About five years ago I left the scene of a local jewelry store’s going-out-of-business sale with several large boxes of trophy parts. There were probably 200 or more assorted gold and silver bowlers, basketball players, eagles, victory cups and the like — everything you would need to service the trophy needs of a small community. “Someday,” I thought, “I’ll be able to put these to good use.”
It is a habit of mine to over-compensate as an adult for shortcomings in my life as a child. Lacking any sports ability whatsoever, and being from a generation where only the actual winners received recognition, I was never awarded a trophy of my own. I did receive several plaques for various academic and service accomplishments, but somehow those only made the absence of a real trophy all the more glaring. Nerds got plaques from the Mothers’ Club, and jocks got trophies for their physical accomplishments.
And though I’ve been known to exaggerate and embellish past accomplishments, I just couldn’t see making up a batch of fake trophies from all those parts and placing them on my mantel (next to a half-dozen plaques from the Mothers’ Club) implying athletic prowess I did not actually posses. So into the garage went the boxes of golden athletes, various barnyard animals, sailboats, racecars, and pseudo-Greek gods and goddesses holding laurel wreaths triumphantly above their heads.
Not all the trophy parts were for traditional sports, though in sheer volume the bowlers outweighed everything else by a factor of five. Clearly, bowling is the sport to take up if you want to increase your odds of bringing home a small gold statuette.
There were statues of men and women shooting pool, fishing in various poses, playing table-tennis, firing a variety of guns, peddling bicycles, scuba diving, and riding horses. There were cups of all shapes and sizes along with a flock of gold and silver birds, mostly eagles, to adorn those awards needing extra flair, or to recognize an accomplishment for which there was no “stock” statuette (which is the only sort I ever had a chance of winning). Victory, it seems, arrives on golden wings of some form or another.
So for five years my trophy parts gathered dust, and at one point I almost gave them to my artist neighbor who drives a van he has converted into a rolling museum exhibit, complete with glued-on plastic doll heads, brightly colored duct works, funny sayings, and other assorted paraphernalia designed to draw attention. What better hood ornament for such a vehicle than 50 identical bowlers or 15 hunters shooting at each other? Or, even better, 15 gold hunters firing rifles at 50 gold bowlers next to 33 gold pool players standing next to 47 golden eagles.
But finally a noteworthy reason presented itself to me last week, and out came the boxes of trophy parts, along with several old catalogs from which these images came (1956 t1974). The occasion, though sad to me, seemed like a perfect one to punctuate with a special award.
Since I began writing here at CreativePro more than five years ago, there has been one constant, aside from my missing deadlines. Cindy Samco has been the woman behind the site who, from as far as I could tell, did pretty much everything that makes the site run smoothly. We worked together constantly, but I don’t think we ever met. I have an image in my mind of Cindy that is probably completely wrong (one of the side effects of a virtual world), though I feel like we’re good friends.
Cindy moved on last week to another gig, and I’d been wondering for weeks before what I could say or do to show my appreciation for the support she gave me over the years. I’m not a very nice person to work with, if only because I constantly miss deadlines, causing others to compensate and work overtime or at odd hours. I felt like I owed Cindy more than just a goodbye email or box of Sees candy.
So I selected several trophy parts that corresponded to columns I’d written over the years, threw in a bunch of eagles and general symbols of victory, and made an award that weighed in at 12 pounds. It probably turned out to be more of a curse than an award, as now Cindy has to find a place to put it. (I gave her permission to relegate it to the garage or turn it into yard art.)
But I really do appreciate the patience Cindy showed me and I wish her the best of luck in her future ventures. I’m not a good enough writer to expect special treatment, and I’ve always pushed past the point of reasonable. So it means a lot when someone tolerates that situation and doesn’t make me feel guilty about it.
I don’t know if Cindy ever got a trophy for past accomplishments — I hope she did. I just hope the one I gave her is bigger. In the world of trophies, the bigger the trophy, the bigger the accomplishment. And putting up with me was quite an accomplishment.
The final trophy for Cindy.
I have a feeling the novelty of a trophy with so many unusual parts will wear off pretty quickly and the focus will shift to how much dust it attracts. That’s when Cindy and I will both conclude that the box of Sees candy may have been the better choice.
This article was last modified on May 18, 2023
This article was first published on March 20, 2008
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
