King of Nerds Genevieve Pearson stops in for Nerd Month!

A few Wednesdays ago I hit the jackpot. I sat, cross-legged, on the floor, elbow deep in a pile of used Happy Meal toys when I spotted it: Owl. I crowed when I found him and jumped up, adding him to the little pile of figures I’d already accumulated, a pile I watched like a protective magpie, eyeing with suspicion any customer who lingered to close to my treasures, my precious precious treasures. 
Owl was the last of the set of four Bambi toys I needed to complete a set. Sure, I could maybe have found them all on eBay, pristine and NIB, for $4.99 each plus shipping. But that wasn’t the point. The point is the hunt, the dig, and the triumph at finding what you need not for $7.55 and a one week wait, but for .50 cents and immediate gratification.
This is toy collecting to me, one of the many reasons I was labeled ‘nerd’ in high school. While other girls were scoring designer purses and spending their money on makeup, I was the one still collecting action figures and My Little Ponies. That hasn’t changed, either. I stalk thrift stores and garage sales, I dig through piles and keep an eagle eye out for the tell-tale sign of plastic pony hair (first gen is best) or the edge of a foot I might recognize.

“Why won’t you just grow up?” Someone would inevitably ask, when they found out about my hobbies. I was only sometimes shy about it, for the most part just willing to share my enthusiasm with anyone who’d listen.
What did toy collecting have to do with growing up? It was fun, there was joy there.
“Why?”
It just is. Except, as I paid for Bambi, Thumper, Flower and Owl, and the cashier asked me why these, in particular, were so sought after,  I realized something. These were the first ones, the first toys I’d ever really remembered hunting for. And now I was hunting them again, after they’d been lost. A great big cycle of lost and found.  And it all started when I was three.
I, like every youngest child, very  much wanted to be a part of everything my brothers did. The middle of my three brothers, Shane, was what some might call a ‘trash hound.’ But in a good way. He had a way of finding awesome things that people were throwing away and bringing them home to entertain the rest of us and plague my parents. One day he found an old luggage cart and brought it home. It didn’t take long to fix it up, and soon everyone was having rides up and down the sidewalk on the cart, myself included, and taking turns pushing.
My whole life I’ve been a stickler for fairness, and so when it came time for me to push, even though my oldest brother stepped in to do it for me, I insisted on helping. Except this time we took a slightly different route, down the driveway, and my brother tripped and let go—and I didn’t. At three I had a growing problem, and was fairly small for my age. With the weight of my middle brother riding on it, the cart went careening downhill and I was drug for several feet behind.
I was used to getting cut up and scraped up, but when I stood up after this fall I noticed all three of my brothers staring at me in horror. I looked down at my hands and realized something was wrong. The four fingers on each hand that had been wrapped around the handle had literally had the skin and flesh scraped off of them at the top knuckle. They were all…stripped. Exposed to the bone. My hands looked, to put it concisely, like that of a Medieval torture victim. 
I was rushed to the hospital and soon the horrific sight was wrapped up beneath a layer of bandages. A lot of bandages. When I came home, the common joke became that I had mummy hands. But that wasn’t the worst part, no, the worst was that the bandages had to be kept clean. And dry.For four weeks.
Imagine you are the type of child who spends as much time as humanly possible outside, climbing trees and playing with your brothers. Imagine your favorite game is to dig trenches for GI Joes in the backyard and fill them with water to make them muddy fox holes. Now imagine you have to stay clean, and stay dry, and not get into trouble. And, to top it all off, you can’t use your hands for anything. My parents tried to improvise, and would slip surgical gloves over my hands, taping them in place. I looked incredibly ridiculous, but at least I could play outside, with my awkward mitten hands.
And for a toddler, how long is four weeks? It’s incomprehensible, forever. And so, to help me pass the time, to help me realize that time was, in fact, progressing and moving forward, my mom came up with a plan. This was the year Bambi was re-released, and with it, a series of Happy Meal toys. Coming home from the ER we stopped at McDonald’s and I got the first toy. Then, after my one week check-up, we stopped at McDonald’s and got the next one, then the same for week two. The silver lining of my torture was the toys: Thumper, Flower, Bambi, and Owl.  McDonald’s was a treat back then, and the toys were exactly the kind of thing I loved. The hunt for the Happy Meal toys, the return, the reward, was my joy. And I think that’s where it began, the seed that told me that even in the worst times, you could make a game out of finding inexpensive toys, a real-life treasure hunt with gasoline your only cost of capital.
Then, the last week I had my bandages on, my family went to the beach. There weren’t many sunny days even in the summer in Tacoma, and my parents wanted to take advantage of one of the last ones. So off we all went, piled in our Ford van with our Sheltie, to the beach. And I was playing with my toys at the beach when my mom called me over and I left them, buried in the sand.
Never to be found again.
And not that my family didn’t try—they tried. But while I still have a perfect picture in my head of where I left them to this day, for better or for worse they were gone (I do suspect a kid nearby absconded with them, but who can really trust the memory of a child of single-digits?) and we were left searching. This was before eBay (or CheatBay, as I sometimes think of it, as it makes things a little tooeasy) and once McDonald’s ran out of that week’s toy, they were gone forever.
And that’s the root, I think, that little voice inside me that makes me always hunt, always keep an eye out. And now I have them again, I have all four of them.  Until I inevitably lose them, to a chewing cat (like the last time I found Bambi) or moving house.
“So are you going to stop toy hunting now?” My husband asks.

I look down at the pile, “Well there’s another set I lost,” I said, “Of these little Hallmark dinosaurs…” 

Genevieve, novelist and contestant on TBS's King of the Nerds! Check out my books Chasing Power and the Song of the Silvertongue series: http://www.amazon.com/Genevieve-Pearson/e/B005EYW0UK/
Having collected action figures and comic books from a young age, Genevieve always dreamed of being an action hero. When she grew up and became concerned about her personal mortality and physical well being, she decided writing about them would be the next best thing.