His Dogness

This column first appeared in the March 2013 issue of Forsyth Family Magazine:

Over the years, Doobins has immersed himself in many imaginary universes – Hero Factory, Bakugan, Pokemon, Transformers and, of course, one Lego world after another.

Garnet and I buy however many figures we’re willing to buy knowing that, one day, Doobins will move on in his imagination and the figures will become effectively invisible. Although he may leave an imaginary universe behind forever, sometimes, something will rekindle his interest for a time.

It might be that he becomes intrigued by some earlier incarnation – in these worlds, 2003 qualifies as the ancient past – and we will poke around on eBay to see what it would cost to lay his hands on some figures from those days. When we do, it’s not unusual to find that a new-in-the-box version of some character will go for $125. A set of four could easily go for $250 or more.

That happened recently when Doobins became interested in the mid-1980s version of Transformers that, instead of transforming into a car or truck, transform into a cassette tape. (I kid you not.) We found an acceptable used version of one that was affordable. The pristine ones were prohibitively expensive. That got me thinking about how, if only I had known, I could have bought a bunch of those for next-to-nothing back in 1985 and gotten rich today by selling them.

Before long, I was thinking about how, if you had a time machine, going back in time to buy toys that are collectible in our time might be a perfect use for it because, as anybody who has watched any movies about time travel knows, the danger with time travel is doing something that would alter the future in some unpleasant way. Traveling back in time to buy a few toys and returning to our present and selling them for a 1,000-percent return in the present seemed as if it wouldn’t be too disruptive to the space-time continuum.

But then I got to thinking about how, if a character in a movie was trying to get rich that way, no matter how innocent the enterprise initially seemed to be, it would undoubtedly turn out to have unforeseen dire consequences. Maybe some kid who was supposed to buy that Transformer cassette and spend a quiet afternoon playing with it would, after finding the shelf empty when he went into the store, go for a walk instead. Along the way, he would fall in with some ne’er do wells and embark on a path that would lead to assassinating the president when he grew up.

It wouldn’t have to be that dramatic. I once read a science-fiction story in which two men had a competition to see who could produce the most change in the present with the least change in the past. The guy who won did it by changing one letter in someone’s last name. I was impressed with how well thought out the story was.

As I continued to ponder the possibility, I also started fretting about all the logistical considerations of traveling back in time to buy toys. If you traveled to 1932 when coins were mostly silver and dollar bills were Silver Certificates that could be redeemed for silver, you couldn’t show up with a bunch today’s quarters made mostly out of copper and Federal Reserve Notes dated 2009. So, first, you would have to figure out a way to convert your money. It all started seeming like a lot of trouble. I like my fantasies for getting rich to require far less work and planning.

And it would probably be just as well if the scheme didn’t require a time machine to pull off.