guff

Fragments From the Memory Log, Entry Two

Remember G.I. Joe? Let me rephrase that: remember the real G.I. Joe. Not the Joe action figure who stands a mere 3 & 3/4 inch tall and dangles within a plastic wrapper display unit off a store wall. Not the Least Likely to Win a Medal of Honor Joe (as part of the G.I. Joe Delta Commando Action Response Team Unit Squad) who finds himself in a never ending hit and run accident with the effeminate, leather clad Cobra and his similarly, unprotectively-attired henchmen. What’s up with Joe on that? I mean, take them out already! For crying out loud…

As a kid I had a G.I. Joe doll. A real one. Have no idea what happened to him along the way to adulthood (still striving at that after all these years, by the way). Joe likely ended his days down a garbage chute, or if there’s some sense to the world, buried in a pit in a backyard of some forgotten neighborhood; after a last battle just like a real soldier might. My brothers and I were anything if not hard on our toys. And our clothes. And our rooms. You get the picture. There was a jeep for Joe along there somewhere, and various accessories befitting his war-like nature. All of it’s gone now. Such is life. Such are toys.

I also had an Evel Kneivel doll, an exact duplicate to the Evel my younger brother asked for and received one Christmas. Except his came on a motorbike; mine went to the limit in the X-1 Sky Cycle. There was a time when heroes were people who did serious and important things like jump over cars and into canyons and things like that. Can’t go far if you don’t have heroes! We spent many a day with the twin Evels, treating them like mortal enemies, revving up their respective cycles and blasting them at each other. Amazing how much punishment some types of toys can live through. Pretty much like Evel.

And we had another sort of doll kit I no longer recall the name of. They were campers, or scouts, or forest rangers, or something along those lines. I figure they must have been an attempt at dolls for boys without all the killing and self-injury attached to other, cooler, much better selling dolls. Whatever their names were, they came with a great jeep of their own that had a rig up front providing a gear and pulley system, which they used to rip up dead tree roots and retrieve lost kittens in wells, I assume. We certainly never used it for such standard or humanitarian tasks as that. I’m not certain, but we may have ended up pulling the arms off those dolls.

Anyway guys, as rough and tumble boys we weren’t actually playing with dolls, right?