Slinky

 

Click the Toy and See

 

 

 

I've probably told of all of the Christmas stories I can here. So I'm going to try to remember every damn Christmas I can since I was born.

I'll start at five since I can't remember any before hand.

Five was great. I came down the stairs and the living room was piled high with gifts. I do have to remind myself I was a little under four feet tall then so the perspective made it seem like a huge haul.

I got the latest tech toy then available, Lite Brite. To me at the time, it was a Star Wars light saber. I can remember sitting in the dark, shoving those plastic pegs into the black pattern you snapped into place under the frame. Pretty colors! Simple things for simple minds!

I also got a Slinky. They still make them I have found out. Of course I tried to make it go down the stairs like you saw in the commercial but all I got was a clattering sound of spring steel crashing down the stairwell. I kept at it, thinking I'd get the hang of it eventually, till the noise pissed off everyone in the house and told me to stop. The old commercial for it used stop motion photography but when you're five, you believe all you see on TV. I had no clue as to what scam was being pulled over me. Even so, Slinky was still fun in other ways, like twisting it into odd shapes and making it bounce. In the late 60's, there were no real regulations to control the safety of toys. Slinky was made of spring steel that wasn't entirely polished. This became a problem as that Christmas night I had gotten the Slinky stuck in my hair from rolling it around on my head. Hey, this is how five year old boys experiment! Mom's scissors saved me.

In college, we were sitting around, between classes and we'd come up with ditty's from old songs, just to make ourselves giggle.

The old Slinky commercial lyrics went:

What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs

and makes a slinkity sound?

A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing!

Everyone knows it's Slinky.

We re-worked it.

What falls down the stairs

when pushed from his wheelchair

and makes a crotchety sound?

It wheezes!

It sneezes!

It's full of diseases!

Everyone knows it's Granpa!

This is what bored 20 something college kids, who are working towards various degrees, laugh at.

My sixth Christmas I can't remember too well. I do remember a friend coming down the street in his new hockey ice skates. There was no ice on the road so he was crunching the steel blades, dulling and probably bending them the whole way to my house to show me. I was standing by the picture window, hearing him gloat over this gift when his Dad showed up, bitching that he “spent GOOD money on those” and not to have him ruin them by walking on concrete and tar with them.

7,8.9,10,11 go by with a blur.

Twelve and Christmas eve had my family in East Providence's Palm Restaurant. The motif was palm trees and a sort of Magaritaville-esque set up. I thought it odd my Dad wanted to eat there as it was a very tacky place to be at on Christmas Eve. Oh well. We came home and I saw, what I thought and out of fantasy, was a Bethlehem Star in the East. As I awaited for Mom to unlock the kitchen door, I looked at it and wondered. In all rights, it was probably just the star Sirius rising. But when your a kid and it's Christmas, you are allowed to let your mind wander.

13-14...another blur.

At fifth-teen I was well past the age of receiving toys. Though a tiny part of me wanted to have something fun. You give up the last remnants of your childhood hard. But at 15 I discovered something else, adult gifts were killer too.

I had received a real Merino wool sweater. Not only that, it was a cool color and pattern. I understood at once what this meant: “I didn't have to pay for it!” Grown-up lesson #234/b4...clothing, gift certificates and plain CASH was a great gift, even though the era of getting toys was over.

I can remember giving my brother the two album set of Joe's Garage by Zappa for Xmas that year. It blew me out of my money too. Just released two album sets were damned expensive back then. No matter, he played along with it for two months straight I came to find out.

16,17...blur

At eighteen I told you already somewhere in the past on this blog. It was the Night Jimmy Keough Terrorized Our Neighborhood with his 1972, 500cc clunker station wagon with no exhaust.

Nineteen was damned interesting, for it's adult nature. I spent that day in the lobby of Butler Hospital admitting my Mom due to a vicious, spiraling attack of severe depression. What was weird, I wasn't the only one there admitting family members that day. This was Destroyed Christmas #1 I experienced. I wasn't really thrown for a loop, I saw it coming. It was the timing that was odd. Seeing psychiatrist's stop each other in those halls to wish one another a “Merry Christmas” was bizarre to me though. But this is their garage, they're used to it

20-23 was a blur except for discovering that Asians couldn't give a damn for Christmas and they keep their bars open that night. My friend M and I discovered this and duly got looped on these occasions. I also found out what the Jews do on that day too, the very same thing, as the Christian world comes to a complete HALT on Christmas. Where else to go but to pagan Chinese restaurants?

24 to..damn 31..another blur...no particular memories. Though somewhere in there I gave Kathy a good container of raw shrimp, along with other gifts for her. She held up the plastic container of shrimp, then at me, kinda funny, when I said, “But you LOVE shrimp...you adore it! You talk about it all the time!” Sheesh...some girls can't appreciate it when a guy pays attention to the little details of their lives, and purchase the appropriate gift! Ha! Or the time I gave another Kathy a few bags of Doritos, along with the other gifts. “Dammit Ron! I'm on a diet...you KNOW I can't help but eat the whole BAG!”

Once again: “But you LOVE Doritos....etc.”

At thirty-two for some reason I can remember blaring Roger Waters “In the Flesh” CD my brother had given me. It was also that day when I had concocted a Robert Sauce for the tenderloin I was cooking. Robert Sauce was demi-glace, Dijon mustard, scallions, white wine. Simmer it down to near nothing and it's velvety stuff. My brother wanted to use a straw to suck it up with. He asked, “Can I get some more GRAVY?” I thought: “God...gravy he calls it...”

After that, the Christmas's became pretty pedestrian, except for a few notable differences in the people that have come and gone from my life. Newer ones come, older ones go and some remain. I like the lights, the competition some of my neighbor's have trying to outdo one another. The boxes of Chocolate Cherries with liquid centers that are pretty disgusting in their own sweetness. Ditto for ribbon candy. I like some of the Christmas music as long as I'm not saturated with it. Instead of C7 Christmas light bulbs, we have gallium-arsenide LED ones that are computer controlled. That and a simple game of Monopoly costs over $30 now.

So the years tick off and the Christmas's tick off as well. The people I've known are another year older, grayer and perhaps more fine lines in their faces. At this age, a Christmas Eve means we pull out the “good” stuff and sit, drink and stuff our faces with food. That ain't bad.

But, Christmas as a five year old, when you come down the stairs and see the proof that Santa WAS there, was great. Even if the Slinky was a bit of a BS toy, everything else was perfect.