REALIZE A DREAM

 REALIZE A DREAM

They say remembering is living... well, then I'm living intensely. Because I keep remembering my times as a child, as a teenager... As I've said several times, I don't have many memories of the past. I keep only those that I still consider to be wonderful. A Christmas or birthday present, although rare (my parents had really meager financial resources, life was difficult at that time), was offered to us when there was a possibility. But it was something so difficult to happen, that we never expected it... in fact, at my house we didn't used to celebrate birthdays... I think I've already commented on that here. Christmas was celebrated more, of course not with all the pomp of families a little more wealthy (and who weren't that much more than us... life was hard for everyone), and it was rare for us to get a gift from "Santa Claus "... but the collaborative spirit of children is much more expansive than that of adults... and if one child had a toy, all the others did too, because they all played together. Not to mention that we created our own toy, with the materials we had at hand... fantasy was our main resource for us to feel in the dimension we wanted. Of course, the landscape at the time helped a lot... the horizon full of green, dotted with the beautiful colors of flowers and birds, which fluttered freely throughout the sky, helped us to imagine the kingdoms of fairies and others, each one more beautiful. It was a time when there wasn't even television for everyone... in my neighborhood, really, no house had "this wonderful device that brings the world into your home"... it's hard to imagine that these days, isn't it? But that was how it was then. Well, my recollection of beautiful and pleasant things (for me, of course) includes one thing that I thought was great... buses. When I was a kid, all buses were kind of rounded, very different from today, where they look more like a giant shoebox. I keep asking myself... what is going on in the minds of these designers, who don't design a single beautiful bus body, like in the old days? I remember that, when I was a teenager, I liked to admire the cars that passed by my neighborhood... the Grassi, Nicola, Incasel (by the way, there was an Incasel that was the most beautiful thing... it looked like a road bus, with the its driver's cabin separated from the rest of the hall...) When the first "square" buses appeared I was about twelve years old, more or less... the first one I saw was a Striuli Magirus Deutz, from the CMTC fleet... My God, what a beautiful car! All square, with the front all glazed, we could see the driver in full... he was paraded in a traveling window... Then came others... in my neighborhood, almost immediately, came the first Nimbus Furcare squares... my father said that passengers were afraid to board these cars right at the beginning for fear of taking the wrong bus... this at a time when identifying companies was something essential for them...

The car that most caught my attention, among all the squares in the fleet, was undoubtedly the 033, the only child of the company. It was a Bela Vista, with the door in the middle. Capacity of thirty-six seated passengers. This CAIO was simply beautiful... I wanted to pick it up, drive around in it, admire it from the inside... but this car was driven on a line a little far from my neighborhood, and the bus ticket was really expensive at that time . People complain these days, but when I was a teenager there weren't as many subsidies for tickets as there are now. In any case, as I said, my biggest wish was one day to be able to travel in that too beautiful little car, which by fate's whim never made the line in my neighborhood. But...

One day my mother was going to Santo Amaro and there we three went... me, my brother and my mother... we took a Nicola, also with the door in the middle... those were the most common cars at the time. When we were already close to Igreja Verde, the collective had a problem... "broke", as they say. The capacity was reasonable... there were few vehicles circulating along the line. And there we were waiting for another company vehicle to pass by so we could board... and guess what arrived? Himself... the 033, in all its majesty...

It was crowded for a change, but you know how it is, right? Buses are like a mother's heart... there's always room for one more... and even without having physical space for anyone else to get on, all of Nicola's people ended up boarding the 33...

For me it was a dream come true... it was the first time I was able to get into that car which, for me, was too beautiful. And so we went... as the capacity was beyond sold out, the driver went straight on, without stopping at the stops, unless someone inside the collective gave a signal to get off... after a few stops... we were already close from the Vila Iza Cemetery... finally there were benches to sit on... I managed to stay at the window... what a delight... inside the car of my dreams, sitting and still at the window, to admire the landscape passing by us ? Was there anything better? Of course.;.

When the car crossed Washington Luiz and entered Borba Gato, close to Gabriel Calfat, next to the Pocchini garage, I confess that I was sad... after all, my ride was coming to an end... and when he finally pulled up to his full stop, at Barão de Duprat, and we had to disembark, well, it was the end of the line... but I was happy to have finally managed to make a dream come true...

My mother solved the problems she had to solve at the center... Santo Amaro was the center for us... and then we returned home, this time to Incasel... it was a nice day for me, because I fulfilled my wish of riding in the car that, in principle, I would never get, and we returned home in the most beautiful car in our neighborhood...