I could not have been more than seven or eight years old when I spotted them sitting on top of the pantry cabinet.
ThunderCats toys. Still in the packaging. Hidden up there before Christmas like my parents thought I would never look that high. But I looked. I always looked.
I did not tear them open. I was smarter than that. Instead I carefully took them down and played with them right through the packaging. Pressing the figures against the cardboard backing, walking them across the floor, acting out whatever battle was happening in my head that day. Then I put them back up exactly where I found them like nothing ever happened.
I do not know if my parents ever figured it out. I suspect they must have. Parents usually know. But nobody ever said anything and I never admitted to it, so that secret lived quietly in that apartment for a long time.
What I remember most is the feeling. That specific kind of joy that only exists when you are a kid and the holidays are coming and something good is waiting for you just out of reach. You cannot manufacture that as an adult. Nobody is hiding anything on top of a cabinet for you. Nobody is wrapping something up that is going to make your whole face change when you see it.
Today is my 49th birthday. I had a nice dinner with my wife. Got some texts, a few posts on Facebook. It was a good day and I am grateful for it. But it is also just a day. The calendar flips and life keeps moving and that wide open feeling of being a kid at Christmas with your hands on something you were not supposed to touch yet, that is gone. You get it once. If you were lucky you did not even know it while it was happening.
I knew. Standing on whatever I climbed to reach that cabinet, holding those ThunderCats in my hands before they were officially mine.
That was the best they ever felt
Leave a Reply