The Downfall

The end of my playing with these sets was synonymous with my end of playing with toy cars. With the sets, neglect would set in a year into my ownership. Since I never kept the boxes, the tracks, set pieces, and connection pieces would be thrown into that toy chest. If they weren’t there, they were in some corner in the room or strewn on the bedroom floor. My toy sensibilities were somewhere in between Andy and Sid. I wasn’t as destructive as Sid, but I wasn’t as organized as Andy. Tracks would go missing, the set pieces would be lost, and the white connecting piece would disappear elsewhere. Along with this neglect came… well, age. As a I grew, the football shaped toy chest was gone, to which I started stuffing a large quantity of my toys into a bag and pack it into a closet. Videogames replaced my toys as my means of entertainment. Some of my toys would end up in the arms of kids younger than I was as I grew up.

As I went through middle school, the need for space in my closet was in demand, and this bag of toys was taking up the space. Many a would be given away, like the stuffed animals and the boardgames. Oddly enough, the cars would last the longest. The bag became smaller with the toy cars at the bottom. By age 13, playing with these kinds of toys seemed too childish by now. Collecting was the name of the game, but I would still find some way to play with them, taking one of them from the platform they were placed on (the dresser) and creating some kind of scenario for what I selected. By age 14, it all stopped. Even the toy collecting stopped with those toys ending up inside the bag in my closet. Eying that bag every time I picked out my clothes to go to school, its days were numbered. It was time to give away my toys.

A large majority of the toys left in the bag was still the toy cars. For a while my mother and I tried to figure out how to get rid of the remaining toys. We didn’t want to throw all of them away in the garbage since they were still in good working condition. One day we decided to clean out the closet to make room for things to put in there. Of the things to go was the bag, made smaller than previous years of giving away. My sister, my mother, and I would look into the bag, picking and choosing which toys were good to give away, which to keep, and which were simply too damaged to give to anyone. Of all the toy cars (which were still over 150 now), I probably retained 10 since they still looked nice for displaying at least. The toy cars were given away to a family that lived in the neighborhood. When all was said and done, almost no toys remained in my bedroom. Mario Kart and Gran Turismo replaced my toy cars.

Today…

Toys from my childhood are not here anymore, replaced by my large collection of videogames stretching as far back as the NES. The toys that are here are part of a new collection I started amassing during my college years from 2006 to 2011 to now, most of them based on anime and videogames. This little memorabilia collection is nowhere near as large as what I had during my childhood. Of course, my organization sensibilities are much better than during my childhood, with all collectibles set on my computer table on two shelves. In terms of toy cars, my mother has two Coca-Cola branded cars that she got from somewhere.  Thinking they’d be collectible, she kept them in their original packaging. She offered multiple times to give them to me, which I declined, stating that I’m too old for those. But in my bedroom, there is only one toy car. Not a car per se, but a London bus one of my sisters gave me when she vacationed at London last year. It sits on the upper shelf as a sort of reminder of days gone by. While I can leave the toy cars, the toy cars can’t leave me.