In 1965, when I was six, my parents started giving me Matchbox cars. I would get two or three on each birthday and another two or three at Christmas. I began to save my fifteen-cent-a-week allowance for them. One car cost fifty cents at the Woolworth’s, a ten-minute walk from my house. For my eighth birthday I got an Official Matchbox Collector’s Case that could hold 48 cars. Two years later I got an Official Deluxe Collector’s Case that could hold 72 cars.
I did the usual things: I drove them down the lanes of the pine floor boards in my bedroom; I lifted and dropped a blanket on my bed to create humps and folds that became hills and hill roads; I combined them with an HO train set and HO scale model houses I’d built from kits, turning left and right on notional streets, crossing the tracks safely after the train went by. I never caused them to crash down the stairs, and I always put them away in the two cases when I was done. Continue reading “Driving Matchbox cars responsibly”