2001-12-17-11:17 p.m.

The toy store is a great place. Abby and I made a flying trip to a nearby town to shop for the little ones and we had a great time considering that we don't really play with toys anymore. No, really, we don't.

We were greeted at the entrance by this huge Sulley from Monsters, Inc. Huge and blue and hairy, about eight feet tall. Really huge. I wondered what my kids would do if I brought that home and stood it in the corner.

The second great thing about the toy store was my basket. This basket was the basket of my dreams. It was new. It was clean. It was beautiful. It rolled straight and smoothly. It wasn't anything like those baskets I get at Walmart that are about a hundred years old and rusty and have one wheel spinning around the whole time you're pushing them and that go one way when you want them to go another. Oh, no. This basket was so fine it made me wish I was the only one in the store so I could start in the baby toys, put one foot on the bar, push off with the other and have the fastest basket ride in history all the way over to sporting goods. That was one good basket. I wish it was mine so I could strap it to the top of my suburban and take it with me to the grocery store.

One thing I really needed to find to put in my great basket was the Bionicle that Benjamin wanted. So we were off to Lego land. The Legos seemed a little picked over and I wasn't real sure what I was looking for. I knew he had two and he needed one more, but... Aha! That's when I noticed the boy standing there.

He had dark brown hair with bangs, glasses, a striped shirt and dark shorts, a bandaid on one knee, two bandaids on the other, and he looked like he was just hanging out there. Like he had stopped off for a few Legos after work.

"Do you know a lot about Legos?" I asked him.

His eyes lit up and he nodded.

"You know how you can put three little Bionicles together to make a big Bionicle?"

More nodding.

"My son has two and he needs the third one. Do you know which ones go together?"

He took the Bionicle I was holding and turned the little plastic cover to see all the different Bionicles. "Which ones does he have?"

So we launched a discussion of Bionicles and who's a bad guy and who's a good guy and man, that kid knew everything. He was the magic Lego kid. He could even tell us the prices of things that didn't have prices on them.

"I know everything about Legos," he said. "I get Lego Magazine."

Lego Magazine???

We found out that we needed Onua (?), the black Bionicle, but there weren't any on the shelf, so we had to go on to other things and we said goodbye to the Lego kid. But while we were in another aisle, he came over and told us that he'd found an Onua at the front of the store and he led us over to where they were and placed Onua in my hand.

"Thank you very much," I told him. "You've been a big help."

"Sure."

"You don't have, like, a lightning-shaped scar there under your hair, do you?"

He smiled and said, no. And he didn't have an English accent, either, but he didn't actually show us his forehead so we like to think we met a little wizard there in the Lego aisle.

I don't guess he'd know about Betty Spaghetty. You know - the new one that has that cute boingy boing hair and you get two dolls in one package and they have the neatest little shoes and... and... it's for my daughter, really.

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