Now that Canyon, our youngest grandson, is 7 months old, his interest is moving away from baby rattles and squeaky-squeeze things and toward more serious boy toys. Because his brothers are soon to be 15 and 12, our house has long been cleared of small playthings suitable to be held, rolled, thrown and gnawed on by this chubby-fisted little guy whose attention seems to already be drawn to objects with wheels and motors.

In trying to keep up with his growing needs, I have made it my recent mission to locate interesting playthings to have on handfor the times when Canyon comes to visit. Since I know his toy preferences will change as fast as he does, and because I am a practical and somewhat frugal grandma, I conducted my toy search at garage sales.

With just a few stops, I easily came up with a basket full of brightly-colored, sturdily-made, easily-sanitized toys that are bound to do a good job of entertaining. I found a ball that makes noise and rolls by itself, a set of small Sesame Street train cars that connect to each other with magnets, a plastic car that rolls with a push of a button and a bright green frog whose mouth openswide to reveal a flashlight. In addition to all the newfangled toys, I bought our little man a classic Cabbage Patch doll. No, it doesn’t light up or move on its own, but I just couldn’t pass up that soft, creased and dimpled body with the outie belly button, topped with the pudgy face, a head full of tan-colored yarn-looped hair and painted blue eyes that stared at me with a blast-from-thepast look.

Anyone who raised little ones back in the ‘80s remembers that Cabbage Patch dolls were all the rage a generation ago. My then little girl, Andrea, Canyon’s mother, had three of them, two girls and a boy, providing her plenty of early practice at mothering. Her littlebrother, Zack, also got one for Christmas and quickly named his little buddy who came dressed in pin-striped overalls and a gray shirt, “Joe Rowe.” Andrea painstakingly decided on names for “Audrey Nicole” and “Tiffany Breanne,” but chose to keep ”Hugo Sargent,” the original name on the enclosed “official” birth certificate of the boy doll with a bald head and a little smile that revealed one painted-on tooth.

In fact Hugo was chosen in large part because she liked his name. He came to live with us as an object lesson in money management for Andrea. She saved enough for a down payment, then put him on layaway at Walmart. I took her back to the store a few weeks later when she had enough to pay the final payment. She excitedly handed over her money and we waited for Hugo Sargent to be retrieved fromthe upstairs layaway storage area. After a long while, the sales clerk returned to inform one sad-faced little girl that her doll had apparently been lost and she could goto the toy aisle and choose a replacement.

Andrea let the lady know that she was not interested in any other doll. We went home empty-handed and waited for a phone call that came some long days later, letting us know that Hugo had been found.

There are many other memories surrounding the Cabbage Patch dolls that lived at our house, including the trip to the dentist when, after her checkup, Andrea placed Hugo in the dental chair so his one painted-on tooth could be examined by the willing dentist.

Along with an assortment of other toys, the Cabbage Patch dolls helped make up the student body the many times Andrea played “school” at home. Audrey Nicole and Tiffany Breanne were always model students, but Hugo Sargent was the class clown and often made low marks on the papers Andrea “graded.”

In hindsight, I am wondering if being lost for all that time in the Walmart layaway department had a more negative impact on the little guy than was realized at the time.

Classic toys may seem bland and uninteresting by today’s standards but their use required creative imagination that was fun to watch. I don’t know if all of Andrea’s Cabbage Patch dolls experience has anything to do with it or not, but Canyon and his brothers do have a good little momma and, not surprisingly, she became a school teacher too, one that seems to have extra patience for the “Hugo Sargents” she encounters.

Annette Rowe is a freelance writer from rural Gentry and aspeech-language pathologistat Siloam Springs High School. She may be reached by e-mail at awalkinthepark50 @ yahoo.com.

Opinion, Pages 6 on 07/20/2011