There’s a little boy in my house who loves to play with construction equipment. He plays and plays and plays, be it with semis and trailers or excavators and dump trucks. Half of my dining table is almost always occupied with a scattering of machinery, big and small.

All this usage, and the little boy being only two years old, makes for toys that get broken and battered and eventually unusable. His very first favorite construction toy was a little yellow excavator. Even when one of the wheels fell off and the boom went limp, he had to have that toy every single day. It eventually went the way of all toys, and other excavators came along. But one by one, they, too, got lost or broken, and finally all he had left was a Lego excavator that kept falling apart.

Oh, he had plenty of other construction toys, but the semis were all missing wheels, and the dump trucks had dried out Playdough stuck in their cabs (if they even still had a cab), and the trailers didn’t hitch up to the semis very well anymore, and . . . despite all that, he faithfully played with his toys.

Then one day I heard this contented and happy little boy say very quietly and wistfully, “I wish I had a skidsteer.” ...continue reading →