September 2003 Issue - Essay # 6
The
Adventures of Bluey Swanson
By Wayne Scheer
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Brooklyn,
New York, in the mid 1950s wasn’t exactly a romantic paradise, but we
young boys still had our heroes. The
Dodgers’ World Series victory over the Yankees was still fresh in our
minds and Duke Snider still presided like royalty over Then
it was announced that the Brooklyn Dodgers would move to “Economics,”
my father tried to explain to me. “The
Almighty dollar. O’Malley ain’t making enough and he don’t care
about nothing but money.” “But
the players won’t go. There’s
no way the Duke’s gonna leave “He’ll
go. They’ll all go.
And you’ll grow up and get used to it.” And,
of course, they went. But
I refused to grow up into a world without heroes; a world where
permanent was just a word for my mother’s latest hair-do.
Instead of playing stickball with the other kids, I began
spending more and more time in my room with the door closed creating the
adventures of Bluey Swanson. Bluey
was just a blue plastic cowboy action figure, but there was something
special about Bluey. You
see, he was posed with a lasso in his raised right hand, but I snuck a
knife from the kitchen and cut the rope. This meant Bluey’s arm was
now in a perfect position to punch other plastic figures; his hand,
which once held the lasso, was even clenched in a fist.
And his bowlegs, designed so he could sit on top of a horse, were
perfect for kicking other action figures. Bluey
was, of course, a hero; a cowboy who fought for what was right while
never losing his hat. And he
had to do a lot of fighting because in my world there was a lot of evil:
other plastic cowboys, Indians, soldiers, knights, spacemen, even
football and baseball players. No
matter the costume, time period or occupation, they all had one goal--to
capture Bluey and steal him away to their world.
But
everyone knows you can’t imprison a cowboy and force him to leave his
friends. He stayed and
fought, unlike the bums of For
a long time, Bluey helped me believe in such basic cowboy truths as
loyalty and justice, a world where good triumphed over evil.
But I was forced to put aside such notions when Bluey
disappeared. To this day, I
suspect my cousin Norman stole Bluey, but perhaps it was my own doing,
perhaps as I grew older I stopped believing in cowboys and simple
truths, and Bluey simply moved on, as the |
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Author's Biography After teaching writing and literature in college for twenty-five years, Wayne Scheer recently retired to follow his own advice and write. Some of his work has appeared in Flashquake, Literary Potpourri,
Blue Magnolia and The Phone Book. He
lives in E-mail Wayne at
wvscheer@aol.com
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Essay
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