La Loca

My old neighborhood, the neighborhood I grew up in, was one the best neighborhoods I have lived in. It wasn’t just a neighborhood but it was and is, still, a place I could call home, a place that taught me a lot of what I know today, a place that watched me grew old and took care of me. It was not a fancy place with luxury cars, big houses, and pretty landscaping; there were no shopping centers two blocks nearby, or a pools in each complex, actually there were not complexes at all. The people, my neighbors, were very charismatic, friendly, hard workers, happy people, and most important they were there when you needed them; of course not everyone who lived there at that time was a noble , honest, hardworking person; some of them would steal from other people in other places, some of them were addicted to drugs, alcohol and smoking; they were some sort of gang members, people that just made a wrong choice, that never went to school and at that time they saw stealing from other people as a shortcut, if you will, of   making money to maintain their families ( if they had one); some of them are still alive today some of them got killed by cops or gang members from another neighborhood.   My friends, they were all about my same age, we the boys, we use to play soccer almost every day, and go around the neighborhood in bicycle; we didn’t have fancy bicycles either, most of them were pre-owned by some other people and we had to fix them to make them work, but we didn’t care about it, we also used to sit, at night in some stairs right below my house, and talk about a lot of things