Leaf out of my life #6: My toy cars!

I've always loved cars. As a young boy I used to spend hours at the fourth floor balcony watching in fascination, cars being parked or driven away. From above they looked like toy cars driven by tiny people. It was fun looking for patterns and symmetry in the way the cars were parked and I used to try and predict where the next car would be parked among the line of cars! (It was the time before internet, cellular phones, etc; I still had computer games but that needed my dad around to start it).

This craze was well-satiated by the small toy cars that my father bought for me from the local marketplace (called souk or souq in Arabic), knowing well that I loved playing with them; emulating similar car parking scenarios and patterns. But I could never have enough when it came to toy cars. I demanded a new car almost every day and often he had to go over to the souq just to get me a car. But never once did he get angry with me even if he was totally tired with my never-ending demands.

Pretty soon he had had enough. From there on, every time we went to the souq he carried a car from home in his pocket. And when I asked him for a car, he would simply ask me and my mom to wait at a distance, go over to the shop and pretend to buy a car. He would then come back and hand over the car that he had brought from home, saying that it was brand new. During the first couple of times this happened I never suspected anything. But pretty soon I had my suspicions and I asked him about it. He laughed it off saying that I just had too many cars and was getting confused with them.

It was during the next visit to the souq when I asked him for a car again. And he played through his ploy once again. When he handed over the car to me I told him that it was definitely a car that I already had at home. He tried to convince me that it was a new car that he had just bought. I turned the car around and showed him the small piece of chewing gum that I had stuck underneath the car. I told him that, just the previous day, I had stuck a small piece of chewing gum underneath all the cars I had, to find out if he was really buying me a new car! 

I don’t remember getting many cars after that again.