- Joined
- Oct 20, 2024
- Messages
- 3,554
- Solutions
- 17
- Reaction score
- 11,355
- Points
- 6,177
- Location
- Buenos Aires, Argentina 🇦🇷❗
I remember how one day I was very upset about something that only a child can find bothersome... something so meaningless that I don't even remember what it was anymore. I was very angry about whatever that was, though, and because I was so impossibly mad about the whole thing, my grandpa came out of his sacred place: the tool shed he had built with his own hands and in which he spent countless hours listening to old records and to AM talk shows on the radio, arguing with the invisible hosts about the current events that were shaping our world. He loved the solitude of his little shelter and rarely let anything get in the way of his personal time in there. He was absolutely right about that, too, since he had earned every second of solitude after a life spent working on a myriad of jobs just to avoid the horrendous fate of starvation. Even at the tender age of 11 he wasn't working towards the future, he was fighting for the privilege of surviving the present. And so, I knew I was in trouble when my childish tantrum got him to stop resting.
But to my surprise, he wasn't mad... he wasn't even bothered by any of that, really. He asked me if I was ok, then took me inside and sat me right beside him as he worked fixing a chair he had built out of scrap wood that someone else had thrown away earlier that week. He grabbed a saw and hammer, worked for a while, then turned to face me and asked me why I was wasting so much time and energy crying over something so small when there were so many adventures to be had. For some reason that really struck a chord with me, and I have kept that somewhere in the back of my mind eve-since. It was genuinely good advise, and also how I approached every situation after that.
Yes, it was all about the Adventure Of Living.
Our first stop? The Winter of 99.
It's almost impossible to describe just how chaotic and bizarre that year was for me... it was a time of change, of breaking out of my shell; of blossoming. The 1998 FIFA World Cup and the advent of Pokemon had made me get close to many of my classmates, those strangers I had known for years at that point but that I didn't know anything about through the shared misery of watching our national squad getting knocked out of the tournament by an old rival, and also through the wildly imaginative nature of Ash's journey through a world we really wanted to be a part of. Shared interests led to conversations, conversations led to invitations, and invitations cemented friendships that are still going strong to this day, even though most of us can't afford to spare even a minute away from our worldly obligations to say hi and visit each other.
Ninety-Nine was also a year of high stakes, because... well, whatever would end up happening after December 31st turned into January 1st, would be the last time it was gonna happen, whether it was the end of the year, the end of the decade, the end of the millennium or the end of the world. We often talked about that, echoing words and fears we didn't understand and seeing signs of "the end" everywhere -- a red sunset was surely to be the calling card of the end times. An unseasonable rain was an "unmistakable" warning sign. Even something as simple as a computer freezing was enough to send us into a frenzy. We had really bought into those end world theories that plagued the times... and we did so because the adults around us seemed to be just as scared as we were.
Regardless of how crazy all of that was, we really wanted to make it count ("it" being this huge, ominous unknown) and so we asked our parents to take us places, leaving no weekend wasted... if something was going to go down, we wanted to at least have the satisfaction of having given it our all before it happened.
Our favorite hang out was a place called Parque Roca, a hidden wonderland that could only be reached after traveling by car for at least an hour, leaving the main roads behind after crossing an impressive, fairy tale-like bridge that seemed to signal us entering another world. We would stare in awe at all the sights that accompanied us as the car zoomed by the craziest of things, like a shack hanging at the edge of a river and barely being above the water, swaying with the wind and always threatening to fall in, but never actually doing so. Or the only other man-made structure on the whole trip: a huge Coca-Cola factory that never went unnoticed and that we kept devising plans to rob, thinking with all our child-like might about daring ploys to break in and steal several bottles, dodging security guards and getting into where the main recipe was stored, just so we could make our version of that carbonated nectar of the gods. It was... every bit as ridiculous as it sounds, but we loved passing the time just thinking about those imaginary exploits, those declarations of our strategic minds and fearless hearts. There is something to be said about childhood, and about the way friendship works when you are all young, carefree and in love with the idea of being together. It's the purest form of human interaction you'd get to experience, and one that's over way too soon, often racing by before we even get to appreciate it fully.
Getting into the park was the real treasure, though.
That place was every bit what it promised to be: a secluded Nirvana, a paradise of green that seemed indifferent to the world of around it, surviving in its most natural form as everything else was made of cement and smelled of petroleum. It was almost its very own best analogy, as it was surrounded by a professional race track whose loud engine noises and frantic cheering crowds barely even registered in our end. It was an oasis of tranquility in the middle of a desert of chaos.
We loved exploring every inch of that place... crawling under bushes, climbing above trees, jumping around the remnants of what used to be human constructions, steely bones that were in the process of being retaken by nature. The solitude of the place also allowed us to really hear each other for the first time, and it was amazing how much we actually learned about our friends by doing so.
