It was made of maroon-colored, stiff plastic. The hull was about four inches long, and another piece of the same stuff was colored white, and in the form of a combination mast and mainsail. The sail, although rigid, had a graceful curve to it, and the mast was meant to be inserted into a hole in the tiny deck. It could be removed by a simple twist with a small, grubby hand.
That’s all there was to it; just a simple toy sailboat. Plain, yes, but for a time it was my favorite plaything. At age four I was crazy about boats, for as far back as I could remember, which I guess isn’t really saying much. Anyway, my vast book collection -there were two siblings ahead of me- included volumes that featured boats and ships and voyages, and those books were the most dog-eared. Even though I could not yet read, the illustrations in those books stirred my imagination like nothing else; girls were quite a few years away at that point.
There was a tiny creek behind our house, and this was of course a well-frequented play venue for all the neighborhood kids. There were a few smalls pools which were ideal voyaging for toy boats, including the little sloop. Indoors, which wasn’t too often in those days, did afford an occasional sail as the bathtub was home to one of the smaller of the seven seas. I never objected to taking the occasional bath, what with all the boating adventure associated with it.
I realized that another dominant fixture in the bathroom held promise for toy boats as well: the commode. One day I was playing with the boat in the toilet – sorry mom, really -simulating oceanic tempests by flushing it, and then retrieving the vessel just in time. Well, you guessed it; I waited a little too long one time and the little red sloop disappeared into the vortex. Oh no! Saddened, a bit shaken and certain that the boat was unequivocally gone, I silently slunk off to other pursuits.
Soon after, the toilet started showing signs of a major stop-up, and no amount of plunging could remedy the situation. The next day was a Saturday, and at first light my dad unbolted the toilet from the floor and transported it to the back yard. He was going to fix the thing. Soon I was standing nearby – I couldn’t help but watch the proceedings. Along the way, I blurted out the likely cause of the stoppage; I couldn’t stay quiet about it any longer. My dad gave me that head shake and “perplexed” look with which I was becoming more and more familiar.
Unfortunately, no amount of snaking and probing resulted in dislodging the toy sloop from the innards of the toilet. The next step was setting the toilet on bricks and building a small fire beneath it. Like I said, he was on a mission. For my part, I didn’t have any notion of recovering the boat; I had accepted its loss and was secretly delighting in this performance.
The fire did not produce any tangible results, but I thought maybe we could see some drops of melted red plastic if we peered into the hole at the underside of the toilet. The fire was extinguished, and then things really got exciting. My dad went back into the house and emerged with not only a sledge hammer in his hands, but a determined look on his face as well. Sure enough, with a few well-placed whacks from the sledge hammer the toilet lay in pieces, the slightly melted little red sloop and its disconnected sail laying there in the midst of them.
When the dust settled, my dad plucked the boat from the shards and gently handed it to me.
“Don’t flush it again, OK?”
