At least once a week, I pick up my nine-year-old grandson Hudson from school and we head to Target for essentials like Pine-Sol, snack bars and potty paper. We also hunt for trading cards with the odd name of Yu-Gi-Oh!
For the uninitiated, Yu-Gi-Oh! (pronounced “YOO-ghee-oh”) is a collectible role-playing card game similar to Pokemon. The storyline revolves around a spiky-haired boy who solves an ancient puzzle and becomes one with the soul of a 3,000-year-old pharaoh. He and his friends battle, without injury, an endless array of wide-eyed, endearingly peculiar monsters with evocative names like Flower Cardian Lightflare, Superdimensional Robot Galaxy Destroyer and Malefic Truth Dragon.
My personal favorite – Dystopia the Despondent. Yeah, we’ve all had those days.
The happy, colorful monsters inhabit various tribes and boast individualized super powers like “lethal burping” and “radioactive poo” (okay, I made those up but it wouldn’t surprise me). The cards are packaged in increasingly larger increments for maximum profit. A convoluted scoring system tallies attack points, life points, spells, traps and other weirdness, all designed to confuse grandparents so that they consistently lose games to their gleeful grandchild. As if needing our grandkids to teach us how to use our iPhones isn’t humiliating enough.
But wait, there’s more! The billion-dollar-plus (that’s right) Yu-Gi-Oh! empire includes a multi-episode anime TV show where a bevy of pointy-headed male and female characters seldom move but talk rapidly and shout frequently, accompanied by a frenzied soundtrack of electronic music and recurrent explosions. He adores it.
There’s also an online presence but that hasn’t become part of my grandson’s routine, which is fine with me and brings me to the point of this screed. Namely, the comforting routine of collecting stuff.
I remember the exact same feeling of comfort from collecting things. During the late 1960s, for example, Coca-Cola ran a summer promotion that involved gluing bottlecaps to a big cardboard sheet. Each bottlecap had a U.S. state name printed on the underside. The goal was to collect all 50 states and win a free case of Coke or a speedboat or a rhinoceros or whatever. I don’t really remember the prizes and I’m still not really sure where Nebraska is, but I vividly remember spending hours parsing the bottlecaps and sticking them in their correct spot. I’d ask my friends (well, their moms) to save bottlecaps for me.
I even enlisted the drugstore lunch counter guy in my obsession, dutifully collecting caps from him when my mom and I made our store runs. I’m sure they exchanged bemused glances, but I never saw anything pass between them that made me think maybe I was nuts.
Looking back, I knew I’d never win anything, but that wasn’t important. The routine was more satisfying than the potential prize (although a speedboat or a rhino would’ve been super-cool). For me, the routine of collecting became an end in itself, providing a measure of comfort and reassurance in an often frightening, uncertain world.
I think the same is true of most kids, especially for my Yu-Gi-Oh! obsessed grandson.
Our routine starts with school pickup. He tries to bamboozle me into examining the latest Yu-Gi-Oh! offerings, which seem to materialize magically on global store shelves every few seconds. I pretend to resist and he pretends to humor me, then spins wild schemes for wheedling money out of me.
“Pawpaw,” he’ll say breathlessly. “I’ll help you plant flowers.”
“Great idea! Let’s go to the nursery.”
“Target’s closer.”
“No, it’s not. Besides, we’ll fill up the trunk with flowers, hundreds of them, you’ll be busy for hours, so we’ll get the cards another time.”
“Yeah, but there’s all these brand-new cards, they won’t be on sale after today, they’ll go fast.”
“So will the flowers.”
“Yeah, but that’ll take a lot of time and it’s really hot outside, so how about I vacuum your house instead? After we go to Target.”
“Hmm, that might work. Empty the dishwasher, too?”
“Yeah, but I can’t reach the kitchen shelves. How about I stand on the counter and you pass me the stuff?”
“That sounds fraught with danger.”
“What’s ‘frott’?”
“It, uh, means there’s potential for something dangerous, like you falling off the counter and denting my floor. Spelled ‘f-r-a-u-g-h-t.’”
“Like ‘thought?’ ‘T-h-o-u-g-h-t?’”
“YES, exactly! Well done!”
I can hear his well-oiled gears churning as he processes this new word, while mine creakily spin in amazement at how quick and smart he is.
“Okay Pawpaw, then we’re fraught with danger that we might miss out on the new cards, they’re Egyptian.”
“They’re from Egypt?”
“No, but the characters are all pharaohs and stuff, can we go, please, please, please?”
There’s no resisting the triple-please entreaty. Besides, given my weakness for historical anything, he had me at ancient Egypt and knew it big-time. So we go to Target where, with a practiced eye, he scans the card-bedecked store panels, weighs his decision and we hurtle back to the car. We’re barely out of the parking lot as he rips open the packages and screams with delight that he got “Armored Zombie” or “Berserk Dragon,” then says how his buddies will be soooo jealous and “thank you, thank you, Pawpaw.”
He also likes the routine of putting the cards in binders with plastic card holders, then drawing monster pictures to personalize his collection. Clearly, he enjoys the comforting physicality of having a collection of stuff, put together with care, that’s all his and nobody else’s.
Just recently, he made me a gift of about 20 cards he wanted me to have, all rubber-banded together, in a sandwich bag that he’d carefully labeled in his cute little scrawl. He handed them to me nonchalantly and I thanked him, tears welling.
I’m so happy and grateful that he wants to share his Yu-Gi-Oh! collection with his Pawpaw, even though I don’t understand any of it. I adore spending the fleeting time of youth with a sweet boy who reminds me of myself, joyfully immersed in the sheer kid-ness of collecting bottlecaps, comics, game cards, dead bugs or whatever.
And if there’s no electronic screen involved, so much the better. Time enough to be chained to all that later.
There’s more to the story, of course, but we gotta go. We’re off to Target!
