Daughter

These are stories about our eldest daughter.

She wants to play guitar in a rock band. She wants to surf and ride skateboards, sell her art in the plaza, become a scientist and play football with the boys. She loves riding her bike through the forest even as the bats and ghosts and witches give chase. Run!

She’s got a great solution to litter: pick it up!

Scoop

AS A REPORTER, I am always on the lookout for stories. So I perked up when my eldest daughter started telling me about the stories she was hearing from her classmates. “In Mar del Plata,” the seven year old told me, “there are ghosts.” “Go on,” I said. “My friends have heard them when they’re [...]

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How to Get to Heaven – And Back

MY ELDEST DAUGHTER has figured out how to get to heaven and back. “It’s up there,” the seven year old tells me, pointing up to the stars. “Way up there.” I look up. “I’m going to go one day,” she says. She tells me that she will visit Tomas, our cat who died of old [...]

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Let Down Your Hair

AT SEVEN AND the world before you, it is good to listen to what’s around. To stop and open your eyes and ears. That’s what my seven-year-old daughter told me. There she is, up there. She’s sat in the middle of the sandy lane in the forest behind our house on the coast. She’s sat [...]

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Go Green

“WE HAVE TWO homes, one here in Pinamar and another in Buenos Aires,” my six-year-old daughter told her younger brother as we drove to the beach in Pinamar, where we are spending the summer away from the big city. “But really we have a third home: the planet. And we have to take care of [...]

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The Lucky Coin

MY ELDEST DAUGHTER found a coin and I said that’s a lucky coin and she asked if she could make a wish and I said yes. The six-year-old said she wished everything was magic. “What do you mean?” She told me that if everything was magic then we wouldn’t have to do anything. The broom [...]

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Wonka

IT CAN PAY to hang out with granddad. Company, conversation and chocolate. Early on at a Sunday afternoon get-together my six-year-old daughter spied a bag of chocolate Kinder Eggs. The find quickly became top-of-mind for her, to use a marketing term. “Egg, egg, egg,” she chanted to me in a hushed voice. She didn’t want [...]

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A Real Christmas

WE’RE SAT OUT on the porch in Pinamar and my six-year-old daughter is drawing and writing in her notebook while her younger brother and sister play in the garden with four-ton, the dog. The six-year-old stops and looks up at me and says, “How do you spell real?” I help her spell it out and [...]

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The Three Sleuths

WHEN I WAS in elementary school a mystery lay under our feet. I forgot who first told me but they must have heard it from an older kid. Grenades, guns and rockets – they and other weapons were stored in tunnels that ran under the asphalt banks at the edges of the school and probably [...]

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Into the Real

I’VE NEVER BEEN one for expensive holidays. Surfing, lolling at the beach. Walking in the hills. That’s stuff I enjoy. Skip Vegas. It’s not my party. So most of our outings here in Los Angeles, where we are on vacation from Argentina, have been priceless times at the beach, rolling down sandbanks and running in [...]

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My Little Tree-Hugger

MY MOTHER HAS often repeated a saying to express her state of hunger. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse,” she’d say after arriving home with my two brothers and me from the beach with Boogie boards, swim fins, toys and wet towels, an effort that involved taking two rather infrequent buses, a rarity [...]

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