Weird Bird in Love

That’s an entirely gratuitous picture of my handsome son at the playground; it has nothing to do with this story whatsoever. He looks older in the hat, which hides his Kewpie doll hair.

This afternoon I had the thrifting bug. Other thrifters, Kristin, Vea, do you know what I mean? That feeling that I gotta get out there, because somewhere out there, something is calling me. Something wants to be mine. My father is a cognitive psychologist, and I took social psych in college, and I know that this is total hooey. Our brains like patterns; patterns create a sense of meaning and predictability, so we perceive them even when they’re not there. I’ve probably gone thrifting when I had that “thrifting bug” feeling and found nothing good,  or gone thrifting when I didn’t have that feeling and still found something good, just as often as I’ve gone thrifting with the feeling, and found something good, if you can follow all that. I mean, I’m sure it’s a false correlation. But when those false correlations work out to our advantage, boy, they stick in our heads. I know it’s bunk. But still, I hear, and obey. This afternoon I had the bug… it was late in the afternoon, Zag was feeling fractious, it was my turn to make dinner, it didn’t really make sense to head out. But I did, justifying it by making a stop at another store to pick up some things we really needed — a futon cover and sticky stuff to keep the mattress from sliding down on our futon couch.  That mission accomplished, we stopped by the Central Square Goodwill, miraculously getting a parking spot right in front of it. Zag was not keen on being there and put up a big fuss about sitting in the cart, and I didn’t have any baby carriers with me.  Circumstances were not auspicious. I headed straight back to the toy section, hoping to find something there that would occupy Zag so that I could look around a little. I let him get down and poke around, but we weren’t finding any toys worth taking home, and he was acting too cranky for me to drag him off to other parts of the store. I was actually thinking, “Gee, I thought I felt the bug, I thought I was going to find something good… but I guess not.” Then I looked again at a pile of boxed toys and games on one of the higher shelves – and noticed that one of them was a new-in-box Tonka backhoe.

Zag has been talking about backhoes for three weeks. Three weeks ago, the landscape service employed by EDS brought in a little Bobcat earth mover thingumy to clear and reseed some of the lawn. Zag watched this for a while with friends, one of whom called the Bobcat a backhoe. Ever since then, whenever we walk by that part of campus, or sometimes just because it occurs to him, he talks about the time he saw that backhoe. (This consists in  him saying, “Gacko! Hmm!” in a happy, affirmative tone, or, alternately, “Gacko? Gacko?” in a hopeful, inquisitive tone – sometimes proceeding to dissolving in tears, when we tell him that we do not have it in our power to produce a gacko.) This morning we played for a while with another little boy who’d come to hang out at the EDS sandbox with his grandma, and who had a small toy backhoe (well, actually a bulldozer, I think) that made realistic noises when you pushed its buttons. Zag latched onto it and carried it around with him lovingly the whole time he was down there. (The other little boy was very gracious about sharing.) When I told Tilt about this, he said we oughta just get the kid some kind of Tonka backhoe… surely they still make those…

And there it was, at the Goodwill: our backhoe. The irony is that some other kid, inconceivably, hadn’t wanted this backhoe. The box had this label on it:

I recognized this immediately as the kind of label churches (temples and mosques too?) hand out to people around holiday time so they can go buy a nice new gift appropriate for some underprivileged 4-year-old boy, or an 11-year-old girl, or whatever, and bring it back to church/temple/mosque to be distributed to said underprivileged children. Well, apparently Ian wasn’t the backhoe type. Maybe he already had one? Maybe he was more into Barbies? More power to him. But my kid wanted a backhoe. Some underprivileged child couldn’t be bothered with this toy, so Zag, whose parents could certainly afford a new one if we could stand to shop at the kind of stores that sell new Tonka trucks, got it for $2.99.

He loves it. He’s barely taken his eyes  off it all evening. Several times during dinner, he had to stop eating to check on it – it was behind him and he seemed concerned about whether it was still there. I consider us lucky he didn’t insist on going to bed with it. He does seem troubled that it has treads instead of wheels, but Tilt spent some time finding pictures of earth-moving equipment online to show him, trying to convince him that that’s OK. Tomorrow he’ll get to try it out in the sandbox. Frabjous day!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 8:09 pm and is filed under Parenting, Thrifting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.