After a brief stint on the beach in the morning, we were hungry, so our hostess L called a friend of hers who owns a local wine store (Le Garage à vins in the nearby town of Le Pouliguen) to see if we could come by and taste some wine and oysters. He was closed, but was having a private lunch with the wine makers of some of his featured biological wines from the D'Anjou region, and invited us to come by. I'll tell you more about the wine makers and the food and wine we tasted in a later post.
As the store owner and his wife were busy cleaning up and the wine makers and their wives were carrying boxes of wine to their vans and packing up for their trips back to their vineyards (they had stayed the weekend), I wandered in the cool, dark store, looking at all the wine labels and the vintage motorized bikes (click to see pictures of examples of a Mobilette and Solex) and other memorabilia.
At some point my eyes wandered to the top of a wine refrigerator and I saw a vintage toy that drew me in. There was something about it that was vaguely familiar. I was having trouble pushing aside the cobwebs of my childhood until my body acted of its own accord. Nobody was looking as I slowly reached up and gently put my hand on its steering wheel, turning it left, then right. I pushed the on-column gear shift up, then back down. "Whoah," I breathed. "Look at this, G," I said. "I think I had this toy when I was little." She came over and was more brave than me. She got up on a stool and looked at it. She told the owner of the store that I thought I had the toy when I was young and his eyes lit up. It had been his toy when he was a boy. He's 52 and I'm 53 years old.I still don't know if it was my toy, or more likely, belonged to one of my brothers and I was allowed (or more likely, not allowed) to play with it. I'll send a link to this post to my brothers and see what they can remember. It just seems like it would be a boy toy, versus my girly Easy-Bake Oven which my Dad and family friend Mr. Saccas assembled in our basement one Chivas-scented Christmas eve, while we children slept soundly in our beds, dreaming of Tinker Taw (my name for Santa Claus). My Dad and Mr. Saccas later admitted to taking one of the cake mixes and instead of adding water they added Scotch and slid the tiny little liquor-soaked cake under the Easy-Bake's powerful light bulb "to make sure the oven was working."
As G teetered on her stool, she peered at the emblems and logos while I took more pictures. There was a "deluxe" emblem on it and G said another emblem said Deluxe Corp., Reading, PA. I grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and Reading was not far from me. How this toy was sold in France, I'm not sure. I came back to our lovely vacation home and did some research on the internets. I found out that it was called the Playmobile Dashboard. One recently sold on eBay for about $450 and another, a store display model, for almost $3000.
It's so interesting to me that I had a body memory of the toy before I had a visual memory. My body remembered that the windshield wipers actually worked and so did the radio buttons.
Later, the store owner took the toy down and we took some pictures of the two of us old fogies "driving" it.
