Being under the gun on project deadlines at work, I have been feeling like I don’t want to “adult” much lately. When I am like this, the old Toys “R” Us jingle runs through my head – “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid….” and this has gotten me thinking about that store in the 80s.

Toys “R” Us was the Mecca of all kids in the 80s. Until Toys “R” Us opened near our house (the store in Auburn, Massachusetts, right across the street from the Auburn Mall, probably opened in 1978 or so), the only real toy stores were KB Hobby in the malls and of course, the famous Child World located somewhere in Worcester but that was too far for us to travel. Of course, other department stores carried toys but that was just one small part of the whole store. Toys “R” Us was, as its name implies, just about toys which made it a real destination for kids.

I can recall going there and always being excited. Even the façade of the store looked like it was build just for kids with its crazy, multicolored wooden paneling and giant logo with Geoffrey the giraffe prominently displayed.

I can remember walking into the store (before they built that dumb shopping cart collection area!) and seeing the aisles full of colorful toy boxes stacked from floor to ceiling! Even today, I can remember the smell of the store – plastic and rubber. Over the years, the store changed its layout several times but while I was a kid in the 80s, it was pretty much the same. First you would go through all of the sale items so, depending on what time of the year it was, you might be seeing stuffed animals or video games or board games or candy. Then, as you walked through that section, you would be come to the educational toys with things like microscopes and number puzzles and things like that. There were a million different board games lined up on the left side. My child-mind was torn in so many different directions!

Of course, once we had an Atari 2600 or our Commodore 64, I always walked a bit further and went to the video game section!

The video game layout was interesting. The systems themselves were displayed in plastic cases so no one would steal them. Then the games for each system were displayed on boards with their cover art and the description of the game and each one would have a bunch of price tags below it. If you wanted that game, you would pull off one of the tags and bring that to the desk at the front of the store where they would retrieve your game and then you would take that to the cashier to check out. It was always exciting to see what new games were available! Once we got our commodore 64, things became a little more complex because some games would come on cassette while others came on floppy disk.

One more block of aisles further into the store were the “boy” toys and action figures. Of course, there were sections with dolls and stuffed animals but I didn’t spend any time there! I probably spent most of my time in the Star Wars aisle with my neck craning up to look at the wall of Star Wars action figures, ships, guns and the hundreds of other different items that were being produced.

In my pre-teens, I would also spend a lot of time in the Dungeons and Dragons section which had all of the rule books, modules and most intriguing to me, the little lead figurines which always looked so cool. In fact, they looked so cool that I couldn’t resist looking in the boxes that had already been opened and, after seeing that some had already been taken, even sticking a few in my pockets to take home! This was the only stealing that I ever did!

When I got a bit older, GI Joe toys replaced Star Wars and my love for Toys R Us waned a bit as I fell in love with role-playing games, comics and books which were tough to find at TRU. For me, there were a few years where that store really captured my imagination. Some of the most memorable toys that I got at Toys “R” Us were the Star Wars Death Star playset (I think I got this for my 9th birthday after begging for weeks), my Star Wars stormtrooper and Han Solo guns, the original D&D basic set, the Big Trak, and a microscope set that came with a bunch of premade slides and an insect kit which let you look up close at the bees and other bugs that were included.

Of course, over the years I’m sure there were hundreds of toys and games that we got there that I cannot remember at all. Even though it was relatively close by, Toys “R” Us was an amazing destination for kids.

Today is the first day of summer for 2011. The neighborhood kids are done with school and the weather has been beautiful. I was reminded of my summer routine when I was about 13 or 14 years old before I began working at Ed & Art’s Video and my days were totally free to do whatever I wanted.

My mom worked at the Cozy Nook restaurant (or whatever it was called at that time) and she used to wake up really early to leave the house by 5am to open the restaurant and get things moving for the other early risers who needed their coffee and breakfast. My sister, if she had stayed at home, was also out of the house long before I woke up around 8 or 9 o’clock so the house was quiet and I pretty much had it to myself. I read whatever it was that I was reading (most likely a Stephen King novel or an Elfquest comic) for a while while laying in bed. Then I would get up and take a “shower”. I have that in quotes because our showers were taken in our bathtub that didn’t have a shower head. Instead, we connected a hose that ended in a sprinkler head to the shower faucet. In order to make this work, we would have to kneel in the tub and spray ourselves with the hose. I didn’t think it was odd at the time….

After I showered, I would usually take the dog for a walk and then go back to the house and watch TV for a while. Re-runs of “Alice“, “One Day at a Time” and game shows were my favorites at that time. For a while, my mom ended her workday at 11am so she would often come home with breakfast for me. This is probably where my love for corn muffins came from. There was something special about one of those rectangular muffins, sliced in half and cooked on a greasy diner grill and loaded with butter. Mmmmmm. My other favorite was a “Western” sandwich with no green peppers. Both of these foods probably contributed to my unhealthy weight but they were delicious.

Now that breakfast was done the whole day lay before me like an open book. Most days probably consisted of hanging out with my friend Christian and/or my cousin Scott depending on who was around. Bike riding, playing “army”, playing Dungeons & Dragons, going to the movies, swimming, hanging around with the other kids in the neighborhood…whatever kept us busy in the days before video games and cell phones ruled teens’ lives. We would often go outside at lunch time and not come back into the house until after dark. Man, those were the days!

While sitting on my hammock this evening watching Chloe and Gabriel chase each other around our lightly leaf-strewn back yard, an often-revisited memory dragged itself back to the surface of my consciousness. In the months following my father’s death, my mom made every effort to sort of bring the family together. There were gifts and trips that I remember. My brothers were old enough that they decided not to participate, but my sisters were up for it. My mom decided that the big family trip that summer was going to be a vacation to [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebago_Lake]Sebago Lake[/url] in Maine with several stops along the way.

My mom, my two sisters, aged 10 and 15 and my cousin Melody who was about the same age as my oldest sister set out in the family station wagon and headed north. I don’t remember much of the trip. I do remember pulling into the campground and playing with my Matchbox cars and watching while everyone else set up the tent (I was only about 5 at the time). The first night of our stay, the weather was threatening but my mother sent us kids down to the bandstand of the campground where there was some kind of show or concert or something going on. At some point, the rain began and the skies opened up with lightning and thunder and buckets of rain. The four of us started running back to our campsite – my oldest sister practically dragging me along as I frantically trying to keep up. I’m sure she would have picked me up in her arms to make the trip faster if I hadn’t been such a fat little kid.

As I watched my children running after one another, dragging their toy lawnmowers behind them and screaming with joy with the slowly darkening sky overhead, their shrieks melded with the ones ringing in my head as my memory played out. I was a timid child and probably moreso after my father’s untimely and sudden death a few short months before. There wasn’t much that scared me more at the age of five than lightning and the crashes of thunder that followed during a strong summer storm. I was undoubtedly out of my mind with fear as we ran back along the dark, wet paths to our campsite. My memories are jumbled – a snapshot of my sister’s face looking back at me frozen by a flash of lightning, feeling lost and confused about where to go…. When we finally reached our destination, we piled into the station wagon where my mom was waiting. I don’t remember if she was getting ready to drive down to pick us up or if she was just waiting out the thunderstorm. In any case, I can imagine that I clung to her as we watched the rain drops slide down the windows of the car and the lightning became less and less frequent and the thunder quieter as the storm moved away.

That’s the memory that sticks with me most strongly from that time in my life. Sure, I remember some other things about the trip -the girl who drowned at the lake a day or two later and stopping at [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Knox_(Maine)]Fort Knox[/url] to “explore” the historic site, but none comes back to me so clearly or as often as that one.