Rememberment, Chapter IX: Wonders of Technology and Imagination

My second grade started in a new school. It was just slightly closer to my home, but enough so that I was no longer eligible to travel there by taxi and had to take the bus instead. This rightfully worried my parents, as it meant I had to cross the dangerous road in the morning to get to the bus stop. But I was a Good Boy, and took extra care so I would not end up as a broken heap at the side of the road. After all, I knew what that looked like.

The new school was bigger than the old one, and it was a proper school building too unlike the last one. This one housed the second, third and fourth grades, with two groups of students for each. We still had the same teacher from first grade which made me happy, and we also had a couple of new kids in our class. One of them was Lauri, who I became friends with.

There was a small piece of forest right next to the school building, which soon became the favourite place for all the kids to play in during breaks. It was like a wonderful little imaginary town with various little huts built with sticks and branches. Some of them served as little homes, others were shops (where one could buy a delicious moss burger, for example) and there were also services like a hospital, a bank, a police station and a prison. Birchbark and mica served as money and gold.

Beside the main building there was also a secondary one, which housed a workshop for woodworking classes. There was also a small gymnasium with a stage for school plays. Our teacher seemed very fond of theatre, and had us write our own plays which we would then act out on the stage. It was great fun and made me dream of becoming an actor.

One day, while on a family visit to see my third cousins, they said that they had a new kind of game. "It's played on the TV" they said. They had a small black and white TV in their kitchen, and connected to it was a box with two controllers, with which the players could move two paddles on the screen to try and bounce a ball behind each other. I found it amazing that you could make things move on the telly.

One can only wonder what they still come up with.

But later on when I visited my new friend Lauri, he showed me something similar but even more amazing. His dad had bought a "computer" which you could use for all kinds of things. I was mesmerized. It was like something out of a sci-fi show, and the games on it were even better.

They even had colours.

There was something about those games that instantly triggered a burning passion in me. I just had to acquire a computer of my own somehow. But it turned out that those were rather expensive, and my family was poor. 

I still had to annoy my parents for a few years with my begging before I finally got one.