Staring at my shoes

If you ask a child what’s the toy he would like to keep if he had to stay alone on a desert island, he probably would choose one of the most precious or sophisticated. Well, the toys I played with during my childhood I can remember several decades after that are the ones I fund on the ground, and it’s between them – without any hesitation – I would have choose the one I wanted to keep on my desert island, and I think I would have chosen this broken robot.

My family wasn’t poor and I was given as many toys as the other children. Now I’m thinking about it, maybe a little bit less, but that wasn’t the point anyway. All these toys more or less hi-tech I was given had a big flaw, they systematically ended up breaking.
When I was seven, I didn’t know it was normal and it was often only needed to change the batteries to make them work again. Actually, I wasn’t stupid and I thought so, a little, but my father had such a way to make me feel guilty when one of my toys stopped working I gave up to ask him the saving batteries, and my room was fool of motionless robots and other games who became obsolete because of my shyness and the fear my father inspired to me. Moreover, he never missed an opportunity, when he found one, to ask me how I broke it. He called me all the taunting names he knew when I said maybe it came from the batteries.
And I will never forget the anxiety, when he burst into my room, usually in the middle of the night, with the so expected batteries. At the time the toy should have come to life, sometimes it just didn’t work anymore, after these years being neglected, so I was copiously insulted, since more than breaking my toys, I forced my father to change the batteries in the middle of the night though I knew they didn’t work.
Now I realise how the process was dishonest, the only aim was to make me sad, but I have to admit in these days it worked perfectly, after all I was only seven.

Finding a toy on the ground, whatever its condition was, was always a very important moment for me. Finally, I had a toy I didn’t have to render any account about. Of course it wasn’t so big or so sophisticated, actually it was often already broken, but for me it was important, it was something I could have fun with, and that my father couldn’t use to condemn and to insult me.

So, sometimes I remember this strange pair we made, the child I was, with a stoop and always a little bit sad, and the shiny articulated ten-centimetre robot, who just needed a second arm to look like a normal toy. He told me about the intergalactic battles when he was mutilated, and I made him fight other ones against some playmobils® to whom I have to say I didn’t give any chance. Anyway, even with one arm only, he was tough enough to resist to all their assaults. Made of metal, he didn’t fear anything, and the shining blue of his plastron, even scratched at some points, gave him the style of a samurai on the battle field. He was always straight and looked his enemies up and down with his metallic eyes, before he gave them a martial arts lesson, combining the ardour of a seven-year old boy with the strength of the steel.

At this time, I didn’t know if toys had a soul or not, but if this one had one, I’m glad I found him in the street to have a normal toy life again. I kept it in my room till I left home. Actually, I feel sometimes like if I abandoned him, because I’ve never gone back there and I don’t know what he became. But I’m still optimist; even the most dilapidated toy may be lucky to meet a child like I was, and then everything is possible.