Toy Story

When I was a kid I had a Dukes of Hazard car that was just awesome. It wasn’t like a little Matchbox car; it was nearly two feet of orange plasticy wonderment. I loved that thing.

One time my parents took me to a park and of course I brought the car with me. I played with it in the playground, jumping over the seesaw and power sliding around the jungle gym. At some point I decided to bury the car in the sand. I’m not sure why I did this but undoubtedly it was immensely fun at the time.

The problem was that being all of 4 or 5 at the time I was shortly thereafter distracted by a balloon or doggy or something and I left the car in the sand. Before long my parents had packed us into our 77 Buick Century and we were on our way, but my Dukes of Hazard car was still buried in the sand.

We went back the next day. I dug my hands into the sand, but nothing. I scoured the playground looking for my lost toy but it was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t believe it was gone, I must be looking in the wrong place. When I realized it was truly gone I was furious, I threw some sand and said some pretty ugly words for a preschooler. I begged my parents to dig up the playground to help me find it, or at least buy me a new one. There was no deal though. My car was gone, forever. There would forever be a Dodge Charger shaped hole in my life that would never be filled. But I realized there were other toys, my life would go on. I had not been buried in the sand with the General Lee.

Somehow my life did go on and a funny thing happened I didn’t miss that car as much. Sure there were times that I thought “Boy the General Lee would totally jump that!” But that thought would soon pass and before too much longer I quit thinking about that car much at all. Do I wish that I hadn’t buried that car in the sand, sure. It would be awesome to still have it and pass it down to my son to play with. But he has plenty of other cars to play with and in the end the General Lee would just be another one in the toy basket.

And that’s how most of our mistakes are. They seem so huge and devastating at the time, we don’t know how we’re going to go on. We beat ourselves up for doing something so stupid. But let some time pass and we see that they weren’t so big in the first place. We deal with the consequences (I never did get a new General Lee) and we learn not to bury our toys in the sand.