One of my favorites toys as a child was my Lurch doll from the Addams Family. I liked him so much I made a stop action movie of him walking across the top of my desk. Lurch and that movie got lost somewhere during the years. I keep looking on ebay for a replacement, but they sell for over $100 and I am not willing to pay that much yet. The Addams Family was one of my favorite TV shows and I had a really cool model of their house, complete with sliding ghosts. This was my house when So and I made our Matchbox (car) cities and I had an ongoing fantasy about living in a big city in a big house. The model was the perfect place for me to live. I had a Burgundy Rolls Royce Matchbox car for fancy going out times and a dark cobalt blue HotWheels Cougar for the fast times. The best Match box city location was the planter that ran against the back of the house. It was framed with 4" wide limestone that functioned as the highway to our city. The begonias and petunias had since died and we pulled the remnants of the dead plants and sculpted the dirt into rolling hills and smooth streets complete with banked curves so we could let the cars loose and they would follow the course. We once lined the bottom of the creek that ran through the city with aluminum foil and poured some gasoline into it. We then staged a car wreck using a die cast green jeep and lit the gasoline on fire. Neighbor boy Geoff had an ambulance Matchbox and it came racing from the city to try to save the driver and passengers, unfortunately they were burned to a crisp along with the little wooden bridge we had built.
I made other houses out of Pop Tart boxes and covered them with construction paper making a quaint little town. We played in our Matchbox city many days and got lost in our little world. One day, being a bit bored with it all, we decided to make another city far away--the front yard. There had to be a highway to get from our little city to the new one so we set out to pull out the grass in a line that ran from the rear of the house to the front yard. It must have been at least 100 feet long and it took an exhausting day to build it. We ran the cars in one direction once. It was too much work and I got way too dirty crawling around on my knees. So the highway fell into disrepair and was eventually covered up by new grass.
I often see places that remind me of that little city. One is on the West Loop North just after Woodway. There is a trail that moves off to the right of the road and slips down in between the trees. You lose sight of the trail until you pass this little grove. It would make a perfect setting for real life Matchbox city. I got part of my fantasy after all. I live in a big city. The big house has taken shape as a small 350 square foot studio and I am perfectly comfortable here. I even have a yard where I could make a new little city, but I would have to get dirty again so I think I will just leave it to memories.
5 comments:
I knew one of the passengers in that die cast green jeep. OMG, I had forgotten about him dying. And now, to know that YOU may have caused his death - well it's just too much for me. Where's my Budweiser?
And, neighbor boy Geoff - he was such a cutie with that short brown hair and the piggy nose. ummmm
Piggy nose? You are a NUT!
Neighbor boy Geoff was a comic book reading boy that liked to smell his arms when reading them.....just too weird. I sure don't remember him being cute at all!!!! So didn't mention the spoons that we were always leaving out in the yard and Mother would complain about "what is happening to my spoons?" and we would look sheepishly at each other....hehe. I will never forget all that So just wrote about and also the city that was under the swingset. That one was like a desert since it was bare with no grass. Lots of dust in that city.
So
I once asked Geoff why he sniffed his wrist. He said he loved to smell the sweat mixed with the leather watchband. His sister, Delane, used to eat sand from their driveway, but that is another story.
I just had a laugh-out-loud moment over the car crash-fire disaster scene...too funny! Geoff sounds like he had the makings of a Leatherman going on at an early age.
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