The Little Red Wagon

Danny was a little six-year-old boy with a cherubic face, blue eyes, and ash blond hair.  He had a smile that could melt your heart. One could forgive him for almost anything. I was getting him ready to go outdoors with his little red wagon that Santa had given him for Christmas. He loved to play with his cars and trucks, especially the truck that made the " vroom" sound. But the red wagon became his favorite toy even if it didn't make any noise--that is,  except for the times he would leave it in the rain, and the next day it would squeak. Then he would say, "Oil 'er up!" He loved to play pretend mechanic.

Since he was so young, I didn't let him roam far from home base, so he would travel by pulling his red wagon from one end of the block  to the other and back again. He never seemed to tire of it. Then when he was a little older, I told him that he could go down the block and through the alleyway and back again. (It seemed that children were safer then.) He started to collect things in his little red wagon. He would pick up broken toys, broken radios and  anything that might interest him. At a later date he liked to take them apart and see what was inside of them. Every once in a while, his father would have to clean house and get rid of the stuff that was accumulating in the garage and the patio. Still, Danny was a nice little fellow, and he would talk to the neighbors while he pulled his wagon along. There were mostly older people that lived in the neighborhood at the time, but as we know, nothing stays the same.

A few years passed, and the wagon had a couple of coats of red paint on it.   I had also added a cord to the handle to make it longer because Danny was getting taller. His collection of things became more interesting as his knowledge of fixing things was improving. I don’t mean that he actually fixed things, but he made a good effort at trying. He was more selective now, but there was no way in which we could persuade him to give up his wagon.

Although he had a nice new tricycle, Danny still preferred his old wagon, and the string became longer and longer to accommodate his growth. One day, his dad asked me in private, "Don’t you think that Danny is too old to be pulling that wagon around?" I knew he was right, and I tried to interest Danny in other things, but to no avail. Then we came upon a plan, and by some miracle, a wheel fell off his wagon and Dad would have to take it to the (pseudo) mechanics to have it fixed. Of course, Dad could have fixed it, but it was a good excuse to get rid of the wagon. Week after week would pass by, and still the wagon was not yet fixed. Little by little, Danny began to forget about it, and not miss it so much. But every once in a while, he would mention it and ask, "How come it takes so long to fix the wheel?" Then I would give him an excuse, and he would forget about it again for a while.

Of course, there was school during the day time; he was going to a school for handicapped children. Did you guess that Danny had problems and that he was slow? The bus ride to school was too long for him. He was picked up at a quarter to seven in the morning, and with all the stops the bus made, he didn’t get to school until a quarter to nine. He was not yet five years old, and when he got home, he would cry for at least  45 minutes before he could settle down. I would try to hug him and placate him, but he would have none of it. After  45 minutes of crying, Danny would become his old, normal, cheery self. But I felt that there was still something wrong, and he just wasn't able to tell me.

Then there were the weekends, and he didn't have many friends to play with. Fortunately, the neighborhood changed, as all things do, and pretty soon there were quite a number of kids. But despite this growing number of children  on our block, it was hard to get the kids to play with Danny. So, I concocted a plan to get the kids to come into Danny's yard, so that they could see that perhaps Danny wasn't so different from them, after all. To put it frankly, I had to bribe the kids so that they would come. I invited them to a picnic in the yard.