Member-only story
That would have lived in my yard.
Confessions of a collector.
I would have slammed the brakes for that tricycle, made my friends roll their eyes, and remind me about how it once took three months and six friends for me to move out of my three-bedroom house because of things like this.
I’m a sucker for things with stories. People, too. When I look at this, I think of a person who rode this as a child, a child in knee socks and shorts with red lips and sparkling eyes, and that old-fashioned wet-comb he would wear into adulthood.
For that first person, it was shiny and new and maybe a bit of a stretch for his parents, with a price tag on it that would make us smile today. Imagine, just imagine when five dollars was something grand.
Eventually it was passed along to someone else: a younger sibling, a poor child down the street, the son of the man who received it first. Only one of these three looked upon it fondly, but by the time they were done with it, it would be nearly obsolete, its hard metal seat and squeaky wheels only good as a last resort.
Or, it would find its way to someone like me, or maybe someone who at least had an inkling of a plan for it, or someone who put these things in their garage until one day their beleaguered children had to put an ad in the local paper in hopes that someone like…
