The plastic motorcycle cop, legs molded in China to form the perfect straddle, was hanging lopsided from his once-glimmering Harley Davidson. A layer of dust covered the aviator-wearing patrolman from his CHiP's-style helmet to jet-black boots. He wasn't the lawman he used to be.
His bike's seen better days, too. The foot-long motorcycle was on the verge of snapping in five different spots. The siren and radio antenna hung by frayed wires. Once able to wail and flash, the 20-year-old assembly of burnt-out bulbs and jammed motors was now dead, like the corroded 9-volt battery rusting inside the Harley's frame.
When I was a kid, no more than 5 years old, I loved this thing. I remember the smell of burning plastic it made, like a model train, when I tuned it on and let it loose. It would race across the tile floor of my grandparents' kitchen, clattering and wailing, bumping into the wooden cabinets and chasing the other motorized toys my grandfather had bought for me at flea markets and bric-a-brac shops around town.
At least 15 years since the last time I'd seen this cherished plaything, I found it. The toy was sitting on a shelf in my grandparents' living room -- the same shelf I'd always put the plastic cop after every ride. The years, though, had added clutter to the motorcycle's parking space. The thing was on top of a calendar stuck in January, 1992, with a Chinese diaroma of a white crane stuffed next to it, along with a box of pictures left over from my parents' wedding, and a dozen other events that happened more than a quarter-century ago.
For the first time in at least a decade, I was back at my grandparents' house. It's a place where I spent so much of my time as a little boy living and playing, right at that age when your first memories form, and certain smells and sights get hardwired into your brain forever.
I'd like to say that when I stepped back into this house, it was like going back in time. The television in the living room is the same hulking Sony from the 1980s. Original baby pictures of me, my brother and cousin are still hanging over the front door. The carpet is still thick and pink like it was in 1985, the same pomegranate trees grow in the back yard, and the koi pond is still shaded by creeping jasmine vines.
But my return wasn't quite a trip back 20 years. This house, its Westminster, Ca., address stamped on my grandfather's naturalization certificate hanging in the dining room, and on his death certificate tucked away in a drawer somewhere upstairs, has remained far from frozen in time. Coming back into this house was like visiting a grandmother after too many years have passed. It's aged, and like hair thins, bones get brittle and skin turns pale, time has left this place a dusty anachronism, a worn memorial to an era passed, left wrinkled by a future moving at the speed children grow up, and plastic motorcycles rust and crumble.
If those baby pictures over the door were updated, they'd show my brother off fighting a war in Afghanistan, my cousin away at college, and me, the firstborn with his portrait placed a little higher than the other grandsons, writing this memoir in the next room, wishing the koi pond still had fish inside, and the pomegranate trees were still in bloom.
