- Our garage
As a child in Cuba, Ernesto didn’t have his pick of a vast selection of toys. His parents would instead go to a large gathering within their zone in Havana, where a local party official drew numbers for each family. The number received dictated when they could go to their zone’s toy store to select three toys: A great toy (called the basic toy, for some reason), a good toy, and a common toy (optimistically called the elective). Basic toys were things like bicycles and roller skates, and each store had a very limited number of each. Yo-yos, marbles, and spinning tops were examples of the electives.
Ernesto says that he never set his heart on a basic toy in advance of the assigned day, because the odds were that it would be gone. Why set oneself up for disappointment? His favorite toys from this era were an erector set (plastic, not metal) and a set of medieval knights, like toy soldiers. He says he always placed the knights back in their box, each figure nested in its individual plastic indentation, until he went to college. At that point he passed the set along to his girlfriend’s little brother. Of course, Cuban children often used found objects to create toys, including little rolling carts they made from wood and ball bearings, with a string to steer it and old shoe soles at the front as a brake.
All of it was a far cry, in other words, from the typical American toy experience. We had an opportunity to discuss the difference between communist and capitalist toy sales when we moved into our current home, with its little detached garage. The open rafters in the garage had been used for additional storage: Several old doors were laid across the beams. It looked as if they had simply been placed up there to get them out of the way.
One Saturday afternoon Ernesto decided to tidy the garage and hang some of his tools on pegboard he attached to the walls. I left for the grocery store. When I returned, he had an unusual tale to tell. I have attempted to transcribe his words exactly:
I was in the garage, and I saw more shredded paper. Remember I told you before there was shredded paper around? You don’t remember. Well, I saw the paper was falling from the rafters. There was a box sitting on top of one of those doors, and there was a hole in the side of the box.
Now. You see, there are birds that are making nests in the concrete blocks at the top of the garage, and they have been pulling pieces, you know, pieces out of the side of a big box that was on top of the doors. And now they have pulled enough that more paper fell from the box. I looked at the paper that had fallen, and it said “Adoption Papers.” I stood on the little ladder and reached up to the box, and pulled more paper from there. It said, “Birth Certificate.” I thought, “Whaaat?”
There were other things in the box, and I could not tell what they were. You know that on the little ladder, on the top is written NOT A STEP? From the top rung I could not quite see what was in the box, and I was trying to see without standing on the “Not a Step” part, and then I felt hair! I thought, “Birth certificates? Adoption papers? Hair? What is going on here?” It was creepy, let me tell you. And then I tried to pull the box down, and it was big but not so heavy so I got it down and there were those ugly dolls that are from the Cabbage Patch and the birds have used some of their hair for the nests.
I explained about Cabbage Patch Kids, and told him that in the 1980s they were a hot item, that people fought one another in toy stores to get them in time for Christmas. He listened with an expression of mild disgust; he is no longer surprised by the things that Americans do. But the fact that these once sought-after creatures ended up abandoned and ravaged by birds says it all, really, in a Grimm’s Fairy Tales sort of way.
So, what’s in your garage?
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