Pbenjay's Blog

I got that all wrong – we rescued him!!! And here’s how it all started a long time ago.

As you know people lose things and kids especially tend to lose things – and often they are unable to backtrack their steps and look for what they must have dropped!  Mom has them by the hand and “we’re not going back now!” Sometimes the object falls out of the car or taxi as you step in or out, it may have bounced out of the stroller or missed a pocket it was being thrust into.  And so the object becomes LOST and we happen to FIND it.  But all objects have some sort of a life and so when we come across one, we RESCUE it.  We rescue it because it looks so forlorn, so lost (and it is lost) and so definitely out of its element.  The poor little things are left lying in the middle of the street and might get run over or on the ground in a parking lot,  fallen to the sidewalk or dropped along the way – you might find a rescue just about anywhere.

It all started when 86th Street was being repaired and there in the middle of the street lie a tiny red elephant.  Peter rescued it and brought it upstairs and upon a closer look we saw that it was a Mammoth and one of his tusks was broken.  Peter cleaned him up and now he resides on the top of the back splash behind our kitchen sink.

Shortly thereafter, we were at a Flea Market in CT and when we returned to our parked car we saw a yellow truck wedged in the gravel.  The truck spent over  a year on the top of the dashboard of our car and every single time we went around a corner or stopped suddenly, the damn truck would speed from left to right across the dashboard and back again! Finally I relegated it to the floor of the back seat.  Then there was the Dinosaur  which must have occurred the year that dinosaur toys were everywhere! The little greenish gray Dinosaur was on a street here in Manhattan but neither Peter nor I can remember which one it was.  We saw it and knew it would be a perfect companion to the Mammoth.  We figured they would get along well in the kitchen since they both are from a prehistoric age.

One day, as we were getting in or out of our car, I spotted a little wooden man who had already suffered a great accident – he was literally split in half.  This kind of restorative surgery is always left up to Peter because with a loupe in his eye and a steady hand, he can repair almost anything.  Besides left up to me or most women as he so generalizes, “would glue everything and anything with Elmer’s Glue”.

The small man who turned out to be a Construction Worker was put back together and other than some severe sun bleaching (who knows how long he laid out there!) he is in good shape.   I never planned on having a collection of items sitting along my splash back and so the Construction Worker joined the Truck in the car. We put the man up on the dashboard where he joined another critter who was not exactly rescued although some might say we saved him from a rather boring life up in the hills of Vermont and moved him the The Big Apple.  We were driving around southern Vermont, leaf peeping and antiquing, (quelle surprise) and we stopped at yard sale.  Nothing much there to our liking but then I spied Donald Duck wearing a sombrero and a duck smile.  His expression was so cute that I knew Peter would get a kick out of him -SO… for fifty cents Donald came home with us.  He sat up on the dashboard of the car so he could see where he was going and we could look at his silly face.

You never know when you look down at where you are about to step, what you might find and this time it was a perky little Sailor.  He seems to be dancing a jig since one leg is up in the air.  Again it was in a parking lot, this time somewhere in New Jersey, probably at the shore which explains why our foundling was dressed as a Sailor.  He was just the right size and he had a suction cup bottom so he also lives in the car.  He wasn’t very dirty, he must have recently fallen from grace to the ground.

Also while in New Jersey, this time antiquing in Point Pleasant, Peter saw this small Pluto-like dog.  The dog’s head wobbled so he was like a canine bobble head.  Where else? The dashboard of the car.  By now the car is housing, a Construction Worker, Donald Duck, a Sailor and a not so small dog!   Besides a wobbly neck the dog’s mouth opens too!

In order for the all the creatures to coexist on the dashboard, I purchased this terrific invention at The Container Store.  It is a square of some rubber like material which has some adhesive qualities to it and all the  “things” remain fairly stable up there.

That brings us to this weekend.  Walking back from the Easter Parade Peter and I both spotted this brightly colored object on the sidewalk.  I peered down at it as did he and simultaneously we said, “Rescue”!! And that’s how Captain America happened to come home with us.