I learned that my two best friends were afraid of playing portable devises in the car because both of them had thrown up by doing so when in road trips. I learned that one of them was actually terrified of becoming an older brother, because both of his parents worked endless shifts and now he was going to be responsible for cooking and cleaning (at nine-years-old!). I also learned that my other friend's seemingly ideal life wasn't so, telling me of how often he would get in trouble for the stupidest, most innocent things. About how his parents were really banking in his future development as an athlete and how much they were counting on him to do so, pushing him to the limit until the sole idea of going to practice sounded sickening to him. And me? I told them all about my prison without bars, about how absolutely scared I was about the recent developments in my household. Those chats, enlightening as they were, were abandoned quickly, though, tossed aside as we didn't want to taint those precious weekends thinking about a future that might not even matter come December. And so, we did what we did best: we played.
We played football like we were in the middle of the aforementioned World Cup, devising the craziest of plays and kicking the ball like our lives depended on it. Other times we would show our age by trying to pull the same crazy maneuvers that they did on Captain Tsuaba/Supercampeones, our favorite football-themed anime at the time, resulting on us hurting each other by being impossibly stupid... and also bouncing right back, because it is a known fact that kids are made of some indestructible material akin to rubber that is almost impossible to defeat.
We would also do something that I'm sure must have passed as exercise: we would grab one of our fancy digital watches, set the timer and just run laps around the place, seeing just how many we could complete before collapsing, our seemingly-endless batteries depleted after one afternoon of intense, never-ending fun. It's funny, really... because the whole thing became sort of a running joke after I committed the stupid mistake of asking how much time we had managed after exactly seventeen seconds had passed, because I had just eaten three burgers and didn't feel like running. Man, they never let me live that one down, and it STILL comes up in conversation, its "fangs" long gone.
We had so much fun wolfing down incredible amounts of asado, playing hide-and-seek, practicing movements meant for immortal, drawn beings and running around like headless chickens that our only enemy in those weekends was the Sun itself.
It was nothing short of torturous seeing move across the sky, dimming the lights as it gradually went to set below the horizon, tagging in the Moon just to signal the end of our fun. We hated the orange glows and the growing shadows that seemed to come out of nowhere and envelop our domains with the cold embrace of night... and we hated even more the fact that my friend's parents would yell for us to pack up and get in the car as soon as the first stars showed up.
In a strange twist of events, 1999 was indeed the end of something... not the end of the world, and not even the end of childhood, but the end of innocence, as just two years later the country would be shocked to its very core and the kind of fun we used to have become prohibitive after parents simply couldn't afford to fill the gas tanks and feed a bunch of kids for one afternoon... not if they wanted to survive themselves.
But, just like my grandpa once said, there was no use crying over something like that when so many adventures still laid ahead. After all, it was just another sunset.
But to my surprise, he wasn't mad... he wasn't even bothered by any of that, really. He asked me if I was ok, then took me inside and sat me right beside him as he worked fixing a chair he had built out of scrap wood that someone else had thrown away earlier that week. He grabbed a saw and hammer, worked for a while, then turned to face me and asked me why I was wasting so much time and energy crying over something so small when there were so many adventures to be had. For some reason that really struck a chord with me, and I have kept that somewhere in the back of my mind eve-since. It was genuinely good advise, and also how I approached every situation after that.
Yes, it was all about the Adventure Of Living.
Our first stop? The Winter of 99.
It's almost impossible to describe just how chaotic and bizarre that year was for me... it was a time of change, of breaking out of my shell; of blossoming. The 1998 FIFA World Cup and the advent of Pokemon had made me get close to many of my classmates, those strangers I had known for years at that point but that I didn't know anything about through the shared misery of watching our national squad getting knocked out of the tournament by an old rival, and also through the wildly imaginative nature of Ash's journey through a world we really wanted to be a part of. Shared interests led to conversations, conversations led to invitations, and invitations cemented friendships that are still going strong to this day, even though most of us can't afford to spare even a minute away from our worldly obligations to say hi and visit each other.
Ninety-Nine was also a year of high stakes, because... well, whatever would end up happening after December 31st turned into January 1st, would be the last time it was gonna happen, whether it was the end of the year, the end of the decade, the end of the millennium or the end of the world. We often talked about that, echoing words and fears we didn't understand and seeing signs of "the end" everywhere -- a red sunset was surely to be the calling card of the end times. An unseasonable rain was an "unmistakable" warning sign. Even something as simple as a computer freezing was enough to send us into a frenzy. We had really bought into those end world theories that plagued the times... and we did so because the adults around us seemed to be just as scared as we were.
Regardless of how crazy all of that was, we really wanted to make it count ("it" being this huge, ominous unknown) and so we asked our parents to take us places, leaving no weekend wasted... if something was going to go down, we wanted to at least have the satisfaction of having given it our all before it happened.
Our favorite hang out was a place called Parque Roca, a hidden wonderland that could only be reached after traveling by car for at least an hour, leaving the main roads behind after crossing an impressive, fairy tale-like bridge that seemed to signal us entering another world. We would stare in awe at all the sights that accompanied us as the car zoomed by the craziest of things, like a shack hanging at the edge of a river and barely being above the water, swaying with the wind and always threatening to fall in, but never actually doing so. Or the only other man-made structure on the whole trip: a huge Coca-Cola factory that never went unnoticed and that we kept devising plans to rob, thinking with all our child-like might about daring ploys to break in and steal several bottles, dodging security guards and getting into where the main recipe was stored, just so we could make our version of that carbonated nectar of the gods. It was... every bit as ridiculous as it sounds, but we loved passing the time just thinking about those imaginary exploits, those declarations of our strategic minds and fearless hearts. There is something to be said about childhood, and about the way friendship works when you are all young, carefree and in love with the idea of being together. It's the purest form of human interaction you'd get to experience, and one that's over way too soon, often racing by before we even get to appreciate it fully.
Getting into the park was the real treasure, though.
That place was every bit what it promised to be: a secluded Nirvana, a paradise of green that seemed indifferent to the world of around it, surviving in its most natural form as everything else was made of cement and smelled of petroleum. It was almost its very own best analogy, as it was surrounded by a professional race track whose loud engine noises and frantic cheering crowds barely even registered in our end. It was an oasis of tranquility in the middle of a desert of chaos.
We loved exploring every inch of that place... crawling under bushes, climbing above trees, jumping around the remnants of what used to be human constructions, steely bones that were in the process of being retaken by nature. The solitude of the place also allowed us to really hear each other for the first time, and it was amazing how much we actually learned about our friends by doing so.
I learned that my two best friends were afraid of playing portable devises in the car because both of them had thrown up by doing so when in road trips. I learned that one of them was actually terrified of becoming an older brother, because both of his parents worked endless shifts and now he was going to be responsible for cooking and cleaning (at nine-years-old!). I also learned that my other friend's seemingly ideal life wasn't so, telling me of how often he would get in trouble for the stupidest, most innocent things. About how his parents were really banking in his future development as an athlete and how much they were counting on him to do so, pushing him to the limit until the sole idea of going to practice sounded sickening to him. And me? I told them all about my prison without bars, about how absolutely scared I was about the recent developments in my household. Those chats, enlightening as they were, were abandoned quickly, though, tossed aside as we didn't want to taint those precious weekends thinking about a future that might not even matter come December. And so, we did what we did best: we played.
We played football like we were in the middle of the aforementioned World Cup, devising the craziest of plays and kicking the ball like our lives depended on it. Other times we would show our age by trying to pull the same crazy maneuvers that they did on Captain Tsuaba/Supercampeones, our favorite football-themed anime at the time, resulting on us hurting each other by being impossibly stupid... and also bouncing right back, because it is a known fact that kids are made of some indestructible material akin to rubber that is almost impossible to defeat.
We would also do something that I'm sure must have passed as exercise: we would grab one of our fancy digital watches, set the timer and just run laps around the place, seeing just how many we could complete before collapsing, our seemingly-endless batteries depleted after one afternoon of intense, never-ending fun. It's funny, really... because the whole thing became sort of a running joke after I committed the stupid mistake of asking how much time we had managed after exactly seventeen seconds had passed, because I had just eaten three burgers and didn't feel like running. Man, they never let me live that one down, and it STILL comes up in conversation, its "fangs" long gone.
We had so much fun wolfing down incredible amounts of asado, playing hide-and-seek, practicing movements meant for immortal, drawn beings and running around like headless chickens that our only enemy in those weekends was the Sun itself.
It was nothing short of torturous seeing move across the sky, dimming the lights as it gradually went to set below the horizon, tagging in the Moon just to signal the end of our fun. We hated the orange glows and the growing shadows that seemed to come out of nowhere and envelop our domains with the cold embrace of night... and we hated even more the fact that my friend's parents would yell for us to pack up and get in the car as soon as the first stars showed up.
In a strange twist of events, 1999 was indeed the end of something... not the end of the world, and not even the end of childhood, but the end of innocence, as just two years later the country would be shocked to its very core and the kind of fun we used to have become prohibitive after parents simply couldn't afford to fill the gas tanks and feed a bunch of kids for one afternoon... not if they wanted to survive themselves.
But, just like my grandpa once said, there was no use crying over something like that when so many adventures still laid ahead. After all, it was just another sunset.
