It was a lovely Sat­ur­day after­noon. I had just fin­ished a morn­ing of some of my favorite car­toons like, “Ritchie Rich”, “Pac-Man”, “The Dukes”, “Incred­i­ble Hulk”, and “Spider-Man and His Amaz­ing Friends”. That’s when I, and my stom­ach full of Smurf Berry Crunch cereal, headed for the base­ment to play with my toys.

It was a sim­pler time; the days when car­toons, sugar, and toys were all that truly mattered.

Hopped up on the good stuff, I made my way to the base­ment and was play­ing along­side my lit­tle sis­ter Liz. I had my toy car, and Liz had her doll, or book, or what­ever. Being a 5 year old boy, I could have cared less what a 3 year old was into, let alone a lit­tle girl. This was espe­cially the case when I had my lit­tle Tonka car.

At 5 years old, it was my favorite toy of the moment. You would wind it up a bunch of times, sit it on the floor, and the press the yel­low but­ton on top, and it would go! As I sit here, I can eas­ily remem­ber the noise of it wind­ing up; it was a high-pitched plas­tic zip tie sound, and when you pressed the but­ton, it didn’t get much quieter.

Being a father now of a 5 year old myself, I com­pletely under­stand why we were made to play in the basement.

After play­ing with the toy for a while, I began to get bored, and as a 5 year old will do, I started to stray from the directed way to use the toy. After a big wind-up, I propped it up on the wall before hit­ting the but­ton. It had no wall-climbing abil­ity like my hero Spider-Man. I made a ramp out of some of my Lit­tle Golden Books, and as it flipped off the edge, I saw that it didn’t have the speed to give me that big “Duke Boys” jump I was look­ing for. I gave it one more wind-up, and as I’m look­ing around for its next stunt to attempt, I acci­den­tally pressed the but­ton. The noise of the tires spin­ning free sounded so famil­iar. Then it hit me.

As a child, I was the recip­i­ent of Mommy Cuts. That was the name for hair­cuts per­formed by my mother. While this may have been more trau­matic to some, in our fam­ily it wasn’t a bad thing. In fact, Mom gave hair­cuts to just about every man in the fam­ily from her broth­ers, to me, and even my Dad. She was very good at it, although she never did it pro­fes­sion­ally or even tried to make a pro­fes­sion out of it. Many in the fam­ily won­dered why, but at the same time, who wants her to go pro and lose out on free hair­cuts? She knew her way with a comb and scis­sors, and very recently in my 5 year old life, she began to expand her skills with the use of elec­tric clip­pers. As a child, I wasn’t too com­fort­able with them just yet. Mom’s clip­pers kind of scratched you up and every now and again they would pull a hair out. And that noise, that buzzing, hum­ming noise, sounded a lot like… the… toy in my hand!

“Hey Liz, come here for a sec.”

My lit­tle sis­ter walked over.

“Have a seat in the chair.” I instructed, to which she gladly obliged.

I wound up the toy on the floor. It was a good, hard, and fast wind-up. And as I hit the but­ton, it sounded exactly like Mom’s clip­pers! My imag­i­na­tion and my actions were fully together in this moment.

I lov­ingly tell my sis­ter as I bring the toy down on her head of beau­ti­ful blond hair, “Now hold still, I’m just going to clean up the…”

In an instant I’m snapped back to real­ity as the toy made a lock­ing, crack of a sound, and my sis­ter screamed out! I looked down at the toy, its wheels all entan­gled in my sister’s hair, and the only thing I could think to do was to pull it out of her hair. As her head snapped back with the force of my tug­ging, she cried out, and I let go.

Liz then took off run­ning for our par­ents upstairs, and before she left the base­ment, I could see the weight of the toy was pulling her head down to the one side. After the toy swung out and hit the door jamb, and her 3 year old body stum­bled back, I started to run after her. I wanted to try and fix it before she found our mother and father, of course, to spare my back­side, but I also at the very least wanted to try and hold the toy up for her so she didn’t hurt her­self fur­ther. Liz, on the other hand, was prob­a­bly think­ing that I was going to pull at the toy again and cause her more pain, so she was run­ning so fast that I could barely keep up.

