Okay, so the time period we're talking about isn't exactly childhood. It started there and continued to, well, occasionally now. Since my dad did and still does pretty strenuous work as a mail man, he used to ask me to massage his back when he came home. The problem is, when you're and eight year old kid, it's hard to do anything to very meaningfully physically affect an adult save for resorting to violence. So one day, we were at the swap meet at the Orange County Fairgrounds (which is really not a traditional swap meet, more like an outdoor gathering of legitimate businesses), and we came across a booth with massage tables set up. However, its proprietors weren't selling massages--they were selling Mr. Happy, the joyful-looking wooden character shown above. The massages they gave that day were free, basically trials of how Mr. Happy could be used to give a deep-pressure massage without having to have fingers strong enough to crack walnuts. Suffice to say that we gave them good business; I don't recall how many we bought that first day, but over the years, we bought one for every family member as a gift for some occasion.
As someone who used Mr. Happy, I can definitely say that he made rubbing my dad's back a lot easier since I could just put my body weight into it. Not being a muscular child ended up being okay, and (presumably) the massages got better as I got older and stronger. At some point, I stopped using it since I could give better massages without it, but I won't forget Mr. Happy or the Swap Meet, which is another story entirely.
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