Christmas 1982:

Well let me be honest, December 24th, Christmas Eve, 1982. As I am writing this, that is over four decades ago. Does my mind really remember all of this, or does it help that we have some pictures that have remained. I am going to say this, Melanie and I are now quickly approaching five years old. While Christmas 1981 was probably pretty fun, I would earmark this as being just in the right range for the two of us to think we are gearing up for a big day.

Firstly, though we have, what at the time was a bit of a tradition, but since I am not even half way to a decade of existence yet the origins of which are lost to me. Anyway, Mom would read the nativity out while we acted it out in the family room. Knowing Mom, there was a good chance she started this maybe just the year before as a “fun” way of teaching Mel and I the story of the birth of Jesus. I know by this Christmas it wasn’t the first time. I remember being smaller and doing one in the living room, However, and it might be because we have pictures, I remember this years better than even the ones that we would do with Justin and Krystle in later Christmases.

There are some definite reasons for this. I think the main one is that I remember the use of some of the stuffed bears as extras really well. For some reason getting the bears in costume for the play was just so amusing to me that it stuck with me. Melanie’s bear, seems to be an angel, I don’t remember much of that, but my black bear, he was another shepherd with Dad and just looked the part all night. I know I have grown up to be pretty secular and nonreligious, but for this night, the nativity show we put on was pretty fun.

Me and Mel got to be the main cast, with a very young Stephanie gender-bending as our lord and savoir. We have Rich, Will and Dorothy as Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar. Then we have dad with the bear, what Cindy’s role is, I actually am not sure, it has been a while, but along with a Carebear that seems to have been the cast that night. I am guessing with new babies Justin and Krystle on the way, Steve and Jill passed on doing something Christmas Eve at the house.

Not to break rhythm, but as a side note, that Carebear was sewn together from a pattern Mom got at a fabric store filled with cotton. In those early years with Melanie around I remember building a lot of stuffed animals that way. I guess Mom was running an early Build-A-Bear out of the dining room. While not fancy it did give us access to some more “toys” and probably helped out on budgetary constraints.

I am sure afterwards, or beforehand there was some dinner and so on, but presents at this point in history were for Christmas day only, so eventually we were sent to bed. As I will touch on in a second, sent to bed at a time that would seem to a four year old to be late at night, but is probably not very.

While we were supposed to be sleeping that night we got up and schemed. An inherit issue with having two four-year-olds eager for Santa’s bounty. We then came up with a solid Christmas plan that night, we were going to meet Santa. We had it figured out, stay awake all night, then when it was nice and late go out into the front room and find out what our cache for the holiday would be.

So, we followed our own orders and quietly did kid things in my room waiting for those long hours to pass into the time we could sneak out. Once we felt the proper time had passed, we got into ninja stealth mode and exited the bedroom. Now we need to pause, the idea of what it means to stay up late to a couple of four-year-olds may be different than what you are thinking. We were most likely put to be no later than 8 pm, probably even 7pm. We aren’t experts of time, our “staying up late” for hours to catch Santa in the act, was probably thirty minutes, maybe an hour. We may have fancied it hours, but it wasn’t probably any later than Nine o clock once we left that room.

That coincides well with what we discovered when we got to the end of the hallway. Which was Mom and Cindy feverishly wrapping presents we hadn’t seen under the tree already. Cindy who was closest to us quickly ushered us back down the hall and back to bed. But it was too late, we couldn’t unsee what we saw, and Christmas morning was able to verify it, Mom and Cindy were Santa.

So, when Christmas 1983 rolled around, the illusion was gone, and a new route of pretending Santa was a thing came about. For faking surprise, I would get my best presents presented to me as unwrapped presents in the morning. Unwrapped? Yes, maybe so no one had to wrap last second gifts anymore, or to change the paradigm in a hope to keep the magic of Santa going in a kid’s heart. I don’t know, maybe Mom thought she could convince me the year before they just wrapped what Saint Nick dropped off, but she had to have known I was just pretending.

