memories by Jorge Ramirez

My blue Bugatti was one of the first toys I ever had, I always loved cars with passion and this one was my favorite toy. My cousin gave it to me when I was little, he was a mechanic and a really good one. I used to go to his shop and he would always give me soda or make me a sandwich and showed me all the car’s parts or how he was fixing something. In Cuba there is a lot of old American cars from the 50s that still run amazing because of mechanics like my cousin. I really don’t understand how they do it but now  I realize that those cars actually run perfect and better than how they used to be. I remember I was the one that would give him the tools when he was underneath a car. I learned a lot with him, when I was like nine or ten he showed me how to change the oil and take all the wheels off and simple stuff that I actually do by myself now to my own car. me and my friends are always working on our cars and it’s really fun when we get together and learn but most of everything I know is thanks to my cousin who gave me this car.

I used take it to school every Friday and play with the other kids, it is really cool because I can open the doors, the hood and the trunk and actually see the engine and how it looks like the real one. The other kids would bring their cars too and we would always compete by throwing them and see which one ran the farthest distance without crashing or something like that. This one is part of a collection, I believe I had two more, but this one was my favorite because it was blue. This is so important for me that I brought it when I moved to Naples. It is one of my childhood’s important details and I didn’t want to lose it.  It also reminds me of how much I’ve changed, how I don’t play with it anymore and it just stands there as a concrete memory. I remember being scared of growing up and telling my mom that I didn’t want to stop playing with toys and she telling me I didn’t have to. Now I’m just old and  it’s not the same.

My Yu-Gi-Oh cards are a great memory of my childhood with no doubt. I used to have a lot but I have been giving them away since I stopped playing. I had them more like a collection thing, I just wanted to have the best cards and the ones that were used the most in the movie. My mom says that seasonal and I’m always crazy about something and when I get tired of it I move on and start doing something different. I did a lot of activities, I played chess on fifth grade and I was really obsessed with it, but I would always get tired and bored with them so I would just do something else, this game was one of the things i did for a while. I used to have DVDs with movies and all the TV shows seasons just to see how all the cards were used properly. I remember my grandma thinking that i was crazy because she didn’t know what in the world I was doing.

My best friends had cards too and when we would play against each other, things used to get really serious. I really practiced with the movies and by myself making my own strategies and getting better at them. We were always trading cards or selling g them if we didn’t want them anymore, we had our own little market. There was always new kids that I would play with, specially when this game became so popular. When they made the video game, I started playing online and there were always other people to play with. I stopped using the cards when I was in middle school since I had lost passion for the game and whenever I wanted to play I could always go to the computer. In high school I stopped playing completely, specially when I moved to US and started studying more being so far away from my mother. But this is really one of the activities I practiced the most and had a lot fun with.