The damn phone alarm’s upbeat song woke me from a doozy of a dream.

Right at the climax of THAT dream again. Frankly, at this age I probably shouldn’t be having that dream again. But boys will be boys.

It goes like this: I stride confidently up to the construction site foreman. I’m wearing a yellow hardhat and one of those neon greenish yellow vests that a drunk person from OSHA signed into law.

I nod toward the massive yellow front-end loader, surrounded at the corners by the knobbiest tires — as tall as an imposter’s colorful hard hat.

“Are the keys in it?” I ask, like operate one of these contraptions daily.

“And who are you again?” asks the frowning foreman.

“I’m Steve, Chief Earth Mover. I’ll take over from here.”

The confused foreman and a couple or 10 other curious union members pause from their rigorous chores to watch me struggle up the loader’s staircase and stumble into the cockpit. I scout my surroundings and fire up the multi-ton front-end loader.

The cavernous rectangular bucket is big enough to scoop a VW bus without scraping either bumper. Or if no bus is available — each scoop should be good for an acre or two of topsoil.

There is a key and it works. The big ol’ diesel roars to life, spewing thick black smoke to the heavens. An off-road version of what we rednecks call rolling coal.

After a spell of fumbling with rods and bumpers, I stumble on the lever I was actually looking for. I drop the bucket to the ground with a thunderous thud.

I tap the throttle enough times to place me at the top of the EPA’s Most Wanted List. With the RPM’s close to those of a Kawasaki Ninja, I set my gaze straight on my target — a 20-foot mountain of soil. Those hard-working union fellas took a step back.

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for since I was just a … jingle-dingle-dingle-jingle shriekarooni goes the phone alarm. And my lovely dream has veered off the rails into the cemetery of unfinished dreams.

They say you can’t dream your own death. Perhaps this explains my brief dream ending so abruptly. If only it had started sooner. It’s what I get for buying expired Benadryl at the Dollar Scholar.

I’m a hundred yards shy of knowing precisely what caused that dream. But I have a theory.

A few nights earlier I was hard at work perusing every item on Fecebook’s Marketplace and, among the 819 items I vowed to purchase someday, was a humdinger of an all-steel bright yellow-with-black-lettering Tonka front-end loader. Just like the one I wore out as a kid. If you were a boy in the 1970s, your full-time job was driving Tonkas. Or watching your parents on trial for child neglect for not buying you a bulldozer or Jeep.

Mine even had the handle that raised and dumped the bucket. I was the most prolific road engineer/builder in the neighborhood thanks to the first, and larger, replacement sandbox my dad built for my brother Bruce, me and the occasional shameless cat who treated our Grand Methuen Dunes as its grand toilet.

My dad built the 8×8-foot sandbox with pine boards, complete with triangular seats at the corners, then painted pine green — evidently cats’ favorite color. A few days after its completion, my best friend Billy Brown and I stepped off the school bus and gasped in unison. There in the center of the sandbox was the actual sand. A 3-foot mound of fine white sand delivered by dump truck while we were at the Howe School daydreaming of dismissal.

The sand had cascaded down the main mountain and flowed to every corner. Our own Hampton Beach without all the arrests.
Billy darted into his house and appeared back at the rendezvous sandbox staging area with an armload of Tonkas. I did the same. In under a minute.

The sand was moist that day, my friends. Billy and I took turns with that big ol’ loader scooping, dumping, paving and ramming each others’ knees. Other rigs rotated in and out of deployment, but that big loader was running around the clock … or until Mom hollered again about supper. By then we’d constructed enough roadways, tunnels and parking spaces to provide backup to the real Boston.

Anything that could be shaped with slightly damp sand. When the hot sun dried out our sandy canvas, we’d drag the hose over for a thorough spritzing. We occasionally over-spritzed (see also Great Howe Street Flood). That Tonka was the GMC of sandbox construction equipment — solid, dependable, good looking.

In the following weeks we built a sand replica of Star Speedway, complete with pit road and a mass-casualty triage center for the Hot Wheels and Johnny Lightnings that were pushed through the sand three-abreast until their scheduled 20-car pileup in Turn 3.

That’s all Ollie Silva in the big 0 needed to wheel to a 1-lap victory, leaving deep furrows down the straight-away.

On the days when the entire field of cars was in the pits for unclogging, we fired up that loader to construct 4-foot-wide berms at opposing ends of the sandbox. Then we’d position my green plastic army men along the crest. Billy and I alternately fired baseball-size rocks until the volley had neutralized each soldier and the wall resembled Cape Cod after a hurricane.

That sandbox, our fleets of Tonkas and especially that brute front-end loader provided endless fun day after day, year after year and provided a fun alternative to homework and routine cat maintenance.

However, leaving metal Tonkas outdoor year-round in New England’s climate ensured the rusting fleet would eventually land in the dump.

I hadn’t thought about our metallic companions for decades — until I spotted that one for sale on Marketplace.

I figured that would conclude my reminiscing. And then I spotted the Vertibird last night — you know, the motorized helicopter on a tether with real blades that spun at the speed of flight.

One Benadryl nap and I should collect all the memories of chopper mayhem at Howe Street and our Mohawk-ed cat.