“I could eat a forest.”
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 in Los Angeles, the land of the car.
The exclamation of such a state of starvation caught on.
So the other day as I walked home with my wife and three children from the beach in Pinamar to our house in the pine trees, I said it out loud. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”
My eldest daughter laughed at the connotation.
“Yeah,” the six-year-old said, still chuckling. “I’m so hungry I could eat a tree. Two trees. All of the trees. The whole forest.”
She paused for a second to gaze at the pine trees around us, with the branches and needles fluttering in the wind under the blue sky and warm sun.
“But then we wouldn’t have any more trees and that wouldn’t be good. We have to help the planet,” she said.
So we had big bowls of soup and large pieces of bread and butter and then popcorn while watching a DVD, followed by milky tea.
The trees still standing and the horses are off the hook.
My two eldest children are upstairs in their room rolling around, wrestling, playing – and plotting. I walked by the door and paused to listen.
“You know what’d be great,” the six-year-old girl says to her brother. “If we had everybody’s money. That’d be great because then we could buy anything we wanted.”
“Yeah,” says the four-year-old boy.
“We could buy clothes and toys and baseballs. Anything at all. Everything. We could buy everything that we see in the toy store. That’d be really great.”
“Yeah.”
It’s no use interrupting their youthful dreaming with a lecture on money and how it can’t buy happiness. No, not now. That’s because I’ve got caught up in the dreaming too. A few extra dollars would sure be helpful right now. And why not? I think. I’d sure love a new surfboard and one of those big skateboards. And I’d love to pick up a dozen new books to delve into for hours on end.
The kids are now walking out of their bedroom door and slowly going down the stairs, seemingly on the sly, trying not to be noticed, trying not look at me. They’re whistling and their hands are stuffed deep into their pockets.
How cute, I think.
And then I think, “Uh oh, where’s my wallet.”
Dire circumstances call for dire measures.
In this day, making an extra buck can mean hitting the streets even harder, as the global economic crisis makes it tougher to get a job or higher pay or a freelance assignment.
No problem, says my six-year-old daughter, smiling widely.
She has two loose teeth.
See, she says, wiggling one and then the other.
So, she tells me, if she falls really hard face first on the sidewalk then the loose teeth will fall out and the Tooth Fairy will come while she is asleep and leave her a few coins. Maybe even a dollar bill. That’ll sure help, won’t it?
I’d better keep my eye on her – and avoid getting too hard up so I don’t have to pound the pavement myself.