A week or so back, I followed a link from Boing Boing to a wonderfully nostalgic LiveJournal entry in which the author recounts how he saved a beloved childhood toy from the junkheap. This particular toy was made for him by his father some time in the late ’60s; it’s a spaceship control console, probably inspired by Star Trek or Lost in Space, built of plywood and decked out with knobs, toggle switches, big ol’ throttle levers, and, best of all, working lights and motorized, spinning “scanner screens.” The entry includes several photographs of the console, and it’s truly a beautiful relic of a time that now seems impossibly remote, before Xboxes and iPods and all the other things that kids think they need these days to have a good time.

Looking at this stranger’s personal treasure reminds me of my own childhood, the similar objects my dad used to make for me. To be honest, it makes me a bit sad for what I’ve lost over the years. Dad and I aren’t what most people would consider “close” anymore; most days, we’re doing well if the conversation runs longer than a minute or two. There’s no great drama there, no family secrets or terrible incident in our past, nothing that would make for even a mediocre movie-of-the-week. We’re simply two grown men who don’t know what to say to each other, who don’t understand what makes the other tick.
Dad never has understood me, not really. He’s an eminently practical man, firmly rooted in the here and now, with little patience for the sort of fantasies that have always obsessed me. He’s told me on more than one occasion that if he’d known I was going to go off the deep end about it, he never would’ve taken me to see that “damned space movie.”

But even though he never shared my interests, he was my dad, and being a dad who works with his hands, he did what he could to be a part of my strange little world. One of my earliest memories is chasing a wooden battleship down a rushing, storm-swollen gutter, a battleship hastily made by cutting the ends of a two-by-four into points and nailing smaller blocks on top to form a superstructure, gun turrets, and smokestacks. Another time, Dad made me a walkie talkie out of a shorter length of two-by-four and an old car antenna; it looked pretty much like the brick-sized behemoths the soldiers used in the old war shows I’d been watching on KSL-TV’s Big Money Movie. And then there was raygun shaped like a tuning fork, a replica of a prop used in a short-lived TV series that no one remembers anymore, cut from plywood with a jigsaw, carefully sanded smooth, and painted to match the one on the boob-tube. I recall that Dad always thought it was a pretty weird raygun because it didn’t look like a gun. I loved it, though, and frequently carried it to school, tucked into my back pocket like the slingshots kids probably packed in Dad’s day.

The biggest thing Dad ever built for me was my treehouse, the envy of the entire town, with three stories connected by ladders, a fireman’s pole and Tarzan ropes for fast escapes, and even a working light and a car radio powered by a cable running to the nearby tool shed. I sat out there late into many a summer evening, reading comics and old pulp novels and listening to my radio. I think he always assumed that his grandchildren would play there someday as well, but I’ve waited too long to become a father myself, and the two of us were forced to take the treehouse down a couple years ago, for safety’s sake. Its plywood decking had rotted through to the consistency of layered rice paper, and we both feared that one good windstorm would bring the whole damn structure crashing to the ground.

I still have the walkie talkie and the oddly shaped little raygun, though. On the days when Dad and I have really gotten on each other’s nerves, when it seems like we have nothing in common and never have, I sometimes think of those relics, and I remember a time when he made toys for me. I remember that he still is my dad…