Despite my genuine efforts to disavow cheap, mass-produced plastic toys, they began to infiltrate our home mere months into my son's life.  Our gateway plastic, the purported one-time exception, was the Classic Chorus Gym, a keyboard on legs with five multi-colored keys, which light up to tinkle-y renditions of classical greats.

Numerous plastic indiscretions followed, always carefully reasoned, until, at eighteen months, we hit our nadir: the flame-red plastic Cozy Coupe, the must-have accessory among the toddler set, the Pied Piper of petroleum by-products.

The size and symbolic coloring of this rudimentary form of transportation (think Flintstones) have, in my imagination, rendered it an emblem of my anxieties about plastic toys.  I have nightmares in which the Cozy Coupe multiplies to murderous proportions, like in those cartoons where a cornfield explodes into a mountain of popcorn burying everything and everyone in its path.  The Cozy Coupes proliferate until the only sight left on earth is a tangled mass of blindingly red plastic, the only sound our plaintive muffled cries echoing against the hollow synthetic. Or else, a nuclear bomb explodes leaving behind only Twinkies, cockroaches and Cozy Coupes perched malevolently along the miles of gray ash that we once called Earth.

To assuage my guilt, I consider the possibility that the Cozy Coupe is something like the mythic fruitcake.

Quite against my early intentions, I entered a buying cycle fueled by simple desires—phone conversations that didn't subject the person on the other end to my high-pitched shrieks followed by comments like "please do not use your great-grandmother's crystal decanter to store your crayons"—and by the close proximity of Learning Express of Westport. I'd see how enthralled my boy was by, say, the Little People Fun Park at so-and-so's house and hoped I could (literally) buy myself a few quiet moments. Except that plastic toys don't buy quiet moments.  For one thing, they almost always have some kind of sound component.

The Cozy Coupe, meanwhile, persists, a fresh gaping wound scarring the lush green landscape of our backyard.  My boy took to toppling it onto its side, which always made me think of cow tipping.  It lies there, a fallen beast, an emblem of loss, its one broken wheel dangling awkwardly from its body like a distended limb. A few yards away, the boy would busy himself with dry leaves, meticulously crumbling them into little piles. 

I'd like to say that I've learned my lesson, but I haven't (as my recent garage project attests). But in those moments when I see him wandering around the house already bored with the veritable toy store of plastic opiates sitting under his nose, I think about his butterfly.

"Mama, look!" he exclaimed one afternoon, pulling me into the kitchen and away from the Matchbox Carwash I was laboring to construct.  "A butterfly!"

He beamed at me, pointing emphatically to a creation on the floor.

I paused to register this image. Four square blocks made up the body. Two long cords, borrowed from a wooden bead-stringing toy, provided wings.  He had meticulously arched each cord to the right and left of the row of blocks.

And we stood there for a few moments, my boy and I, quietly contemplating this creature of his imagination.