You were kind of excited about your Saturday afternoon trip to the toy store. You were 21, but that didn't matter. You couldn't help but remember the Saturday morning trips to the toy store when you were in grade school. (Mom went to the grocery store, but they were still trips to the toy store as far as you were concerned.) The grocery store was Lovette's supermarket; they changed the name when someone else bought it, but everyone called it Lovette's just the same. Lovette's was just an old yellow building that you didn't go into unless you had to; you tried to confine your attention to the toy store next door. It wasn't really called a toy store and it surely didn't resemble the toy store you were going into now with all of its new fangled super toys. It was Ben Franklin's 5, 10, and 25. You sure can't get much for that now days. The overstuffed animals, the James Bond super-sleuth toys, the space games, no you didn't have anything quite comparable to all of this. But there sure were a lot of fun things to do for 5, 10, and 25 cents. You now waded through all of the multi-dollar stuff of this new toy store, dismayed by the great abundance of ingenious toys. You rationalized that your toys required more imagination to yield fun. You were about to leave this modern toy store that failed to fulfill so many of your old memories of what a toy store should be like when you came across the remainder of the 5, 10, and 25 cent toy tradition. You were at once at ease, back at home. You had wandered into the unknown of the engineered toy; it had frightened you. But here it was, the delightful stuff you had once played with.
Here were the coloring books. Remember when you used to color with your friends, or every once in a while when Mom would color with you and you would try your hardest to color the best picture you had ever done and Mom would smile and tell you what a good job you had done and you'd be proud and then you'd look at hers and see how much better hers was and you wouldn't be jealous but you would wonder why she could color so good and she'd tell you that you'd be able to color that good when you got older and you wondered why you couldn't color that good now.
Just above the coloring books you found that play money was still around. You used to be able to get a whole lot more for a dime than you can now. Well, that's what inflation will do to money. Oh, and remember in fourth grade when the big thing to do was to make your own paper money and you and all of your friends in the back of the class would sit around and make money whenever the teacher wasn't looking. Making money was fun. Most of the time you could color it green, and other times you would experiment. You never wasted much time on one dollar bills and often you would see how many zeros you could get on a bill coming after a nine so that in effect your one bill was worth more than all of the other guys' money put together. Sometimes you wondered why money was so important, but not very often.
Yes, and the ring that squirts water at people. Remember how much fun you had getting your cousin wet with a fake hearing aid and then you ran and laughed and thought how funny it was and then got mad when he got you wet and you wouldn't speak to him for awhile. Then when you calmed down you wondered why it was funny when you got him wet but it wasn't funny when you got wet.
And oh, how much fun a balloon was. You'd hit it up in the air and then again and then with your head and then with your nose and you'd rub it and hit it and scratch it and throw it and then wonder why it popped when it was just getting fun and then you'd blow up another one.
Gee, glider airplanes like those on the top shelf were fun, too. They were only a nickel then instead of a dime and you learned to adjust their wings so that the plane would make long flights or stunts, according to how you wanted it to go, except you could never really tell for sure. And then when you got a little older you found that it was even more fun to attach firecrackers to them and then fly them and watch them explode in flight.
And badges. You never bought any badges for yourself, but somehow someone always got you some somewhere for some reason. You weren't sure why, but you sensed that you were supposed to be prouder and more important because you had one on.
And when one of you had a badge on, it was only natural to play cops and robbers and you'd get your guns and decide on your rules and you'd go out of the woods and have a rip roaring time. You always especially liked to play "guns" because you could always beat the older kids. But when you played around home it was always harder 'cause Mom didn't like for you to point your toy guns at people and you didn't know what difference it made, but you went along with it.
Being a kid was fun, but you always sensed that there was something temporary about it. You could remember someone saying something one time when you were playing with some soap bubbles being popped. You didn't know what it meant and you didn't figure your friends would know, but one day you asked Eddie if he knew. He didn't know either but you sensed it was somehow important so you kept it in the back of your mind.
Eddie's shooting Communists in Viet Nam.