I didn’t care much, I actually thought it was cooler that I knew, and most kids didn’t seem to. Anyway, what the folks did that year was hide some Star Wars figures unwrapped in the tree as a surprise to find when grabbing the presents under the tree. I don’t remember who all the figures were, but I do remember the strategically hidden rebel commando from Return of the Jedi hiding in the boughs of the mighty Christmas tree. Star Wars and the upcoming toy rush of 1983(84) are going to become very important…

 

 

Ryan and Mel's fifth birthday party. Mom light the candles and Jaime seems to be getting ready to push me back from getting into the cake early. a wide shot of the new presents being played with. (1983)

Christmas of course leads to the new year, 1983, which I find as a massive pivotal time in my life. Melanie and I turning five is big, the fact that we schemed and discovered our parental deception was bigger beyond the story itself. It is important to note that even though Will is now getting older and plays with Melanie and me, it has for what seems to be my whole life now, the Melanie and Ryan show:

It has felt like from my perspective that we were the main characters in the world. That is how things were and, I mean we even had the same birthday, sort of, and that is the starting point coming out of the holidays for 1983. This birthday of ours staring us in the face not letting us know what was coming.

For now it’s February, we are sitting at the dining table covered in one of Mom’s pea soup green tablecloths and getting ready to cut into a cake that is 50 percent Ryan, 50 percent not Star Wars. Those figures, starting with the Stormtrooper I got with Dad and Reise on the way home from seeing the original picture had stuck with me. And now, coming into a year featuring a new Star Wars movie I was of course jacked to have more little plastic men.

I can remember being at the table and seeing those figures on my half of the cake, and especially getting Yoda’s house and putting it together with Jaime. The nice thing is that a lot of the pictures from this birthday seem to have made it through time. The picture above is one of a few pictures from this age where I can remember my viewpoint of events while it was taken. Notice what figure I am holding onto while being presented the cake? Yeah he was always hanging out.

There he is, almost exactly 40 years later the same little plastic man from the birthday party.

Jaime by the way was one of my mother’s piano students, that then morphed into my babysitter as Cindy got busier with her increased family. She became more and involved with family affairs around these years and was a fixture for a while at birthday parties and the like.

The other presents are not as me centric. Obviously, Mel got a piano she can be seen playing with. Then there a Peanuts puzzles and other things that were more multi-gender friendly for little kids at the time. But man was there an explosion of things coming my way in the path and wake of Return of the Jedi this year.

The Golden Age, of Toys

  

Now, Materialism shouldn’t be a driving force in a child but let me start to explain things before we go down this rabbit hole. As I have stated I grew up the baby in a large family, in a pretty isolated suburban city in California, Davis. Both of my parents worked but, not to put them down, their income was probably a little less than the normal family in the city I grew up in. Not everywhere just in our particular town. So, especially during early elementary school it was hard for me to comprehend why classmates of mine seemed to be doted on so much more by their parents. When you are little and money really only carries a representative weight equal to what you learn in school, seeing other parental interactions where kids are getting straight up spoiled messes with your head and understanding of reality. I never doubted my parents love, just wondered why they were so stingy.

   Too boot, these are all formative years. My formative years fell from 1983 through 1988, which for lack of a less poetic way to put it, was the golden age of children’s merchandising. Reagan had loosened the old locks on making programming geared towards children and in that ten-year span before the government locked us back down.

Now that is a broad statement. I’m currently looking for a good concise video to link here. Maybe by the time you’re reading this I found one. Anyway, it’s a little more complex than just loosening up regulations which is to an extent how it is always described.

Reagan was very anti corporate regulation, doesn’t matter were you fall on that line politically for what I am covering here. Just in so much that he was, one of his appointees was in charge of the Federal Communications Commission. For a long time children’s television was dictated by some strict guidelines. How you look at these I think depends on your point of view as well.

But one of the great fears was that if programs designed for children weren’t heavily controlled, children’s programming would become nothing buy advertisements geared towards children. Which was bad, because the belief by those in fear of that was that children’s television had a duty to be educational. In so much that many of the cartoon’s prior to the 1980s lived under a very tight watch and were thought out of order by some.

So in comes the 80s, there was an explosion of ideas of how to capture the minds children along with the dollars of their parents. It would take a couple years to get going, but this caused a boom of new programing for young kids in the 80s.

