Collect And Trade With Your Friends!

I wince every time my son asks if he can buy more Pokemon cards. This is probably due to the fact that we were initially so very proud of the fact that he showed little or no interest in such things, and even went so far as to ask us if we could call the police on McDonald's for putting a Yu-Gi-Oh "prize" in his Happy Meal that told him to buy more Yu-Gi-Oh cards. For a moment, we imagined a future in which our son would carve his own toys from pieces of wood or create them from scraps of plastic and metal that he rescued from our recycling bin. We were mistaken.

He is, as his father was before him, a consumer. He collects and obsesses on the things that appear on the television: the commercials and the commercials disguised as programming. I could blame the company he keeps, but I don't need to look much further than my past. In my youth I collected Odd Rods. The neighborhood would, in a pack, hop on their bikes (mostly Schwinn Sting Rays) and head off down the street to the nearest 7-11. With ten kids all buying multiple packages of three cards apiece, we were bound to have many duplicates and, on occasion, the appearance of a brand new card. When the card was highly sought after, it was best to play it cool, especially if your little brother had it. You didn't want him to know just how important it was for you to own "Fords Breakfast of Chevys". When we got home, we packed them away in shoe boxes, until we saved up our nickels and dimes for another trip to the convenience store.

And I know my parents shook their heads. They wondered what we must be thinking, to throw away our allowance on some stickers that we never bothered to stick on anything, and a piece of gum with only slightly more flavor than the waxed paper they were wrapped in. Now that I think of it, maybe that Happy Meal was a pretty good deal after all.