Toy Story

    When we were children, we had very few toys. I remember a single cardboard box with miscellaneous blocks, "rescued" pieces, donated and hand-me down toys. We enjoyed them all, and when we were little would spend hours with blocks for walls,random Erecto-set sections as tracks for roads and animal figures to enclose and transport.
   My mother had even fewer toys. But her most cherished were, no surprise, figures of animals. She told me that when they were little and still living in the city of Troy, that, whenever good fortune smiled on them, and they were able to accumulate some money,  she and her siblings would go to the five and ten-cent store and buy little metal banks  in the shape of  animals. She said they cost 5 to 7 cents each.
     She kept them, possibly the only things  she  brought into her married life and she let us play with them. I remember a lion, a donkey, a dog and a deer with a broken-off leg. Nobody cared about that deer; Whatever became of it is a long-gone mystery. Joseph claimed the lion, which I think was blue, Dorothy wanted the donkey. It was silver and was the closest thing to  horses, which she had loved from infancy to the end of her days. I got the black dog. I liked it, but used to wish it didn't have the backpack; I didn't get it at the time. And the dog was not as articulated as the lion and the donkey, but small matter then.
    The donkey was painted gold during the gilded age of Ann Burke. But the dog is just as it was during those halcyon days of yore.