As soon as she reached the top of the steps I stopped in my tracks back at the bot­tom. When she star­tled Mom in the kitchen, look­ing noth­ing less than a scream­ing, cry­ing mess with her brother’s favorite toy stuck in her hair, it didn’t take but an instant for me to hear, “Ben! What the hell did you do?!”

“I was try­ing to clean up her hair­cut!” I yelled up the steps.

By now Dad has joined my Mom and Liz in the kitchen and now came his bel­low­ing voice, “Ben­jamin! In here, now!”

I slowly made my way into the kitchen, and every­one was furi­ous with me. I was full-on ready to be dragged off to the bed­room for a beat­ing, when instead, Dad sim­ply said, “Stand there, and don’t move.”

It would appear that my date with the belt would be post­poned to deal with the sit­u­a­tion at hand. This had to be one of the worst feel­ings as a child. You knew that the whip­ping with the belt was inevitable, just not when. Not only that, but the sit­u­a­tion your par­ents had to deal with first would have given you more than enough time to hide, call a cab, or if you were really good, fash­ion a dis­guise and legally change your name. Only you couldn’t. Because you knew that in the end that it would all just make it worse. My only choice, and the best choice, was to stand there in silence.

Mom and Dad were try­ing their best to fig­ure out an approach to the sit­u­a­tion they found them­selves entan­gled in. Mom, our fam­ily bar­ber, was ready to go for what she knew best and said, “I guess I’ll have to cut it out.” Only she didn’t want to do that, because after what seemed like for­ever, a bald tod­dler Liz finally got this head of hair. After a few min­utes of Mom bat­tling over whether or not to cut the toy out of her daughter’s hair, with a “Dammit Ben­jamin!” thrown in there for good mea­sure, Dad stepped up to the plate.

Dad’s first approach was the sure­fire to never work method of revers­ing what was done. Every sec­ond of this only served to tan­gle her hair into the wheels fur­ther. Also, let us keep in mind that the toy’s gears were still engaged, so as he man­u­ally turned the wheels back­wards they were giv­ing an awful crack. Each crack sent chills down my lit­tle spine. “He’s going to break my toy!” I thought. After a few more cracks, it was as if some­one else was talk­ing when I blurted out, “You’re going to break it!”

Dad looked over at me with a face that was at first angry over my out­burst, but then gave way to a look of inspi­ra­tion mixed with a mis­chie­vous Irish grin.

“I guess we’ll have to take the toy apart.” He hap­pily stated.

As Mom turned around for our “junk drawer”, that catch-all drawer in most kitchens, to look for the screw­driver, I let out a, “Nooooooo!!!” and fell to the floor in heart-broken agony.

The scene that fol­lowed was one that I care not to relive, not here, not now. Actu­ally, I’m over it, but I hon­estly can’t recall much of it since my eyes were either closed or filled with tears for the major­ity of it. I will say that I remem­ber the final release of my toy’s clutch on Liz’s hair came at the use of a but­ter knife. And that final whir of the gears inside is a sound I will never forget.

“Tonka Tough”? Appar­ently Tonka was not tougher than my father.

I remem­ber cry­ing out, and my par­ents telling me, “You should’ve thought about this before you did that to your sister’s hair.”

To be fair, I did. Except that I was in a totally dif­fer­ent moment, hold­ing a pair of clip­pers. To this day, I par­tially blame the sug­ary intox­i­ca­tion of Smurf Berry Crunch.

In the end, Liz’s beau­ti­ful hair was spared, and in a shock­ing twist of events, so was my back­side. It turned out that Dad decided that los­ing my favorite toy was pun­ish­ment enough, and that I had learned to never do any­thing like that again.

And had I learned my les­son? Well, I will admit, maybe I should have got­ten beat with the belt.