I am going to try again to write a short one.

I have a great love for the word toys, which being perhaps the most unserious and inoffensive word in the English language, must reveal something unflattering in the character of a 36-year old man. Nonetheless whenever I see it written or otherwise spelled out in an elegant or poignant context I am able in that instant to come to some peace with the world for the purity of experience, or attachment, or hopefulness, or whatever it is that I have come to associate so strongly with this word (Old Eng. toye meaning dalliance according to my excellent 1965 Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary). A few years back when I used to go down to Brookline, Mass every week for French lessons, there was a very small store near Coolidge Corner on one of the big streets there (Franklin Street perhaps?) that was always closed in the evening, and always dark, but which one could see through the window was packed ceiling to floor with all kinds of stuff, one of those cramped, narrow-aisled, 40s or 50s type set-ups, that had an brown and white awning around the door that had TOYS written on it and nothing else, a lone streetlamp shining on it, and that was what caused me to think "what a lovely little word" for the first time.