The Tin Man Saga

  The other day as I was waiting for the release of classes, I observed several young boys playing together on the playground. Sitting there, my mind was teleported back to a place in time that I remember the neighborhood kids playing together in my back yard.  photo by Joao Rafael I was raised in a certain part of the city, closest to the river and therefore our back yard was not exactly flat, grassy, and without thorns. Regardless of what small obstacles we faced, we always found a way to make things fun and enjoyable. We would pretend my back yard was a fortress and castle we had to defend against the bad guys. It was an army war zone where children would find the perfect shaped stick to become our Luger pistol or machine gun with which to annihilate the enemy. There were about 12 kids playing and so we had a come up with two teams to portray the bad guys and the good guys, then after a while, we would switch sides. It was no big deal to disagree as to which side one would ...