“Wait until you see me play in these new trainers!”
I took my son to buy football trainers.
That’s what he wanted, like all the other boys at his school, most of them mad about football. This is Argentina, where every kid wants to be the next Lionel Messi, the wizardly amazing striker of Argentina and Barcelona.
The eight-year-old tried on a florescent yellow and black pair, but they weren’t to his liking.
So he perused the wall of shoes to see what he’d like.
Hmm?
As he looked, I thought of Ray Bradbury’s novel Dandelion Wine, when the main character, Douglas Spaulding, convinces the storekeeper of the delights of a new pair of “magic” sneakers and how they make it possible to run like antelopes. And so he does. He speeds off into the green grasses and leaves behind his worn-out sneakers that had been slowing him down compared with the other kids in town. [continue reading…]
A little help?
If you follow this blog, you may wonder what happened between March and July of 2013 when no stories were posted.
Short answer: my dad.
Long answer: my dad.
He’ll frown when he reads this, so I’d better explain quickly. My father, who recently turned 93, moved in with us in November 2012. His health is declining. So my wife and I have become his primary caregivers while he has gone from walking with a walker to being bed and wheelchair-ridden. I wrote about him after his arrival in a post about a memorable car trip to the coast of Argentina, and before that of his capacity to outrun my children and how he couldn’t get my son to hand over the TV controls so he could watch tennis.
But I would be fooling others and myself if I said it’s been easy to take care of my dad these past few months. [continue reading…]
“It’s that, well, I just don’t feel that good.”
My youngest daughter woke up and decided, so she told us, that she wasn’t feeling well and that meant no school. She told us this meekly and with droopy eyes.
We gave in.
I used to pull off such performances any time before a big exam. Stomachaches were the best for getting an extra day of studying, of which really only an hour was spent. The rest was spent watching Westerns in bed or “Gilligan’s Island” reruns, and reading comics and books like Encyclopedia Brown and The Hardy Boys. My wife would simply let the bus go by and walk home glumly, telling her mother that she missed the bus and, hence, no school.
That was the objective, as it is with any kid. Skiving, as my wife calls it, or playing hooky or ditching, as I call it, is a sacred art. It’s a passion. It has to be done. To ditch is to live.
Of course, you have to pretend to be sick while doing the living bit. [continue reading…]
