Guilt Trips

The NY Times ran an article Tuesday on the psychology of buying a gift for a child while on a business trip. The sub headline said it all—”For a Traveling Parent, Beware of Acting Out of Guilt” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/business/04gifts.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=charles%20sophy&st=cse).

Other than acknowledge I was guilty of the practice when our children were young (I used to say I came home from trips laden down with 5 lbs. of die cast cars and plastic My Little Ponies), I won’t comment on the merits of my actions. Staff members who traveled with me knew at some point during our trip I would abandon our primary mission and wind up in the toy section of a store looking for bring-me-homes. It didn’t hurt, of course, that our job took us into retail stores throughout the day, so we really weren’t deviating too much from our assignment.

I will admit I sometimes went slightly overboard. Like the time in Torrance, Calif., I deviated from our route to the Del Amo Fashion Center to stop at a yard sale. Fortunately, Debbi Kent had a young brother, so she didn’t mind pawing over toy discards in the driveway.

My best score came during a solo trip to Detroit when Dan was about 3 years old. I was driving along the service road next to one of the freeways on my way to the airport for the return flight to New York. It was garbage collection day; refuse cans stood sentry at the edges of each home’s driveway. Motoring along at 40 mph, I caught a glimpse of some bright construction yellow paint jutting out of one garbage can. I circled around and, just as I thought, discovered the yellow belonged to a vintage Tonka metal dump truck which, I could not believe, was sitting on top of two other earth movers, a back hoe loader and a bulldozer. Each truck was roughly a foot and a half in length. No doubt, the trucks had outlasted their useful life as playthings of the boy inside the home. I quickly liberated them, stuffed them into a paper shopping bag I picked up at a nearby grocery store and headed to the airport.

As I carried them on board, one of the stewardesses teased me about traveling everywhere with my Tonka trucks. I sheepishly laughed along with her, but got the more satisfying last laugh when I presented them to Dan later that evening. He enjoyed those trucks for several years until he, too, outgrew his interest in toys (as a construction company executive Dan now gets to “play” with real equipment). We didn’t throw out those Tonka trucks. They’re idling in our attic until Finley is old enough to rev them up again to push some dirt around.