I miss playing in the rain. As a child, I used to line up my rubber duckies on the windowsill nearest the door facing the lawn, darting outside with an armful of my squeaky friends the very minute the first few raindrops fell. Sometimes, I'd be content if someone would just turn on the garden hose and simulate a light drizzle; the whole point of it was that my toys would get quite bored just bobbing up and down the water in my plastic tub.

I cannot, for the life of me, do these things anymore. For one, it would be quite a scene to see an eighteen-year-old running across the lawn only in her underwear. Some things just had to be outgrown, stuffed in an old box and left in the bodega. My rubber duckies were among the first few items to go into that box; the older I get, the more they had for company.

Take, for example, the battery-operated Game-N'-Watch, which I suppose is the precursor of the bigger and bulkier Nintendo Gameboy and the pocket-sized Japanese virtual pet, Tamagotchi. Of course, I was not the only one who had it hidden in my skirt pocket clear out of sight of a school authority; others had it, too. No bigger than a cassette tape, it had tiny buttons, a small screen, and an uncomplicated mission: shooting down vultures or bats, and in some cases, fighting jets and missiles. Some of them even had a version of it with a specially "advanced" feature: it could double as a squirt gun, a perfect practical joke.

There was also a bagful of jackstones in the box, which was at that time a must-have for every girl in class. I was never an expert at it, a complete klutz, actually, often ending up scampering on all fours to the farthest end of the room, where I would then fish out the wayward ball from under a shelf.

Well, if it's any consolation, I could easily wipe out the grins on those jackstone geniuses' faces whenever I challenged them to a more intellectual game of Boggle or Bingo. I was often a cube ahead in the former game, feeling smart whenever I strung the wooden letters into a word not found in any of my co-Bogglers' lists. Doubly smart and doubly thrilled was I whenever I faked a poker expression (when in fact I was on the verge of freaking out), hoping against hope that the red player won't see that I had already stacked up three white tokens, one token away from victory.

All that is left of my Boggle and Bingo set are the wooden cubes and tiles, but I still keep them in the box anyway, along with my rubber duckies. Some toys I kept for sentimental reasons eventually had to be thrown away because they have gotten sticky and gooey after years of storage, and now I feel I owe them an elegy of sorts...

The great Sticky and Squiggly Worm was by far the best Science teacher I ever had. Just by playing with it, I learned the precious scientific concept of gravity. The simple "experiment" involved dampening it a little, throwing it up the ceiling or wall (observation #1: it sticks there for a while), and watching it crawl down by itself. I also learned that one must not attempt to climb up a chair (observation #2: the chair used was unstable) to retrieve it, precisely because "what goes up must come down and hurt her behind."

Another item worthy of tribute, is this thingy-I don't remember what it's called-which usually came out in the form of a dinosaur or teddy bear. The two-inch creature grew by as much as twice or thrice its original size after having been soaked in a tub of water overnight.

Well, there is this other trivial thingy: the gummy, scented and colored dots called "kisses." I never found out what they were really made of. What I do know is that they were found in the tips of Bensia fancy pencils, and we used to put the kisses in a small container lined with cotton. The logic behind the practice was the rumor that these scented dots actually multiply overnight or in a few days if left untouched in the dark; the rumor was neither proven nor disproven, because every other day we compared our "pets" and found that some did multiply, while others didn't. The yellow ones usually did.