On the other hand, there was also a great bust of the old guard of children’s programing. As we build towards all the shows that will be popular on a weekday afternoon in 1983, many of the older regulated educational shows couldn’t compete for the very limited tv slots allotted these shows. Some might see this as a dark age for things, but most don’t look at it this way.

Now there is the materialism aspect. Things/toys having stature socially as a little kid was a big deal, every year some great new toys would infect the school kids with a mad lust of needing to have. But wow sounds a lot like the adult world and Somehow Darth Vader seems more innocent than an iPhone.

This of course first made wide scale public attention with the introduction of the Cabbage Patch Kids craze. Luckily, I didn’t care about baby dolls, as I saw them, they were babies for babies. In all honesty I always preferred the Star Wars toys, that by the tail end of 1983 were starting to dwindle away from toy sheleves. They were my favorite and as G.I. Joe and He-Man and all these others would start to join the ranks of toys in the toy chest, to me Darth Vader still ran the show.

But I did love the new G.I. Joe figures. They were to scale with the Star Wars toys I already had, and they were able to make a seamless addition into my toy’s fictional world where they fought the Star Wars toys, a lot. These new toys though were gaining a lot of traction. During this one moment of time, I could go to longs and get Darth Vader, Cobra Commander or Skeletor in the toy aisle. School House Rock was neat and all, but its hard to argue against a world without those gentlemen in it.

 

Vintage Darth Vader, Cobra Commander and Skeletor as they would have been in the 80s. Vader might have been advertising a diffrent film but close enough. A Rebel Commando like the one found in the Christmas tree of 1983.

                Because of this though, the G.I. Joes never really stuck out either. In my memory they are just an extension of the armies fighting for control of the play area in the garage that all my big brothers had moved out of 1983. This itself is key to note, 1983 Reise moved out and left the garage from being his bedroom that I sometimes got to go out and gawk at the cool army models and such he had built, well and Conan, we will get to that. To the garage becoming my play from for a quickly expanded world of toys.

Instead, the first real change to my play pattern I can recall is the mass need for He-Man. He-Man figures were different, they were much bigger than we were all used to with Star Wars and their arms were interchangeable, not on purpose mind you, just due to making them cheaper to mass produce, which honesty was one of the neater things to a kid about the toys. He-Man could now have a diseased green arm if you swapped him and Mer-man up. Thus creating a whole story to play around.

Also G.I. Joe, thanks to the new legislation, He-Man had a really cool afternoon cartoon show giving these toys context and life. Instead of He-Man just being some weird looking Conan the Barbarian knock off, these cartoons let you know who he was and what he stood for, giving the toy men personalities. Even if He-Man’s solution was mainly to punch things and see if they got fixed. The cartoons helped advertise the toys.. wait that was the issue?

Or is it? It’s a hard dilemma here, for one what’s wrong with giving toys a backstory. People love the Toy Story movies because those toys are given personalities. While possibly nefarious, this is what is going on here. Now I do feel the need to point out the original Star Wars and Vader were developed as a story and characters without knowing what was coming from the marketing of the toys. So the morale issues are more with guys like Cobra Commander who was designed with the idea that the toy was cool.

                Now this is where adults lose their marbles, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe the show was just a thirty-minute daily advertisement for the toys, even if you like the show that is what it was. But what people fail to remember about these shows is while designed to make us kids relieve our parents of their hard-earned dollar. The shows themselves, although cheesy, were directed at us, the children, and it made them special in a different way than the older children’s shows and cartoons from Hannah Barbera and so on were not. G.I. Joe, He-Man along with Newcomers Robotech,  Transformers and all the other shows of that ilk followed the trend Star Wars had set. Which was to take a ridiculous idea seriously.

Making the kids take these silly toys seriously. He-Man wasn’t a Conan clone, or someone who solved his problems with his fists, no he was the alter ego of an intergalactic prince that had to hide who he was to spare his loved ones from the wrath of those that would do evil upon the universe, along with a pet tiger that was scared of everything. And these shows would, every once in a while, tie stories together. Or as in Robotech were just an overarching epic. They had the same draw to them like that of the morning soap operas. One could even argue that they were good. In fact the story for Robotech is more of a failure to really launch the toys but a rather incredible way to make a U.S. kids cartoon out of multiple Japanese cartoons.

Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes, these shows didn’t carry that. Disney programming, nope, those were just a series of events meant to zombify you for your parents and buy products nowhere near as cool as Castle Greyskull. Afternoon cartoons instead were meant to electrify you into a frenzy of wanting to be part of the action and while ethically questionable to hype up kids to buy things, it did make kids feel more a part of the shows. Probably one reason why the legacy of the syndicated cartoons of that era live on to present day (2022).

I mean come on, the older stuff, Jerry would hurt Tom and nothing would come of it. No matter how many times Elmer Fudd got dupped by Buggs Bunny he came back to hunt more rabbit. In Robotech Rick makes a mistake and looses his friend. Heck just dealing with the war his big brother passed on. These new shows were giving us a better understanding of the dangers of these exciting wars. Sure with the Transformers movie, once again they were trying to move kids onto new product, but the actual message was still there, and it was that violence had consequences. Which sadly the parent backlash to these childhood hero’s dying in their fictious wars was to re-desensitize children to the possible horror of war, and then complain that too much violence makes kids not understand the destructiveness of such behavior. Maybe some people don’t get what they are fighting for.

Now it’s here I should mention it wasn’t just a complete free time from the governments hands either. Obviously, I think the cartoons were great and that the deregulation worked out here. But the big wigs already started making compromises on how to institute things. Shows like G.I. Joe and Transformers had to start using bumps before advertisements because they figured kids were to slow to notice that the show had stopped and the ads had begun. This of course if you’ve watched any of the shows is a very insulting reason. Ads back then were even lower budget than the cartoons and featured the products they wanted to sell, they were drastically different from the show you were watching and such the idea that kids just saw the pretty pictures and wanted to buy, buy, buy does show a lack of understanding from the groups fighting for the kids “rights” and lends some credence to the issue being more about controlling.

                Yeah, back on topic, He-Mans, He-Men? Shows, playing, He-men were a thing in the garage and beyond for a while.  I can remember being at day care and seeing weird He-Man toys and wanting some of the ones I didn’t have so badly. Luckily for that line there didn’t seem to be a big point of entry, so Skeletors and Man-e-Faces ended up being fairly easy to come by. It was nothing like the first toy of this era I really remember feeling like I was missing out on. And that was Voltron, defender of the Universe. Here was the first toy too that was harder for parents, not as well off as others, to just get for their kids. Because whatever the price point was at the time would have been for this large for the giant die cast machine, it was more than the couple bucks an action figure was.

                But that was no concern to me, my friends had him, and I coveted it greatly. So much that it’s really the first thing I can remember little kid me asking God for. I was desperate man. Now this happened a long time ago, so I don’t really remember how long I suffered from this, but eventually Voltron made his way to the toy buckets at the house during a Christmas in a couple years, which isn’t bad because Voltron didn’t even premiere until 1984 during sort of a big sweep of Japanese shows being repurposed for American kids. Which on a side note was why the toys for those shows came out so quickly, all the molds and tooling already existed.

Here is where people would write a fake moral about realizing the toys wasn’t that important. Nope, I won’t lie the toy was as cool as I had expected it to be and honestly remains so decades later. I can’t re-emphasize this enough the early shows marketed towards selling product to kids in the 80s were actually really good. The shows weren’t as simple as the thirty-minute commercials they get belittled into. And especially, some of the imported Japanese toys, were not cheap toys setup to just earn a quick buck but little pieces of art. Which makes me wonder if in a less judgmental world, and maybe a world where things like Pokémon didn’t circumvent the rules, somehow. If we couldn’t have gone on with the trend of decent children’s marketing. I mention Pokémon going around the rules because by the 90s the adult groups won and it became forbidden again, well more regulated and the quality for most of children’s programming became terrible, interesting. I blame the Ninja Turtles.

Back to the play though..

