Arms and the Boys

or "How I Gave Up Trying To Interest My Sons In Unisex Toys and Learned To Live In an Armed Camp"

Our lives as parents of two boys started out peacefully enough with the usual baby and toddler toys – balls, blocks, stuffed animals.  Those were followed by lots of cars, trucks and digging equipment.  Caroline Kennedy’s 1962 letter to Santa described ideal boys' toys perfectly when she asked him to bring her brother John “interesting planes or a bumpy thing he can ride in or some noisy thing or something he can pull or push.”  I did try to add some gender balance with toy kitchen appliances from a garage sale, and the boys each had a baby doll (“to practice being good daddies”) but those items were never serious contenders in the “Most Popular Toy” competition.

Without anyone saying anything, an informal ban on toy guns developed among the parents on our street.  We weren’t rabidly anti-gun, but no one wanted to be the first to bring weapons to the neighborhood.  The kids found plenty of other things to keep them busy – Big Wheels, the sandbox, a climbing dome.  I should have realized disarmament couldn't last forever when I found John in his crib brandishing a Lego gun .   Not long after that, at a neighborhood picnic, I noticed the kids nibbling their sandwiches into the shape of guns and shooting at each other across the table.

The coup d' grace was delivered by grandparents. (Who else???)  For his birthday, the boy across the street got some big, expensive toy from grandma and grandpa.  He already had one like it so they took him to Toys R Us to exchange it.  This was a FUN shopping trip so, of course, no parents were allowed.  Chuck came home toting the biggest, baddest gun his skinny little five-year-old arms could carry.  That was the official start of the arms race.

At first, the growth of our family arsenal was modest – a handpainted wooden popgun here, a wooden rifle there.  Somehow weapons made out of wood seemed more wholesome.  Before long, however, there were changes in the process of choosing Halloween costumes.  The era of the cute little panda bears and lions and stegosauruses was over, and the boys’ Halloween costume choices took a new direction. Now, Step One was a trip to Cappel’s Halloween store to admire and test out the extensive array of weapons.  Step Two was, naturally, coming up with a costume idea that required one or, better yet, several of the available weapons. Step Three was conning me into buying them.  I was a soft touch.

When we moved to a house with bigger closets, a large finished basement and a huge wooded backyard, the weapons cache grew exponentially.  The boys and their friends had big imaginations; and they needed a wide variety of props for their cowboy gunfights, pirate raids, Indian wars, medieval crusades, army battles and Roman conquests.  The collection included everything from pirate pistols to six shooters to Davy Crockett rifles and from hatchets to bows and arrows. They had daggers, foils and broadswords along with helmets, breastplates and Darth Vader boots and capes.  A measure of law and order was introduced when a police officer neighbor donated two used police hats and a billy club.  As they got older, more exotic items like a British cavalry sword, a Honduran machete, a Peruvian blow gun and numbchucks appeared. 

In the end, it turns out that our parent angst about guns, like a lot of other parent angst, was pointless.   All the gunplay and swordplay, the backyard violence and mayhem were nothing more than just normal kid activity.  Neither our boys, nor their friends, who are now 20 and 30 somethings, turned out to be serial killers or axe murderers; and they sure did have fun.

This fall we were invited to a party in our old neighborhood hosted by Scott, the guy who bought our house.  He generously gave us a house tour; and we were happy to see that he has redecorated it beautifully while carefully preserving the character, the unique features and the history of the house.    He still has the blueprints from 1941, which the original owner had given us when we moved in.  He also showed us the original owner’s brass nameplate, displayed on his desk; and he asked if
we would like to contribute a memento to the “Eugenie Lane Museum.” I thought for quite awhile about what one object we could contribute that would best represent all the experiences of the Eugenie years with the boys and their friends.     The following week, after digging around in the boxes and bins of things we brought with us when we moved, I left a toy rifle at Scott’s side door.

P.S. Do rifles come in size 3 to 6 months?