Matchbox Cars

We are who we were yesterday, last week, forty years ago. Some of us learn, change, and become robust because of it. Some of us are stubborn. We don't realize that change is a blessing. I'm one of the latter, stiff-necked, strong, steady, and unwavering as an oak. And we know, don't we, that hardwoods are brittle, and break.

As a kid, I had my ways. My friends enjoyed whatever led the popular parade. They idolized Wilt Chamberlain and were mad for the fresh, new NFL. Me? Basketball was an odd sport. Men (or boys) ran up and down the court, heaving at hoops and mostly missing, doing the same over and over to predictable results. Accessible, basketball was. Easy to follow. Football was the same. I preferred bowling, the chess game of sports, where both athlete and spectator are forced to use their heads. Always with the head, that was me.

I loved the complexity of bowling, the physics of it. What control is necessary to bull through a sweaty blockade of pre-teens to drop a basketball through a circle? Okay, so there's some control necessary. I know the hoop is only slightly wider than the circumference of the ball. I realize that, don't throw a fit. But you don't have to hit the net every time, and even gifted players rarely succeed more than fifty per cent of the time.

But bowling. Every run at the lane matters. Every read of the ball/floor dynamic can win or lose a game. And every turn at the lane is different. Each time you stand at the line becomes a new equation involving pins, their positions, the lay of the lane, the friction of the wood floor, and even the fit and glide of your shoes. It's as beautiful and challenging as a symphony. Bowling is the mind at work.

Not every mind is interested in labor. My middle school friends went religious over toy cars. Open warfare fell upon the neighborhood over the dubious advantages of Jonny Lightning and Hot Wheels. Which were faster, cooler, and more freaking awesome than the competition? I held those dilettantes of tiny two-inch cars in disdain. Theirs were cheap, pedestrian afterthoughts of a miniature toy art form. And, regardless of their brand, they were essentially identical.

The only true hand-powered automobile is Matchbox, the car from which all others were copied. Matchbox cars are authentic, painstakingly patterned after real vehicles in the real world. I had a Rambler American exactly like my mom's four-cylinder rolling wreck, except that my Matchbox was a different color, fit in my palm, and dependably moved when I applied power. I had a Pontiac Bonneville with flaring rear quarter panels and jutting chrome bumpers, not the random, wild, unrealistic projections thrown onto Hot Wheels and Jonny Lightning monstrosities. My Bonneville and my Rambler had doors and hoods that opened. How many Hot Wheels had doors at all?

Just as my mind opened on the bowling alley, carrying me through idle play, then high school and league competition, my Matchbox cars kept my brain in gear. I collected whole lines of make and model. I imagined stories starring my vehicles and built streets of cardboard and Legos on which to drive my treasures. With a second-hand Super-8 camera, I made stop-motion movies of my cars on busy streets. They maneuvered over pretend pavement between fabricated buildings, with green Army men as pedestrians on paper sidewalks. I took pains to make it all (almost) to scale. Thanks to stop-motion, my cars, more than the dopey competition, could move of their own volition.

It's important to move, to move forward without being corrupted by the world. I believe that wholeheartedly. I just wish that I also believed I should have a lick of sense. If I had adopted such a view, if I had held within me the capacity to grant my old, conformist friends an ounce of wisdom, maybe I wouldn't be where I am. Maybe that night of the city league championships wouldn't have mattered so much to me. My friends thought it silly to go out in such weather for such an odd hobby. I could bowl any night, they told me. Why risk doing so during a raging snowstorm? Stay home, dude. Watch the game. Kobe's hot tonight.

So, because it wasn't a hobby, because it was practically religion, I trudged outside to shovel free my '58 Bonneville. I climbed behind the wheel and patted the matching Bonneville Matchbox glued to the dash. I did not fasten my seatbelt. '58 Bonnevilles didn't come with them. My classic car was cherry.

So now I've learned a lesson, but lessons learned too late are just that, too late. Maybe I won't be so judgmental of the loves of others, even if those loves are obviously transient, not really love at all. Maybe, just maybe, the crowd has a point.

I don't know if I really accept that notion. It seems cogent enough right now, but the mind has inertia. It takes time to change.

But change happens nonetheless. I can see it in me, in my doubt and regret. I see it in the faded yearnings that once drove my life. While my childhood friends dreamed of stardom on the gridiron or the basketball court, they ended up ordinary people in ordinary lives watching the stars on TV. I, on the other hand, had stayed true to my dreams. I had risen in the bowling rankings to that moment that night of the storm, when I might have been the star on TV. I recall that rise to near fame, that thirst for possibilities and its sudden truncation every time I ask across the counter, "What size shoes?” and, “You'd like a soda with that?"

We are who we were yesterday, last week, forty years ago. Some of us learn, change, and become more robust. Some of us just change.

Some of us who change drive wheelchairs rather than cars.