This was 1983 though and that toy Golden Age had begun, that turned the said garage into an entire universe were all the toys, from all these evil TV shows, got to interact in a way they couldn’t on the television. Since I had two working parents and oddly not many children my age in the neighborhood, this world became very important to me. Building up the dynamics of the great wars between different figures, forging alliances for them, and strategies on how to topple their enemies. Also having a backstory of aggression between the players helped with two things. One, as a little kid were pretty tough on the toys, so toy damage could be played off as battle scars and two, my father was a sales manager at a thrift store, so a lot of my toys came second hand already, with premade battle scars, so making a one-legged obi wan a grizzled battle veteran helped a lot in buying into the garage’s narrative.

Out in the garage, Reise before he moved out had setup a small hanging bookshelf. I think it was for displaying his army models which he was quite proficient at, but it became one of the most important bases for the figures out in the garage. It was high on the wall and hard to get too, so whoever I felt needed to have that advantage controlled it. I remember it usually being the G.I. Joes, partially because the Star Wars men had AT-ATs which worked better setup on the carpet. And for years they would wage war. Occasionally their movements would be erased by being forced to clean up the garage and put all the little plastic men back in their “proper” place. I don’t think my mother ever got that they needed to stay put to keep the story going for next play time. Parents, am I right?

But that was the sad end to a lot of epic battles in the garage. It was putting the men back in their buckets, then tearing down the blocks and Lincoln logs that made up their bases and putting the buckets back on the shelves for next time. Causing next time to have to spawn a whole new conflict. Maybe tomorrow Skeletor had his arm stolen by Snake Eyes so he will have to hire Boba Fett and Darth Vader to cruise over the Joes base in an ATST to get it back.

That can be okay, I guess, as time went on alliances had to be paved with He-men, then the Transformers had to join sides. Later fights over controlling boulder mountain from M.A.S.K. had to be fought. To say by the time, I finally got a Nintendo and the video games that I craved, the toys in the garage had put in their time would be an understatement. Those toys were battle hardened and could probably take on small world nations successfully and in a magical world probably enjoyed the pax coming from the NES era.

Another play pattern with my poor action figures was the freezer. A prominent character from Star Wars, Han Solo, gets frozen in carbonite and shipped away to a gangster that has been hunting him down named Jabba the Hutt. Even though a toy would eventually come out depicting him in this carbon freezing block, it came late in the toy line, and I never had it. Instead I improvised, and would from time to time fill a glass or bowl of water, pop a Han Solo action figure in it and then stuff him in the freezer.

I would come back later in the day to find a frozen figure. My simple kid brain enjoyed this a lot. I would then go outside and slowly remove him from the carbonite block. Eventually just freezing Han wasn’t fun enough, I started freezing guys like Zartan, from Gi Joe, who would also turn Blue in the sunlight. Although my memory is hazy, I remember wondering if I broke him when I went outside with a frozen Zartan and his color changing was off somehow while in the block of ice, and in the water after releasing him. But he did restore to normal.

image 20 The eventual Han Solo in carbonite figure that came out in 1984, and what toys look like in a block of ice.

That’s a lot of information on how important little action men were to me those years. Right before kindergarten started, like I said my last older brother left home for the military, and my niece Melanie, who was my age, and a constant playmate for all those years left town for the deserts of Arizona. Thus, as I was thrown into the fire of the public schooling system and the house was much emptier than I was used too. Making the escalation of toy lines in 83 even more important.

It’s still important to note that Darth Vader was the leader at the end of that run as he was at the start. From 1983 on no matter what amazing action man came to add to the war effort Star Wars was always king of the garage. Star Wars Collecting

 

Reise moving out:

I mentioned Reise moving out. I remember him moving out, and why, but I have no memory of the rest of it. So, I don’t remember the orientation of when this happened, whether it was Reise getting married to Karen and joining the Army, or Rich and Cindy moving to Arizona. Above is a picture from Reise’s wedding to Karen, there are Steve, Russ, Mom and Dad, then Dad’s first wife even. I don’t remember this happening, from the pictures Reise sent me, it happened at Grandma Brown’s house, which was just a few blocks from the L street house, how is it I don’t remember this, but instead just remember Reise packing up to move out of the garage.

