Sting-Ray Afternoons

But time is never slower than in the days leading to December 25. Tonight, like every night since December 1, I stare at the construction-paper chain taped to the back of my bedroom door, the green and red loops representing the number of days until Christmas. Every night before bed, I tear off one more link in the chain and toss it into the oversized Schlitz-can wastebasket in the corner, as if that Schlitz can is a Shinto shrine and every loop a Japanese prayer slip.

Then I hit my knees and pray to God that Santa Claus will bring me a Super Bowl Electric Football game and a children’s typewriter and an ant farm and a woodburning kit and a Toss Across and a Score Four and a View-Master—preloaded with The Brady Bunch and Pan Am’s 747 discs—and a Spirograph and an Etch-A-Sketch and a pair of white walkie-talkies that “enable minute-by-minute contact with your fellow spies the moment danger strikes.”

All these objects of desire, and hundreds more, beckon from America’s shop window, the Sears Christmas Wish Book, whose 601 pages I have committed to memory since Mom first set it out in mid-November, a full two months after it landed like an Acme anvil on our doorstep. Jim and Tom get first crack at it and have left its pages dog-eared, glass-ringed, and BIC-graffitied until at long last—after two full days and nights—I am allowed to hold its broken spine and gaze upon its booger-encrusted pages with a longing that leaves a physical ache.

My brothers have read the catalogue from back to front, as if it were in Hebrew, for the last third of the Wish Book is devoted exclusively to toys and games and electronics. Outside of Santa’s Workshop, these two hundred pages are the greatest concentration of toys ever assembled in one place, at one time, in human history.

Many of these toys appeared in the very first Sears Christmas Wish Book in 1933, including the battery-operated cars, the Mickey Mouse watches, and the Lionel electric trains. It was just called the “Sears catalogue” then—our family still just calls it the “Sears catalogue”—but enough salivating customers called it the “Book of Wishes” or the “Christmas Wish Book” that Sears officially changed its name in 1968, by which time it had grown to more than six hundred pages, of which more than two hundred were devoted to toys of every description.

The Wish Book is yet another wondrous product of the Minnesota–Chicago axis. It is the brainchild of Richard W. Sears, who started a business selling watches and jewelry in North Redwood, Minnesota, in 1886, opened the R. W. Sears Watch Company in Minneapolis, and a year later moved his business to Chicago, where he hired a watch repairman named Alvah Roebuck, who became his partner in Sears, Roebuck and Company. Their watch catalogue expanded over time into the omnibus behemoth that I am reading now, on my stomach, head cradled in my palms, in the primary-colored glow of the Christmas tree bulbs.

Unlike Jim and Tom, I read the catalogue front to back, for the Wish Book’s wonders are scarcely confined to the toys I’m saving for last. The first two-thirds of the catalogue are full of insights into the world of adulthood, the secret lives of my parents, with its fondue sets and fake-fur bedspreads and—on a heavily thumbed page sixty-six—a variety of “nylon tricot sleepthings for sheer beauty.” These are pastel nighties with plunging necklines worn by models and advertised in strange proximity to an arresting array of “Fun Bags”—which turn out, alas, to be organizers for children’s bedrooms and playrooms.

But still. My gaze falls on an in-car coffeemaker that would allow Dad to brew a pot of Hills Bros. on the drive to Mickey Mining, then hold the scalding Styrofoam cup in his crotch between sips. “Just hang this in your car window,” the caption reads, next to a photograph of a man giddily driving to work with a coffeepot hanging in—and blotting out—his shotgun window.

Or maybe Dad would like the cocktail ice bucket shaped like a diver’s helmet. Or the “Mediterranean-Style Smoker,” a solid elmwood stand twenty-five inches tall that supports a green glass ashtray, so no houseguest ever has to bend to ash his or her cigarette. On the page dedicated to the kind of colognes Dad marinates in every morning, I circle in blue BIC the three brands I recognize. They are, in reverse order of expense, English Leather, Brut, and Old Spice. Every Christmas, The Boys get Dad a bottle of Old Spice. For his birthday, we spring for a can of tennis balls. Opening either one even today releases a pleasing smell I have come to associate with my father.

If Mom and Dad give us a “family gift” this year, the “Portable Color TV with Remote Control” is an impossible dream. There is no way we are getting this fifteen-inch TV in a walnut-grain plastic cabinet with a two-button remote like the Star Trek phaser. “You can control on/off, volume, and channel selection from any spot in the room,” the catalogue claims, offering no indication at all how this miracle was engineered, except in the two-word semi-explanation at the end: “from Japan.” Dad’s frequent trips to Japan, where Mickey Mining is in mortal combat with Sony and TDK, color his view of all Japanese electronics, and I silently resign myself to manually turning the channels for the rest of the decade.

I turn the page and my eyes fall on the twin polestars of Dad’s professional existence: an “Automated Replica of the Pan Am 747 Giant Superjet” replete with “little stewardesses that move up and down the aisle” and a variety of “Portable Eight-Track Tape Players (Cartridges Not Included).” Don’t you worry about the cartridges, I think. Dad will jump on that 747 and sell you all the blank eight-track cartridges you will ever need for your Portable Eight-Track Tape Player, which fits in a car’s glove box, dashboard ashtray, or under the seat. “Only space-age integrated circuits make it possible to pack such quality of musical performance into such a surprisingly small unit,” according to the catalogue, and all I can think in reply is What a time we are living in, with our space-age this, our superjet that, our in-car everything.

As much as the toys, I am falling in love with the language of the Sears catalogue, with its Perma-Prest, double-knit, flare-leg slacks; its safety-stitched, rib-knit sweaters of high-ridge twill; its shirts of Textralized Ban-Lon. These are clothes that Dad literally wouldn’t be caught dead in. He would rise from his casket and speed-bag the funeral director who put him in one of the terry-cloth kimonos or U-neck belted sweater vests on offer here.

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