At the Crossroads (1)

 
 AT THE CROSSROADS                                

By Rodrigo Padula de Oliveira

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     I moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1961.
     I was still there in 1962, the year Brazil won the World Cup, even though Pele was injured in the first game. Amarildo came in for him, and Garrincha, one of the best wingers of all time, finished top-joint scorer.
     But I didn't write about soccer in my diary. At thirteen, my preoccupations were elsewhere.
     "At gym we were throwing medicine balls," I wrote the same day as the first-round match between host Chile and Italy. "I got hit on the head, and then when I went to change, Chris H. walked by me and said, 'You sure got clobbered out there!' I looove Chris. He is soo nice."
     I also didn't write, "I left behind my childhood." But that is precisely what happened during that first year in a new country.
     Back in my childhood, I had lived in a house where I made my own bed.
     I lived on a wooded hill in a neighborhood, and we, the kids who lived there, had been free to roam, delighting in new schemes; we were transcendentalists, finding God in the swirl of the maple leaves. We went ice-skating on ponds in the winter and rode bikes, as Davy Crockett or Tonto or the Lone Ranger; back on a grassy patch of green we called the Common, we played Spud and Kick the Can.
     At night, in this childhood, I curled up in a cocoon of a messy bedroom with a cat at my feet and a dog on the floor beside me. Somewhere in the house, there was my mother and father and two brothers and a sister.
     In the winter, the radiators ticked, a strangely comforting sound. In the spring, the scent of peonies rose up through the open windows; in summer, the crickets sang.