Matchboxes

If your around sixty and are a boy you will probably remember Matchbox trucks. Even if you're a sixty year old girl you might remember. You may have had a brother or a cousin or a friend who had them. Maybe you had them too.

Who knows. Ultimately who cares. That's not the point.

I had Matchbox trucks. It was the highlight of my little life back then. Going, with my mother, to the store where they had the carousel which, when you turned it, revealed dozens of new, very cool, very colorful Matchbox trucks.

There were cars and bulldozers and ambulances and military jeeps and convertibles and jalopies and dumptrucks.

Oh GOD!!!

It was so exciting. I could pick out one and my mother would buy it and then I was all set. It wasn't about building a collection. I didn't care about that. It was about getting it home, making a road in the dirt in the back yard (or on the rug in winter) and reducing myself to miniature and then driving the car/truck/jeep/bulldozer all around accompanied, all the while, by the appropriate sound effects.

The sound effects were critical to the quality of the moment. But, then, have you ever met a little boy who didn't puncuate every experience with the appropriate sound effects for the moment?

I was good at it too. Just the right amount of whirr and pop and scroom. Not too much. Not too little. Just the right amount. My vehicles rocked!

Matchbox trucks. I loved 'em then and I love 'em now.

I have a friend in New York who is a high powered corporate executive. He's a wonderful guy. Very successful and just plain nice.

He's an afficionado. We had lunch once where I brought the remainders of my "collection", or as Paul Giamatti's Myles says to Maia (Virginia Madsen) in the wonderful film, Sideways, referring to his wine collection...a "gathering."

We looked at my trucks with such an affection that you would have thought we were looking at a newborn child. Love and sensitivity filled our eyes. Thoughts of our youth and generations past and legacy and history and a slight melancholy at moments seemingly gone forever.

But not so...I brought my trucks out again the other day. A yellow front end loader with gray metal wheels. A red double decker London bus. A green army transport with a Red Cross symbol on it (no doubt to carry my many wounded or decapitated or amputated or bent or crushed lead soldiers...) All "Made in England by Lesney" Real Matchbox trucks. Real collector's items. Real gems!

They were brilliant and sparkly and shiny and wonderful...even though all of the brightness, sparkle and shine is long gone after 50 years. But not in my mind.

They were, and are, no less wonderful. I love them. They remind me of those precious times with my mother who is now lost to dementia. They remind me of those dear moments with my father, who is now lost to memory, who laughed at my sound effects.

And they remind me that I am still capable of being childlike...even now with a 13 year old with her own sound effects. They remind me of those wonderful minutes I spent in my childhood...in miniature...in the dirt of my back yard...careening around corners and up hills...at breakneck speed...crashing and spinning and delivering my imaginary loads to whatever destinations I had constructed out of twigs and rocks.

I love my Matchbox trucks.

Vrooooooooom...!