Toys and Scars and Brother Steve

Hot Toys

Brother Steve’s toys left him marked. I remember his bleeding fingers, sliced by the Xacto knife he used while building models. He longed to design cars, and wanted something called a Vacu-Form. I mean, he reeeeally wanted this thing. With it, he could design bodies for his track racing cars, and mold them from plastic.

He got it, of course. He proceeded to burn his hands and forearms while creating the most Steve-like race cars imaginable. He was covered with scars.

Together, we played with another dangerously hot toy called a Thingmaker. It was a small metal open stove that held metal molds, the most popular of which made Creepy Crawlers. You poured in a colorful goo and then baked it to create colorful bugs of your own design. In 2024, I find it inconceivable that this was something we plugged into our bedroom outlets, and over which we hovered, inhaling the fumes of whatever was baking.

We repeatedly burned ourselves on this.

I can’t remember what Steve liked to bake up in the Thingmaker, besides bugs. Maybe cars, because he was all about the cars. My favorite mold was Tarzan. I didn’t care about the vine-swinger at all. Instead, I perfected the art of making white faces and bellies for the little chimp, and experimented with the main color; not brown, but purple, yellow, orange, red, green, blue. I baked them up and hooked them all together, long chains of small, colorful simians. 

Things Remembered

I don’t know when the Thingmaker disappeared. I remember it in Aberdeen, but not in Rapid City, so maybe Mom “disappeared” it during that move. Thank you, Mom, I think that was probably for the best. The products didn’t last, either. Whatever that toxic goo was, its finished results were not hardy. All the little chimps went to bits.

Nothing lasts but memories, and they only last for a while. My brother talked about this with me, the evaporation of memories. He said, “There’s an entire set of memories that belong to just Mom and me, things that only the two of us remember. She’s gone. When I’m gone, those memories are gone, too.” He spoke of this with pain and disbelief.

Memories, like scars, die with the person who carried them. Steve had no kids, no younger version of himself to hear his stories of sharp knives and hot little ovens that baked toxic materials into toys. So I’ll keep those stories in my heart, and take them to my grave, and then they will be gone. I wish Steve was here, scars and all, to share these memories with me again.