Over a month off from college can cause campus trends to grind to a screeching halt. Students just store them in their memory bank as they prepare for classes to start up once again. This is precisely what happened to Andy's toy piece after it reached the emotions of practically the whole student body. People still recognized and liked Andy, but it was more for who he was and not what he wrote.
Still, at our first newspaper meeting of the term, the staff paid him high compliments as he walked in. After all, we hadn't assembled since 10 days before the piece was published. It was time for his fellow writers to congratulate him as a group.
After the meeting, I took Andy aside and asked him to prepare something for the issue that was to be released in a few days. The meeting that had just taken place was for ideas about the next issue. The coming issue was mainly editors' work, but since the sports section needed to fill space, I decided to approach Andy before anyone else.
Specifically, I asked him to try and apply his toy piece to sports. He agreed to do so, but deep down, I wondered if I had presented too big of a challenge to him. That proved not to be the case however because the next day, I received his editorial in my inbox. The only question left was whether it would be a quality piece of work, so I opened the attachment and began to read, hoping it would at least be decent.
"You may remember me as the writer who told you to get out your old toys to see if it triggers any memories. I also may have made you cry after I told you my story of my relationship with my old toys. You might think my story has nothing to do with sports, but it actually does, particularly when it comes to playing them.
Anytime you play a sport, you like to think you can play competitively forever. This can especially apply to anyone who plays at the collegiate and professional levels, which are the highest of competition in this country. When it comes to playing with toys, the prime years are obviously your childhood. You may think that even though you're eventually going to grow up, you'll keep on playing with them forever.
However, one can't keep doing the same task forever for one reason or another. Athletes play sports until they either lose interest, recognize when they've reached their peak or physically can't do it anymore. At a very young age, people are still trying to figure what it truly is that they love doing, so they likely pick up sports at least once. Eventually, most of them become more interested in something else and the interest in playing sports either fades or disappears.
My interest in playing with toys faded as I got older. I found bigger and better things to do and toys just weren't a priority for me anymore after awhile. Besides, even if I didn't lose interest and kept playing with them into high school, people would have found out and I would have been ridiculed for it.
Naturally, the hardest part of giving up a sport you love is the task itself. You love it and you wish you could play it forever, but there comes a time when you have to recognize it's over and time to move on. Your mind is as competitive as ever, but everything else is working against you and there's nothing you can do about it.
This happened when it came to giving away my toys. Though I hadn't played with them in years and willingly followed a suggestion to donate them, I never really wanted to give them up, but it was time to face facts. I was heading off to college, a little girl around the corner loved playing with toys in the present and in retrospect, I don't think being stuffed away in the attic for who knows how long would have been a good thing for playthings that still had a good run in them. Even my cowboy Woody, who was supposed to go to college with me, probably would have been wasted just sitting on my desk all the time and really, college doesn't have a place for toys.
So what can we take away from the relationship between playing with toys and playing competitive sports? I guess it's that even though the ideas will always be there, folks must come and folks must go, willingly or not. We don't live forever and others need to take our places in everything after we're gone. At the risk of sounding too cliché, it's all part of the circle of life."
While I knew this wouldn't stir the kind of emotions Andy's last piece did, I still thought it was good enough to stand out from any other article the paper would put out in the coming issue. That said something considering most if not all of the other articles would be written by editors. When I laid the piece out for the sports page the next day, I gave it the headline "Sports and toys: closer than you might think" because that's exactly what Andy proved.
Next week, Andy will start writing about the wrestling team on a weekly basis. It's nice to know giving away his toys hasn't taken over his mind so much that he's letting it take over his life. He's said he's moved on from it and for now, I think I'll take him for his word.