Audi Love

clyde in arun's motorcycle helmet

In the mornings now I let my son watch an Audi video on youtube. He wants to watch the same one again and again, a guy in a blue Audi S4 gunning his engine and speeding off down the road.  He sits on the couch, still in his footed pajamas, his fists clenched by his sides in anticipation.  Vroom, he says.  He talks endlessly about cars.  For several months he slept with a model Audi R8 I bought.  It was radio controlled.  He had no idea how to work the thing and in a few weeks, because it went everywhere with him, it was ruined when he insisted it come in the bath with him.  He carries around matchbox cars, there must be fifty around the house now.  At night as I am putting him to bed, he names the cars he wants with him that night.  The blue audi, the green jaguar, the red motorbike.  Nightly there is a grand search throughout the house for these things.  When I’m in the car with him, he’ll report on the Audis we pass.  “Yellow Audi,” he’ll say.  Or, “A4.”  Once, as we were on the driveway, a couple passed by walking their dog.  My boyfriend has a red S4 and it was in the driveway that day. “Do you like my red Audi!?” he shouted after them.  They turned, maybe a bit startled.  “Oh, it’s beautiful,” the woman smiled.  “It’s fast,” he told her.  “Really really fast.” At Target he points hopefully to the toy I will not let him have, a $100 racing set that pits a Mercedes against an Audi on a track.  It says 8 years and above and since he’s 3 and I know the fate of our last remote controlled car, I say no. But it doesn’t stop him asking.

He has lately widened his interest to include motorbikes.   He has a Skuut, a little no pedals bike that he zooms around on.  His motorbike, he calls it.  The other morning while waiting for the other kids to wake up, I showed him some motorcycle stunts on YouTube.  In one, a guy crashes but miraculously manages to land on his feet.  We watched a few more videos after that, and every time he’d lean forward, staring at the screen, eyes wide:  “Is it going to crash mom?”  Later that day we went to my mom’s house and he brought his Skuut.  Coasting down the driveway, he took a tumble into her rosebushes and came out with scratches on his face.  He cried and cried.  Finally he let me have a good look at his face, tears streaming down it.  “Wow, looks like you were in a motorbike crash!”  I said.  He liked that, and got back on his bike.