Of Boys and Toys
The Legacy that Fathers Pass On to Their Sons
When I was a kid, my parents gave me a train set. My father’s favorite toy when he was that age was his train set, so it was obvious to him that I’d want one too.
Soon, the train set became the focus of my father’s affection. It wasn’t enough to have a circular track with a single engine on it, so he added a siding where the engine could pull off to … do whatever trains do when they pull off on a siding. Then he gave me more cars for the engine to pull. Then he widened the circle into a large oval and added a figure eight in the middle, along with ramps and an elevated section to make it all work flawlessly.
The second section of track necessitated adding a second controller. And as long as there was a second controller, the system obviously needed a second engine, along with a few more cars (this time imported from England, a special Christmas present when my father returned from a business trip to London).
The track was now far too complex to set up on a temporary basis, so my father mounted it on a 4x8 plywood board, carefully nailing down all of the sections, side tracks. and ramps in a beautiful configuration that was surely the envy of every other model-train envier. The train board was given a paint job, with green grass, blue streams and lakes, and pieces of lichen scattered liberally around (lichen is like the crate of first-person shooters; it’s not clear what purpose they serve, but the world seems too empty without them).
This train table of every boy’s dreams now lived in a semi-permanent state on sawhorses, in the corner of my room. It sat there every day looking at me in judgement, willing me to play with it.
We then moved houses, enabling my father to take the next step in the track’s evolution; he boxed in the bottom of the track (the dark underbelly of the system, with wires and attachments galore) and hoisted the entire thing on a pulley system attached to the ceiling. Now instead of taking up permanent floor space in my new room, it rested out of the way up above, and I had merely to lower the table down to my height whenever I wanted to play with it.
Which I never did.
The only time I would play with the train was when my father had undergone some monumental effort to add a new capability to the system, obliging me to play with that thing to appreciate it. Otherwise it sat there dangling, convict-like, from the ceiling, gathering dust and accumulating a lifetime of guilt that haunts me to this day.
The thing is, I didn’t want a train set. At no time did I ever say, “I’d like a model train.” And I sure as hell didn’t say, “I want the biggest, most complicated train set in this county, with multiple, independently controlled sections and expensive cars and engines from foreign lands. And rig it up to the ceiling so that I can call upon it on my slightest whim.”
I didn’t want it. My father did. He built the system that he wanted, knowing that that must be something I desired, too. But I didn’t. So instead of the pure joy that he wanted me to get from it, I just got a sense of unfulfilled obligation. Many kids wonder in what ways they fall short of their parents’ expectations. I didn’t have to, I knew exactly what I wasn’t doing enough of; I wasn’t playing with the world’s most complex train set, lovingly assembled by my father through years of effort and engineering for an unappreciative son.
Around the same time that the train board was darkening my ceiling, another toy happened to arrive in my life: a refurbished pachinko machine.
Pachinko, for those that haven’t played or seen it, is kind of like pinball if the flippers were broken, you got many more than three balls, and the playing surface was vertical. And instead of a handful of bumpers, there are nails. Lots of nails.
Okay, so it’s not much like pinball. But there are steel balls involved.
In pachinko, you send a ball up into the playing field and it makes its way down through the maze of nails and targets, usually narrowly missing everything you wanted it to hit. Occasionally, it will fall into a target and you win more balls so that you can keep losing.
In Japan, this was and is apparently an obsession tied to gambling, although since my machine only dispenses steel balls when you win, it’s not clear what they’re gambling, unless the Japanese economy is steel-ball-based.
I spent entirely too many hours of my childhood playing this thing: flipping the balls up, watching them come rickety-tickety down the board and occasionally, very occasionally, hitting a jackpot to win more balls. More frequently, I’d run out of balls and then scoop more out of the back of the machine.
I played it less as I got older (probably due to my obsession with the Atari 2600 and the imagination it took to pretend that the large color rectangles on the screen represented anything except low-resolution graphics limitations) and eventually went off to college, leaving the pachinko machine to collect dust in my parents’ house.
Years later, my parents moved out of that house and sent the machine to me (Parenting tip: the easiest and most guilt-free way to throw anything away is to dump it on your kids), where it continued to gather dust in my house instead.
Now I have young teenagers of my own, so it seemed time to drag the machine out of the closet and see if it worked. Amazingly, after lots of tinkering and lint-scrubbing, it came back to life. The balls get jammed occasionally, and the electronics are fried, but it works basically the same as it did in my childhood. It turns out that gravity hasn’t changed much since my youth.
So I cleaned it up and put it in my son’s room, where I knew he’d want to play with it. He was busy with other things (including video games that don’t require nearly as much imagination as my old Atari did), plus it was still jamming frequently, so he didn’t play with it much. I took another run at it, fixing the cause of the ball jams and hauling it out to the garage. I constructed an elaborate frame for it and mounted the frame on a convenient hinge system, so it now swings out from the wall smoothly at your slightest whim, whenever you need to cheat and re-supply the balls from the rear.
Now the pachinko sits beautifully upon the garage wall, waiting. I’m sure my son will play it soon — how could he not, when I’ve put so much effort, time, and love into it?
