Posted By Vonna on November 16, 2009

The problem with sentiment is that I never know when it will strike.  Often I don’t realize I am in a sentimental mood until there is an inciting incident. If I knew ahead of time, I could arm myself against it, steel my will to pack away those Transformers, Megazords and Bionicles.

Like many kids who love to read, my son collects books like trophies. The bookshelves in his bedroom once lined the hall at my parents’ house. These bookshelves had been a gift to my parents from my father’s mother, at a time when they had been so angry at her—I was never told what their argument had been about, but it could have been anything; my grandmother loved a fight—that she bought these bookshelves for them as an apology. During my childhood, those shelves contained my father’s favorite books—everything written by J. Frank Dobie, dozens of books on World War II, both fiction and nonfiction, the complete works of O. Henry and Shakespeare, and a smattering of novels by R.F. Delderfield and Thomas Costain. One book belonged to my mother—Sophie Tucker’s signed autobiography—but it was just a souvenir; she had never read it. My father kept his cherished childhood collection of Horatio Hornblower novels on a small shelf in my parents’ bedroom, like it was a secret treasure.

Yesterday, with my son’s permission—his approval even—I packed up six dragons and two Megazords to make room on this old bookshelf. The Megazords went into their original boxes with all the original packaging intact, the dragons returned to their eggs, which are still on display on top of a pinball machine. (Sadly, one dragon is missing his tail.) There still isn’t enough room for the series of books he is currently collecting, so I had planned to pack up a few more Megazords and dragons today. But then my husband, who had already left for work, called to suggest I look at something he had left up on his computer.

He warned me not to look if I was feeling sentimental, but at the time I wasn’t. I had been on a cleaning spree in the kitchen, sweeping, mopping and putting stuff away. So I trotted upstairs to his office and sat in front of his computer.

It was a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, the one where Calvin is working hard on a report for school while Hobbes tries to get him to quit and go play in the snow. It ends with Hobbes shown as just a toy, no longer a life-sized friend, while Calvin scribbles on his report.

These days when my son has time away from the outrageous demands of middle school homework, he chooses other ways to play. When he’s with his buddies, they either take to the field of honor with small frightening characters in a game called Warhammer or they battle a variety of aliens on Xbox.

In the evenings after dinner, he battles his dad by video game, board game or rough and tumble, then it’s off to bed to read until mean Mama calls lights out. The books are piling up, but the Megazords, dragons and Bionicles are gathering dust.

Now I am feeling too sentimental to pack them away. The books will have to remain stacked on the floor for a while. My son may be ready to let go of them, but I’m not.

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