I didn’t do well with that event by the way. This is why I cannot remember which came first, Cindy and her family leaving or Reise, but I remember latching onto Reise’s leg and not wanting him to go. In this year that started off with the world making sense and so many cool things coming into existence all around me, suddenly, presumably all around May it seemed like the whole family was disappearing. I remember being really down about losing the only brother I had left at home. Steve’s move out had been a stressful time for Mom and I think I borrowed that emotion from her, now this year two more siblings aren’t just moving, but moving to places I don’t really totally grasp at five.

Which is an interesting thing to say, We would visit Cindy and Rich in Arizona the next summer, and I feel by six I had an oddly strong sense of geography, perhaps it was all the road trips that started becoming a thing now that everyone moved out, but for a moment there I must have really wondered what the hell a moving to Arizona, or going away to the Army even meant. It meant now going out, staring at Conan the Barbarian on the wall and watching my brother paint little model tanks. It meant not having Melanie around to cruise the neighborhood with anymore:

No wonder Dad made a big deal of going to see the new Star Wars movie, assuming when this all probably took place, my world as I knew it was in so much change at the time, at an age when I didn’t understand change that well. And even though I had been going to pre-school for a while now, there was elementary school looming in the fall, something I knew nothing of.

 As I was approaching kindergarten my mother fell in love with Spanish immersion program the city was about to introduce. She figured a bilingual education was far superior to a regular one and so we had to camp out at the district offices to get a sign-up spot for the first kindergarten class in this program. Of course, once again all I really remember from that night was Dad brining a Kenner Millennium Falcon toy for me to play with in the back of the car. See why I brought up Star Wars already.

Maybe that madness inspired my mom to start training me ahead of time for school, because I remember being sat down at the dining room table and having to learn to differences between the English and Spanish alphabets before school even started. In fact, and in retrospect of having taken kids to their first day of school, this was weird.

There was also a lot of anticipation because of this early training. Mom told me to expect the other kids to be able to read this and that already. But this was all played with some optimism, like I got into this kindergarten class, and I am now special, which made the build up to school exciting in way. By day one I was ready to go, and had no idea what to expect, I was both entranced at being a school kid and anxious about what school was actually like. Pre-school was like day-care, was like being babysat, it didn’t feel like I was going into the same thing.

 I can actually remember the first day of kindergarten. For one I was still having issues with one loop shoe tying versus bunny ears conundrum, an issue many that age have to tackle. Mostly though I remember reading along with a song that was written in Spanish for us to learn. To me that’s the more interesting part was that reading was sort of expected to be a thing by kindergarten versus now when it doesn’t seem to be.

image 58 Me going to my first day of Elementary School (1983)

               

From that point on the competitive nature of learning was what school was for me. Not already knowing what was being taught in class was some weird sign of weakness that persisted on through elementary school. This as one might think was frustrating. Beyond that was the material issues too. Given that even though perfectly fiscally content my parents weren’t making money like other students in class and supplying me with the luxury goods like my contemporaries in class were getting. School days would become a day in, day out, prove you have it all the game show.

We didn’t even have letter grades at this level, so showing proficiency was really all the kids measuring their abilities had to weight against the others. Then recess would hit and there would be lessons on how to properly play on the jungle gyms, and the proper way to play with all the popular toys. It was like life was a handbook of things everyone should just know and not understanding that was somehow a sign of mental retardation.

This gives way to the belief that a lot of my peer’s parents might have been insufferable. Which may account for why my dad didn’t ever seem to be involved with many of them growing up. I have noticed as an adult that some people do live life this way, they know it all and they will show you the right way to do something that really has a multitude of solutions. This though, as a kid, was just what life was. It may have given way to some frustration. I wouldn’t find out for years about the dyslexic nature of my person, weird way to state that, yet I was decently successful in this arena anyway.

But the sign that my dad, who would tell anyone that would listen, a story. That dad didn’t seem too keen on the other adults around this culture, might have been the biggest give away had I been mature enough to figure that one out. Dad would bend over backwards to please people, but then with some of, well you get the idea. (smarfal)

But yeah, frustrating. So, I also got the reputation as a youngster of acting out. Although I will stand on my merits to this day that some of what I was doing was just questioning the validity of what was going on around me in a manner a five-year-old could do. Some of the ways we were doing things were pointless, why did I need to be silent all the time? These were valid questions, but in a competitive school environment when the strict military system for how schools should be run was still very much a thing. Questions were bad and only leaded to acting out.

