Do you remember being a child? All the plays, the fun, sleeping on the couch and waking up in your bed, your favorite toys and the mornings watching cartoons. A time when we all believed in magic, Santa Claus and fairies. When the scariest thing was the dark and sometimes weird movie witches, or even the “Blonde in the Bathroom”. All these memories make us remember from our childhood with a large smile on our faces.
By the time we grow up, the only moment where we stop to think about these memories is when we are watching a Disney movie or telling our best stories to a group of friends. Her Campus Cásper Líbero wanted to hear these histories, make people remember a little bit from their own childhood, wake up their inner child again and enjoy more this Children’s Month.
Taking it from the start
As soon as we start our adult life, things start to happen so fast that we don’t even have time to stop and remember our favorite childhood moments. Caroline Camargo has already finished high school and, at 18 years old, she remembers her childhood with a huge smile on her face. From a time that isn’t this far away, she told us about games that she used to create with her brother.
Carol lived in a home with a great garden. Her house was built in the back of the land and in front of it there was an inclination in the lawn, until it got to the road. Smiling, she started to talk about the times that they used to roll down in it. Carol and her brother got a giant bucket, that was used to put water inside, to roll down in the grass. To start their adventure, one of them needed to get into the bucket and the other one pushed down. A lot of kids have already done that once in their lives, but for Carol it was even more dangerous. Her family lived next to the road and the bucket could get in the middle of the cars with her or her brother inside: “I used to live in front of a road, there were no fences, there was nothing, the risks to ending up in the middle of it, inside the bucket, was pretty high”, she said.
Caroline’s favorite fruit is strawberry, and she has a good (but not that great) memory with it. Once, to play with her brother who was older than her, she dug under a little gate that her father had put to prevent her from going out without anyone noticing: “My dad made a little gate for me, when I was a kid, that way I couldn’t escape. I used to escape to play with my older brother”. After digging under it, she went to a construction site next to her home. In her land they were building another house that was never finished.
There, she found her brother and they played together. Inside that construction in progress, there was a place with a bunch of glass, where her dad always warned to pay attention and be careful. By that time she wasn’t, and stepped on the glass. With a bloody foot, she went to the hospital. Back at home, her mom bought her a lot of strawberries, just so she could get a little more happy. Even after getting ten days in a bed, with stitches in her foot, she said it was a good memory from her childhood.
“She was only a kid” would be the perfect explanation for the next story that she told. Carol still lived in the same house, next to the road, and as she said before, there wasn’t a physical barrier as a wall or a fence between her home or the road. With a handmade little gun, made of a water pipe, balloons and beans, she used to throw beans in the cars that were passing by. “Ten years ago I picked some PVC pipes, the little ones, for water. Then I grabbed balloons, a normal one, and put it in the end of the pipe and used it as an elastic to throw the beans”, she recalled. Once, these beans broke a car window, she hid herself behind a couple of bushes and the owner of the damaged car never discovered what exactly happened that day.
Besides all these crazy stories, she still did things that children usually do. She learned with her mom how to ride a bike using her brother’s bicycle, with no training wheels, and her father let her swim in a river to teach Carol how to. “Great memories”, concludes Caroline.
The old days
What we consider as childhood today is not the same thing as in that last century. Growing up decades ago was harder, not every child could go to school or play. To help their parents, they needed to start working very early. Narceu Beluco grew up in the São Paulo countryside and, at 77 years old, he talks about how difficult it was to study at the time.
“We used to go to school barefoot”, he affirmed. Running in the hot sand was normal, so they didn’t burn their feet, and using a bag made of fabric to carry their belongings to school was a reality too. Narceu said that, when he started 4th grade, he went to Marília, a nearby city from where he lived with his family. The situation got way better when he started studying in this new school.
In that time, to get into “ginásio”, what we know today as the Segundo Fundamental in Brazil (or Middle School), they had to write a text. After one year studying in Marília, he came back to his family farm and turned in the text to enter in “ginásio”. To be able to keep going to school he needed to ride in a horse-drawn carriage for 13 kilometers, just to get to another city, Lutécia, where we would continue his education. By the time he comes back from school, he needs to hoe coffee, to help at home. And on the weekends, Narceu could be a kid a little more, playing football.
Keep your inner child alive!
Being a child is something unique, it is an unique moment in our lives that goes by so quickly that we do not even notice when it comes to an end. In different ways, we enjoy, and now memories from those days are the only thing that remember us from our inner child.
Sometimes, we need, for a second, to come back for those moments, or do something we used to do, watching a Disney movie or just telling our best memories for those we love.
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The article below was edited by Fernanda de Andrade Silva.
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