A tale of a lonely tradeable

This article was originally published on Cache Up NB. It has been mirrored here for archive purposes only.

I started at a Dollarama. I was on the shelves for a long time. I used to really enjoy watching people walk by and wonder what they were going to buy. Were they looking for a toy gun, or maybe a doll, or something a bit more seductive. Once in awhile someone would take me off the shelf and I would get really excited. Maybe this will be the one that will take me home. But one by one, they put me back on the shelf and I felt the despair of not being wanted by anyone.

One day, an older man came into the store and went right for my aisle. I wondered if he was looking for a birthday gift for his kid. Sure enough, he started taking all kinds of toys off the wall and putting them into my cart. It had been a rough week so I didn’t expect much. But low and behold, he came up right to me, smiled, plucked me from my long time home on the wall, and dropped me into his basket.

If I could have shed a tear I would have as I was so happy to finally have a home to be going to. Before I knew it, I was in his home, unwrapped, and surrounded by so many other toys that I felt like I had a brand new family.

We spent a lot of time hanging out but every once in awhile a few of the toys would end up in some kind of food container and taken away. The few toys always mixed with a notepad and a pencil. The toys were random mostly but I never knew what he was doing with them, and the toys he took never came back. Where were they going? I always wondered what happened. Until that fateful day when it happened to me.

He came into the room, plucked me from my box and dropped me into a jar of some kind with a pencil, a gold ball, a golf tee, and a few pins and another little toy. The notepad was in a plastic bag and the entire jar smelled of peanut butter. In a flash, the jar was covered up and I felt us moving.

There was a small crack in the tape that was wrapped around the jar and although we were moving, the light peaked in enough for me to make out something on the notepad. I didn’t know the writing, but it spelled something like “geo cach ing”. What was that? There was a lot more writing of some kind but it was so small I couldn’t make it out.

Before I knew it, the man took us out and as I peaked through the crack of the tape, I saw several other jars, and a few other containers with him. We were in a park somewhere but I wasn’t sure exactly where. After about 30 minutes of walking, the man took our jar, hooked it to a tree, stood beside the tree for a good minute or two with some kind of machine, then left us there. Alone.

There was no sound in the park. Only the wind against the leaves and other woodly noises that scared both myself and the others in the jar. It seemed like days passed before anyone came. I was sure we were being left there to die. But after a couple of days, a few people picked us up out of the tree, open us up and looked inside. They wrote something on the notepad but the only letters I could read were “FTF”. They put the jar back in the tree, and left us again.

It seemed like this pattern would repeat over and over again. One guy took the golf ball and left a quarter. Another person took one of the pins but didn’t leave anything else. It seemed like some people would take the contents, but not others.

I yearned for the days of hanging in the dollar store waiting for someone to play with me. I really wish I had been bought by someone who would enjoy playing with a little toy car. All my wheels worked and I had a bright red paint job. Any 6 year old boy or girl would be happy to play with me. But alas, I was alone in a jar in the middle of the woods. Is this where I was destined to rot for all eternity?

Then one morning, the jar opened up and I saw the face of a little boy. He shot me a huge smile as he spotted my paint at the bottom of the jar. I wondered what would happen next. He moved his head as his dad was saying something. He dropped a little army man into the jar and then reached in. Now it was my time for a new adventure.