While we were vacationing at my parents house, in a room uniquely identified by jigsaw puzzles, children’s books, and a plastic golf bag complete with red-and-blue clubs and whiffle balls, two toys of particular intrigue caught my son’s attention.
One of them, a black machine gun, molded from plastic and capped with bright orange for safety reasons, makes all sorts of military noises when you press the button. The other, colored with green camouflage and an orange tip, noisily slides piston-like when you depress the trigger. Oren gravitated toward the black one, but that might be because Siena liked the green one first.
My wife and I are parents of intellectually modern sensibilities, and so toy guns are on an ever-lengthening list of unavoidable but socially unacceptable diversions, one slot above Halloween death imagery and a few slots ahead of dolls that look unlike real people with real plastic surgery. Knowing how carefully we screen our children’s television viewing, my wife wondered if our children would have a clue about these toys, and what they do. So she asked them, “What are those toys?” Oren answered, “They’re worker things.” Siena, being a year older and just that much wiser, looked at the piston-like gun and said, “This one hammers nails. It’s a pliers.”
For a few days they played with the guns as if they were no big deal, picking them and leaving them behind with everything else discovered here: the golf bag, the dolls, the remote control cars, the double-nine Dominos. But on a warm weekday morning, my wife took them out for a walk so I could stay behind and work. Siena said, “I want to bring this,” and she brandished the green machine gun like a Sandinista while it shook out a barrage of imaginary bullets. Having backed ourselves into a corner by not explaining anything about the toys, we were unable to explain why this was a bad idea. “Ask Mommy,” was the best I could do. Mommy said, “Okay.”
We never told them what the toys were called. We never explained what they did. After all, guns make us nervous.