Say such a thing? Not us. We’ve got halos over our heads.
I drove home in traffic after fetching the girls, and we got stuck in the left-hand lane and missed our turnoff.
“Oops,” I said.
Then I passed the next turnoff, unable to merge into the right-hand lane in my oversized beast (yep, I’ve moved up to an SUV from a station wagon). The blind spots are big and the windows are tinted (by the previous owner), making me feel like a CIA dork in dark sunglasses and with a telephone cord coming out of my ear.
Ok, this means get agro. So I put on my flickers and started pushing into the right-hand lane and almost hit a car. [continue reading…]
“Hey, did you hear the news, did you?”
My three children came up with a plan at the dinner table after hearing that I was going to be on the radio the next day for an interview about the news in Argentina.
“I know, I know, he’ll talk like this,” my 11-year-old daughter said, cupping her hands around her mouth and speaking in a deep and steady voice like a newsreader: “It’s a cloudy morning in Buenos Aires and there is a chance of rain.”
“Of storms!” her nine-year-old brother said, perking up after a weekend of tiring activities.
“That’s right, big storms are approaching the city,” the newsreader said. “The wind is blowing hard and the government is calling for people to stay indoors.”
“There are danger warnings!” the boy said. [continue reading…]
“Young ladies? We’re nothing of the sort. Explorers – that’s what we are!”
My wife and I pulled our loungers onto the grass to catch a few rays of sun on a recent winter afternoon.
We’d come back from a long walk to the beach and our three children were still out front. They were pulling feathers from the Pampa grass.
We smiled.
This is the great outdoors and they’re playing in it. Or at least it is our version of the great outdoors in a garden in a pine forest on the coast of Argentina.
We spoke about other things, my wife and I, but we both knew that this was what we wanted for our children: the joy of playing outdoors. The joy of playing thought-up games that can extend all afternoon and until dinnertime, even with the temperatures dropping on a winter day.
This was our childhood, allowed to wander, explore and make up games with kids from around the neighborhood.
And so my friends and I ran amok, learned about life and got into trouble. We were chased out of a cemetery by guards who in our heads were not really human. We played elevator tag in office buildings on the way home from fifth grade, a half-hour walk extended beyond an hour and into a riot of fun and the danger of getting caught. So we grew and learned and figured out how to play it safe, i.e. how not get caught. And how to own up and apologize, and get out buckets of hot soapy water to clean the thirty-something’s BMW of the orange juice and smatters left over from our pegging it from close range on Church Lane in West LA. They’d never stop, we’d always told ourselves. Now one had, and so we learned to reserve our oranges for the RTD bus. The drivers couldn’t abandon their passengers. And if they got out, we’d bare-ass them.
Oh such fun – and what little shits we were. [continue reading…]
