. But looking at all this stuff – and there is no better word for it – adorning the shelves, beaming with its own uselessness, I felt regret. I probably won’t be able to waste money on dumb things for my daughter the way my parents did for me, thanks to life choices squandered fifteen years hence.
It was under this cloud that I sulked aimlessly, until I stumbled across this:
