A Letter to My Friends

I was starting to write about why I never liked playing football when I started thinking about my friends, my childhood friends, those friends you make when you are so little that you don’t recall meeting. At least that’s how I remembered it.
We were a group of kids that grew up together in a small town near Lisbon. It had a steady growth in the ’70s when many people from the former colonies returned to Portugal after civil wars started breaking there.
The farthest memories I have of getting to know any of my friends are so blurry, I can’t travel back that far. But there we were, our street was separated into small groups of buildings, and we'd made friends pretty much depending on which street you lived. For example, if my building block was part of street A, I would probably spend most of the time playing with my friends there, but would eventually play with friends from street C, but would never play with kids from street B. They were terrible, so bad! Ahahaha, just kidding, but there was a lot of rivalry between those two streets when we started playing against each other. So we played all over the place, would cover all the neighborhood, I still remember some construction happening, and we would take advantage of that. We would go inside those buildings and play with wherever there was there. Pipes, woods, nails, electrical wires, anything we could get our hands-on. I remember in Carnaval that we would get water guns. We were at war, baby!!!! Going at each other with water guns, getting soaked, and running like crazy all over the place. We used the public places as a safe haven, such as a supermarket or a store or a very commonplace inside a garage used as a shoemaker business, Mr. Gouveia, to keep us safe. And there was always a spot to refill with water, but they were scarce, and they would be near those construction places, and you needed to be careful with your water levels, or you would run out of h2O, same as a shooter with their ammo, same basic principle. I also remember the drama when some kids from a neighborhood nearby from where we lived used to come down and steal our water pistols. That was bad, and there was nothing we could do about that. We felt hopeless, and we knew that this was happening every year.
We used to get plastic pipes used for plumbing and used them as blowguns, making darts with fragile paper that we used from yellow pages phone books that were huge and readily available at the time. I loved playing that. We would hide and go after each other with that. Some of us were more ingenious and starting using small red balls from some bushes, more ecological in a sense, but they were, tiny and there was always a risk of you swallowing one of those by accident.
        I think it's our responsibility as parents to connect with our inner child to recapture those moments from when we were kids and take on the streets again!!! Ok, the levels of emotional outburst just went up a notch for a moment. I promise I'll cool down!
OK, it’s apparent at this point that we played a lot on the streets, and we were happy doing so. There are so many stories that I could stay here all day writing about them.

The purpose of all this is to say thank you to my friends that were always there. We hurt each other, hugged afterward, kissed each other at some point 😀. I’m sorry if I haven’t always been there, when you got married, when you had your first child, or when you had a break-up, when you went through a divorce, or when your mother or father passed away, when you were sick, I am sorry if I haven’t always been present.

I love you all ❤️