I was talking with a friend yesterday about a New York Times page from the Kids section this past weekend which depicted a billion dollars as a large circle of one thousand dots, each representing $10,000. It’s a pretty stunning graphic, even for someone like me who spent his career trying to help teenagers understand the powers of ten.

This got us talking about a million dollars which led to the Six Million Dollar Man and we realized we both had his action figures. His brother also had Oscar Goldman, an action figure I didn’t know existed.

Which got me thinking about my old pal Steve who is sitting somewhere in the attic in a box waiting to someday, I expect, end up in a landfill.

In the early 1970’s The Six Million Dollar Man was my favorite television show. I dreamed of being in a terrible accident so that I too could have superior bionic parts placed inside me.

Having the action figure was a big deal for me. We were living in University Heights, OH at the time, a suburb of Cleveland. I must have been in kindergarten or first grade when I realized you could roll down the skin on his arm and see the electronics inside.

The inspiration for using this memory as a poem came from reading Lynn McMahon’s poem “Barbie’s Ferrari” from Billy Collins book poetry 180. I remembered reading Denise Duhamel’s book Kinky which is a collection of poems using Barbie as the central theme. Here is a poem from that book with the same title, “Kinky“.

I actually played a lot as a kid with action figures. I had several Action Jackson dolls as well as a few GI Joe figures along with a space capsule. I had an Evil Knievel that rode on his own motorcycle. That fell off the back of a VW van’s bumper we had back in 1973, a loss that still stings.

I learned not to place my toys on car bumpers anymore. A life lesson for sure.

I have always had a powerful attachment to things and have found it hard to get rid of them, the action figure in my attic being a great example.

We were once driving in that VW van and I was holding a pillow case in my hands, letting it flap in the wind out a window on the shoulder side of the car. The pillow case slipped from my hand and landed somewhere along the side of the road, quickly gone, my dad refusing to stop, aware, I think, of this proclivity of mine.

I remember crying but also thinking, why am I crying about a pillow case?

The ending of this poem has the right feel to it, not the end of a story, but a part of another story, another memory but not something that wraps the poem up like a bow.

There is the rocket reference again, though. That is the “bow” I suppose. The action figure had this button, as I wrote here, that you could push and its arm would lift up. There was a plastic motor you could put in his hand to show how incredibly strong he was.

I actually doubt that the arm could lift up Barbie, but my sisters and I definitely played with them. Their Barbie collection was much more vast than my few dolls, but I had Steve Austin. He had his own TV show. He was a star.

I remember when I learned that Lee Majors had married Farrah Fawcett of Charlie’s Angels and wall-poster fame.

So I too wanted to be an astronaut, to marry a movie star, to be bionic and have superpowers and have young boys listen to stories about my exploits on vinyl records.

I became a poet, so close. I’ll gladly take it over glamour any day.

So what do you have WordPress AI for an image today?

I love that the box read “Bionic Action Pears”. And the little mouse. I love the little mouse.

The featured image is one my daughter took of a little Barbie and Ken family, though he looks a lot like Steve Austin. She loved to style Barbie’s hair and even here their daughter. I love it.