Spiders, Slingshots, Matchbox and Skateboards

Growing up as a child, I was as playful as any of the children in our neighborhood. I like to play a lot and I even make my own toys. Some of the toys that I made were boats made out of used rubber slippers and kites made out of stick broom and newspaper.

As a child, I liked to play a lot with spiders.  We would catch a lot of spiders around my grandmother’s house that had a variety of trees around it like guava, star apple, mango, santol, kamias and coconut trees. We kept these small spiders in match boxes with small compartments inside it to be able to accommodate several spiders. Some of my playmates even made their own spider box with glass tops so that the spiders can be seen without opening the box. When it’s time for a spider fight, we would pick out our spiders from the matchbox by using a stick from a stick broom. When two spiders meet in one stick, they would fight it out by trying to bite the opponent and eventually covering it with spider web. The loosing spider ends up in a cocoon like state, all covered with its opponent’s web. We enjoyed these spider fights, especially during summer time.

Also during the summer, when there was so much time to play, we would make our own slingshots. We would look for a guava branch that formed a letter “Y” and make it into a slingshot. A pair of rubber slings is attached with rubber bands to the two ends of the guava branch. At the other end of the pair of rubber slings is a small piece of leather for holding the stone.  We had so much fun trying to shoot with small stones the fruits of the trees around my grandmother’s house, with the use of our home made slingshots. We even played target shooting with our slingshots, with empty milk cans for our target. There were ready made slingshots that can be bought from the market, but home made slingshots are much better, for it was proudly made from scratch by its owner.

Toys that stayed with us for a long time during our childhood days were the Matchbox toy cars. Matchbox is a brand name of small toy cars which are literally the size of a matchbox. It is made of cast metal and some of the toy cars are replicas of real cars. Some even have doors or engine hoods that can be opened. There were innumerable models of cars, and we collected a good number of Matchbox toy cars. Some of my friends even had plastic tracks where these toy cars can race. Since these small cars were manually propelled, the tracks were attached to the edge of a chair or a table so that the cars can accelerate from an inclined track. These toys lasted for a long time and seldom got destroyed because they were made from hard metal. Until now I see Matchbox toy cars in the toys department of some stores.  Another brand of these small toy cars is Hot Rod, but I guess Matchbox was the original.

My playmates and I also spent a lot of time playing with our skateboards. Our house had a warehouse and machine shop beside it, where my parents worked for a fishing company. The entire warehouse had cemented floor which made it an ideal playground for us skateboarders. We would spend hours upon hours playing and racing on our skateboards. But one time, while having a race, my playmate accidentally slipped from his skateboard and bumped his head on a parked car. Without any helmet or padding on, he sustained a swollen forehead and nursed it for several days. Only then did we realize that these toys were not meant for the fast and the furious, for we can end up with broken limbs or worse.