Like so many, our best neighbor in school had wealthy parents & he typically had the newest & latest gadgets & toys every year.
I wasn’t jealous because I knew that his parents were laboring themselves to death to maintain their wealth & our parents weren’t exactly struggling financially either, so I still acquired nice toys & gifts on holidays & birthdays.
Instead, I enjoyed hanging out with our neighbor because it meant playing in an air conditioned tree new home in the Summer while playing video games in his amazing basement game room in the winter. And he had the best game consoles too, right when they were released to the greater public. When he was sleepy of a game, especially for Gameboy, he would typically give it to myself and others or his younger sibling. You can’t be jealous of something when the person is so generous with sharing their bounty. By the time all of us got our licenses at 16, I was looking for ancient cars that needed some work but our best neighbor got a brand new sedan that was the first of its kind that I had seen with a digital control component on the dashboard. Until that point, I had only seen temperature controls for car air conditionings & oil oil furnaces that are a dial or a slider that goes from zero to numerous. He could set the temperature in the car to 78 degrees & it would tell the cooling system or heat to run according to that setting. I was impressed with his car’s heating & cooling idea to say the least.