“Boo!”
My son is growing up, almost too quickly.
The seven-year-old wants football trainers and a shirt of Racing, a first-division football club in Argentina, as belated birthday presents from his aunt.
He hasn’t put toys on the list.
But he still loves toys and has just spent the afternoon searching for a lost toy gun the size of a hairclip.
Now he’s moaning about the lost gun at the kitchen table after dinner while I clean up, his two sisters already in their pajamas and playing in the living room. [continue reading…]
This is a face of glum.
There often is a debate in my head about surfing.
Will the surf be good today or not?
The question revolves around hulking my board to the beach or not. It can be cumbersome when calculating in everything my family needs, from the cooler to the windbreak and the tent and the bags of toys and the towels, the sun block and the boogie boards for the three kids.
On a late morning recently, I made the call to leave my board at home. The wind was switching to side shore, no longer the ideal offshore wind that keeps the waves clean and better. And it had been small the day before.
So we drove to the beach without my board. [continue reading…]
Buenos Aires doesn’t have surf. So why do I live here?
I have become a weekend warrior.
If you surf, you will know what I mean.
As a kid with time on my hands, I’d hit the beach as much as possible: before school, after school and every now and again at lunch. This was Los Angeles and the surf was frequent enough to warrant checking it out on the way to school. I wasn’t too picky. Nor were most of my friends. We just wanted to get out there in the surf. We had few qualms about ditching school if the surf was good.
Then came the weekend and the crowds. Big crowds. We called them weekend warriors and we’d pine for Monday to come so that we could have it on our own again – or at least with fewer people. Then the weekend warriors would be back in their business suits or on the construction site or behind the counter, and the surf, no doubt, would be bigger and better. [continue reading…]
