Is this statement a fact?
The only difference between men and boys is the price of our toys.
Hmmm. Well, young boys can’t grow beards. But boys usually have hair on their heads. Sometimes, older boys have so much hair that it drapes to their shoulders. Or they style it in a fashion that appears as if they are entering a Wilma Flintstone look-alike contest.
Men, traditionally, don’t cry when we fail to get what we want. We swear and then get away from the people that provoke the swearing.
Outside of those three examples . . . I’ve got nothing.
Oh, yes, the price of our toys.
My earliest memory of my first real toy is that of one given to me Christmas morning, 1963. It was a Western Flyer Fire Chief pedal car made from pressed steel. Red, of course. With a bell! It cost my father $9.95. I rapidly pedaled it up and down the sidewalks of Everett Avenue in south Lincoln for a year before we moved to an acreage near Malcolm. Like most fire vehicles, it was the subject of drama. I was sitting on its metal seat one summer afternoon in 1964 when I drove down our driveway and out into the middle of Everett Avenue. A lady who was speeding down the street slammed on her brakes and managed to stop her car less than two feet from a life-ending collision. I spent the rest of that day incarcerated in my bedroom. Mom confiscated my car and gave me the “wait until your dad gets home” speech. It wouldn’t be the last time I did something careless while operating a moving instrument.
A hand-me-down 20-inch red single speed bicycle was next. As a creative, imaginative seven-year-old, the bicycle became my Batmobile. I would pin one of my mother’s dishtowels around my neck to form a cape. Dad made me a mask out of black cloth and my gym shorts combined with long underwear offered a relatable Batman appearance.
The acreage was loaded with ornery geese that would chase me as I pedaled around the farmstead for hours on end. The honkers served as a perfect Joker, Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman and any other imagined villain who was trying to douse my crimefighting flame.
From 1967 to 1991, my father managed a research farm for Norden Laboratories of Lincoln. The 200-acre farm was located five miles southwest of Valparaiso. In 1968, Dad bought me a 26-inch singe speed red bicycle from a hardware store in Lincoln. The price tag was forty dollars.
“Be sure you ride this thing,” he told me.
I did. For the next three years I took numerous trips to Branched Oak Lake. The ride from our house to the lake and then to pedal all the way around the lake and back home was a good 20-mile trip. My brothers and other friends would join in the fun.
By 1971, it was time for my first motorized vehicle. A new Honda 50cc motorbike for $250.00. Dad wanted my brothers and I to have something durable with which to heard cattle. Of course, being adventurous country boys, we had to ride the Honda on the county roads, despite being lectured to not even consider such a feat. After all, this was an uninsured, unlicensed, off-the-road vehicle. When Dad wasn’t looking, yeah, I broke the law.
I had gone on a two-hour cruise on several Lancaster, Butler, and Saunders counties roads one afternoon. When I got home, the keys were quickly confiscated by the Old Man.
“I give you an inch, and you take a mile,” he hollered. “Your transportation is now your feet!”
Despite my poor understanding of inches and miles, Dad upgraded our motorized power to a Honda 70cc a few years later. Despite Dad’s continued off the road rule, my brothers and I wore him down. We constantly drove the bike to a nearby lake to fish or simply cruise around. Again, on an uninsured, unlicensed vehicle. Such was farm life in the mid-1970s.
“You get caught by law enforcement and you pay the fine,” was his threat. Thankfully, it never happened. In my 14-year-old mind, it was only illegal if I got caught. And I never got caught.
I turned 16 years of age in July, 1975. My first gas powered vehicle that was supported by four wheels was a 1972 Ford F-100 pickup truck. I gave up my life savings of $1,750.00 to own this chariot. Its main purpose was to transport me to and from high school – a twenty-mile round trip – and to haul my hogs and sheep to the local county fairs. Of course, when I wasn’t transporting livestock, my priority traveling companions were high school classmates of the feminine gland. I didn’t know it at the time, but I later learned that they wanted to ride with me because I was always successful at finding a buyer that supplied us with Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill.
The girls reinforced their lack of interest in my physical appeal on the night of December 4, 1976. The Cornhusker football team was playing in Hawaii. The game kicked off at 11 pm central time, and three cuties were cruising around with me and Mr. Boone listening to the game on my pickup’s AM only radio. All three of them shared – over and over and over – that Husker quarterback Vince Ferragamo was a true heartthrob. Oh, well. The Huskers won the game, 68-3.
During the past 45 years, several more vehicles — from farm tractors to pickups to cars to motorcycles to school buses — would come and go. However, two of them join the ranks of to the aforementioned.
A 1987 Dodge Colt and a 1987 Dodge Caravan.
I purchased the Colt shortly after I moved to Alliance. It is the only new car I have ever owned. It’s seven-thousand-dollar price tag included no air conditioning but a stingy 42-miles per gallon. It was the vehicle Cynthia and I were sitting in when I proposed to her while parked in the driveway of a Hayes County, Nebraska cornfield on November 27, 1992.
I purchased the 1987 Dodge Caravan in 1997 from an Alliance railroad executive for four-thousand-dollars. I needed something dependable that would allow my family and I to travel across Nebraska. Dad had recently undergone triple-bypass heart surgery and I wanted to travel to eastern Nebraska to see him. I also had two young daughters aged two years old and six months old, so reliability was key. The Caravan would transport us to our desired designations in Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Colorado for the next 18 years. I didn’t let it go until my youngest was a first-year student at Chadron State College.
So, yes, the difference between men and boys may be the price of our toys.
However, there is an important contrast.
Boys play with their toys. That’s a fact.
Men embrace the memories of our toys. That’s priceless.