Matchbox 20/20

Trinamick, who is probably the most prolific, yet always entertaining blogger to whom I pay attention, and whose blog I engourage you to read every day, recently asked her readers to share what their favorite toy was from their childhoods. I started to respond when memories of mine flooded out all over my keyboard. I have a nasty habit of blogging in peoples' comment sections, and I was well on my way to doing just that when I caught myself. So this is my post about my favorite toy(s), inspired once again by another blogger.

As many boys my age in the 1970s probably did, I owned a formidable collection of Hot Wheels and Matchbox miniature cars. For anyone who might not know of these, they were cast metal cars that could fit in the palm of your hand -- or a match box, hence the name -- and were cast in the shapes of contemporary, as well as futuristic, cars of the day. Most of them had been handed down to me from my brother, the sibling next-up in the family chain. There were even a couple of Johnny Lightning cars in the box. Hot Wheels and Johnny Lightning waged commercial warfare during the late 1960s and early '70s with similar products and accessories, namely miniature likenesses of contemporary cars and flexible plastic tracks on which you could roll your car at unbelievable speeds for hours of fun! You can probably tell who won that war...who (aside from me) remembers Johnny Lightning?

While they were fun (for hours?), I usually grew tired quickly of the silly plastic tracks. I couldn't have put my finger on it then, but today I think using those tracks limited my imagination.

In warm weather I used to lie out by this big tree right next to the street in front of the house where I lived and play with my cars for hours. There were a number of bare patches of loose, dusty dirt in the grass around the base of this tree, and, using the long side of a popsicle stick, I would scrape a path along the bare patches through the tufts of grass all the way from the tree to the sidewalk. This scraped path became a country dirt "road" on which my cars could drive, meandering their way to the sidewalk, which was the "main highway." The area right near the tree was the "town," and the loose, dusty dirt patches were where the homes, businesses and the police and fire stations were. The tires of the toy cars made their own little "ruts" in the dust, which I found to be the neatest part of the whole thing.

Now you may think this is all neat and cute (unless you hate me, and you're wishing a car would have veered from the street and squished my little head before I had a chance to spawn), but I attribute this little bit of my past to my interest and attempts to be a writer. In the time since my days of "playing cars," I've noticed other little kids playing with their cars, and they all seem to do the same thing: they run the car of choice over various surfaces, making their own vocal car sound effects - tires screeching, engines racing, police siren sounds... I did all these things as well, but I also created elaborate scenes with imagined characters who engaged in dialogue and experienced conflict and resolution, though I didn't know the words for those things at the time. I had a miniature fire truck, police car (Ford LTD), two ambulances -- one British (Matchbox) and one "tricked out" (Hot Wheels) (when the British ambulance was dispatched to a crash scene, it always raced there with the classic English Hi-Lo siren blaring!), and one red Ford LTD station wagon that was always the coroner's wagon. Why? I don't know. The other cars were just what the regular townfolk drove around, making their ruts in the dust as they went about their business. And these characters interacted. Some disliked each other, some conflicted, some were in love, and others just didn't care about anyone else.

And I think that's where it started, though I didn't know anything had started until I put a few things together in my head a few years ago. Ever since I started playing with my cars there in the dirt, I quite often imagined scenarios around situations I was in or thought I might find myself in. I think we all think about what we would say if a certain situation presented itself. But I imagined whole conversations around what I would say to somebody in response to one thing, and then what they might say to that, then what would I say, and then what they might come back with, and so on.

I did this right on up through junior high and high school, and even through my stint in the Air Force, sometimes speaking the words of my dialogues out loud, just to occupy the time spent on a lonely guard post through the night.

Then I finished my four years of service and went to university. I was not required to declare a minor, but if I had, it would have been English. And so it was that English was my secondary focus, my undeclared minor, and, wishing to avoid the boring mechanics classes, I opted for writing classes. Late one spring, at registration for the fall semester, I rather haphazardly registered for a beginner's creative writing class. It was open and I got a slot. It was a few weeks later when, bored, I actually read the class description. I broke out in a cold sweat: I couldn't possibly write a short story, let alone TWO, in one semester! I have no freakin' ideas! What could I possibly write about?

Then one evening I caught the PBS documentary show "P.O.V." and its topic was cryogenic freezing. Aside from the nut jobs these people interviewed on camera, there was one supporter who said something like, "Wouldn't it be great if, when we lost a loved one to some nasty, incurable disease today, we could freeze them until a cure for their illness was found, unfreeze them a few years later, cure them of their disease, and have them back with us?"

And I thought, "Sure. That'd be great. But what if the cure isn't found for like ninety years, and th..." And WHAMMO! I had my first idea for a short story! First it was just a vague idea. I made a first attempt at writing, and writing was slow. But then a new idea hit me, and then another, and another. The next thing I knew, 6 hours had passed in the computer lab, it was going on 1:00am, my bladder was full and my joints were screaming, and I had about 75% of the story written! I had my first "flow" experience, where you become so consumed in the task at hand, so intensely concentrated, that almost everything else around you and within you is tuned out. Oddly enough that story was titled "Ice Age," though it has nothing to do with prehistoric animals or an acorn-deranged squirrel.

Next I drew upon experience, taking the legend of a haunted site at an Air Force base where I had been stationed and turning it into a first-person narrative. There were a couple other, less memorable stories written over two semesters of creative writing classes. And then I was done. No more classes. No more writing. I had faced the challenge of writing for a grade, and I had done well. I really enjoyed writing, but I felt limited by the fact that I couldn't come up with ideas to write. My nascent writing career had already peaked before I was graduated.

Shortly after graduation at the end of 1990 thoughts were swirling around in my head, and I hit on this idea for a short story. I will not share it here for paranoid fear of somebody else taking it, but it was one of those flow moments: the ideas came hard and fast, so fast I couldn't keep them straight. The longer I thought about it, the more ideas that came. Finally I had to sit down and organize the thoughts into a rough outline, otherwise I feared the idea would slip away. The more I scribbled, the more ideas hit. Before too long I realized that, even with concise, efficient writing (as I'm not prone to do, in case you hadn't noticed), if it ever was written, this little idea was going to be a novel.

Due to various reasons, such as creative burnout from my job, lack of funds for a computer (I won't write with anything else), and then a serious case of writer's block, it was more than ten years before I sat down and earnestly started chipping away, first at connecting the story's beginning elements with its end elements - I had the two and needed to connect the dots across the middle - in a clear and concise treatment, and then at the actual narrative. I'm several chapters into it now, and I feel with a couple of other writing projects I've generated for myself, and the musical goofing around I've been doing, I've kick-started the next creative surge that may take me much deeper into the novel than I am at the moment.

In other words, I feel like I'm being eaten up by the urge to write. It took starting to write this novel for me to realize that I've been "writing" all my life, with the little scenarios in my head for every little event that might happen. If I could think my way through a career change to one where I could make my living by writing in a creative way, I would do it. I've told people for the past 15 years that I couldn't imagine myself being in any field other than the one I'm in right now, but a career as a writer is the one alternative in which I could see myself.

I feel that perhaps I have unfairly teased my reader (I had a handful of readers when I started writing this post. I'm fairly sure I've bored most of them off by this point) by mentioning this great novel which I will not mention. I will dig out the old stories from my creative writing classes mentioned above, dust them off and transcribe them from hardcopy for posting here. This will take a while since the format and media on which they were written - both hardware and software - are long since obsolete.

Keep your eyes peeled, if you're at all interested, for some original short stories.

Looking for suggestions: should I post them as blog entries, or would you rather they be downloadable from links?


dassall