But then punishment brought its own rewards. As in the first grade when acting out got us a new family member, Napoleon. But Dad’s punishment was probably one the nose, not much at that age really warranted harsh punishment. It was this time though that I really cemented myself in that class though as someone that would talk out of turn when I saw fit and dad maybe figured that maybe I was dealing with little versions of the adults.

That was next year though, well next school year at least, Kindergarten itself was in the long run what it is for everyone, the time when you think the world of schooling is going to be great all the time. And at home toys.

AYSO

 

 

 

I guess to keep me from wondering about all the change and issues this new Fall paradigm was brining, what without a brother, and pseudo-twin and a kindergarten class full of retentiveness, mom went down to the local AYSO (American Youth Soccer Organization) and signed me up for youth soccer.

Division K soccer, I think this was always Mom’s favorite time ever for youth sports. Years later she would still drone on about how cute it is to watch the kids all run around in a little pack after the soccer ball. It’s also, in a childhood full of youth sports, the only time she ever took pictures of the games. And she didn’t just take pictures of the games, but the practices:

I guess I lied a little bit, I think there are some T-Ball pictures too. Soccer was a good outlet though at the time. While the following isn’t from kindergarten, it does sum up things best for this first couple years of elementary school living:

I cannot actually tell you which grade that was from, it is in English, but is simple enough questions that it must have been some exercise in class one day. But what gave me the best feeling I had? Which was terrible apparently, kicking the ball in soccer.

Then look here, school photo, could just be another soccer portrait. Then there is just the fact that I sat around afterwards in my soccer jersey all day:

Oh yeah and had birthday parties for inanimate objects while doing so. In what I can only guess was a subconscious way to fill the void of not having as much going on at home anymore I really started to do things, like in those pictures, have birthday parties for my moon boots. Which Mom found cute but was probably just me adjusting to a quieter homelife.

Over the next few years, I will keep wanting different pets too. I really think it might have been a thing. I also wonder a bit, after having to spend five years sharing everything with Melanie if the idea that I got to have items that were just my own didn’t make me place more importance on them.

I was now a full-on maniac though. I had soccer, an imagination, Star Wars fever and things like He-Man and GI Joe were creeping into the world. I was transitioning into a normal five year old boy… wait what.

 

 

 

So that Rebel Commando figure that was hidden in the tree.

I went on about the importance of the toys coming out to me, and that Mom and Dad dropped the late Christmas Eve wrapping shenanigans after Melanie and I discovered the awful truth. I had always remembered that guy hidden in the middle of the tree, mainly because I think he was the first guy I found that morning. Oddly he is the only one then I remember specifically, which may be all we get since it seems we took off taking pictures this Christmas.

So, while I don’t have a picture from that day, I do still have him:

Luckily, I never lost him, I do seem to have lost his gun, which is par for the course with my old figures, but he is still here alive and kicking. Now I didn’t pay this much heed to that fact, I tried to keep all my figures over years to different levels of success. Then I discovered this:

Yup, an elementary school drawing of the Rebel Commando. Now there is no way to one hundred percent the date on this drawing, but If I had to guess, January 1984. It seems that the memory of him in the tree lingered on at the time, even when I probably got other things that year for Christmas.

This turned up in a pile full of elementary school work, so for one I guess this was a “what did you get for Christmas” style assignment we had in class. Which would explain why its colored and why, for that age I worked that hard on this picture since it was to be graded. Beyond that, even all these decades later I look at the picture and I instantly notice that I made the background to look like the fence in the backyard.

I have and will keep reiterating how odd memory works while sorting thought my past. Seems obvious at the time this figure meant a lot to me, it stuck in my subconscious, and even though the Rebel Commando is not say, Yoda, or Darth Vader, that specific version at one point was pretty special. It’s weird because its just a “troop builder” type figure and his importance quickly got shoved aside for the onslaught of higher profile action figures due out in 1984.