“Come on. Let’s Pogo.”
My eldest daughter ran up to my wife the other day and beamingly declared that she’d reached level eight on her pogo stick.
My wife looked puzzled.
“Level eight, you know. I did 80 bounces without stopping,” the eight-year-old said.
“Oh, okay,” Mum answered.
The pogo stick, of course, is not virtual. It is real. It’s the terminology she used that is high-tech, learned from friends and the world of PlayStation, Xbox and Wii. My three children don’t play video games. Not yet. My eldest daughter has had a run on her cell phone. Yes, a cell phone. Her grandparents bought it for her in England. It doesn’t work in Argentina as a phone. And she lost the recharging cable so alas no more Tetris or whatever else she was playing. She’s only got non-electronic toys – and the terminology of games consoles.
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“Seconds, please.”
It’s the beginning of the next stage, and I’m teary.
My eldest daughter is eight and she’s declared her graduation to adult meals.
“I don’t want a child’s meal,” she said.
“No toy?” I asked.
“Yep. No toy.”
Simple as that. One day a kid, the next day approaching adulthood. She’s growing up. But to me it seems that only yesterday she was still in nappies. Where is the time flying? She is learning how to cut her own food. She is cleaning her own room. She is hanging out alone in her own room. She is growing up. Yet with the child still in her. For only hours before her demands for an adult-sized meal, she was looking through her homemade binoculars for a fox because she had found a footprint of what really did look like that of a fox at the top of our garden-cum-forest on the coast of Argentina. She peered out into the forest beyond through the binoculars she’d fashioned out of kitchen roll tubes and pink paper. [continue reading…]
No lights, small town.
My neighbor in Pinamar is a dear friend. I met him on my second day in Argentina and we worked together at a ski resort in Bariloche. Then we worked together at a newswire in Buenos Aires. Some years ago we took a trip to Pinamar and decided to buy land next to each other. And so began our Pinamar adventure that continues today.
We were all there for the winter holidays last month, and we arrived to bad news: a robbery. The thieves, once largely limited to targeting tourists in summer, had taken a fancy to the houses of the year-rounders, many of them in our neck of the woods. Our neighbors demanded help. The town put on a team of cops to patrol. And we came to rest a bit better in the darkness of our pine forest on the beach.
Almost.
The darkness crept in and in the shadows lurked our fears. My friend, already with lights in his garden, installed yet more. Up went wood posts with lamps on top. They were spaced out in his garden-cum forest, shedding light into our garden that has been referred to by some as the mouth of the wolf for its darkness. My friend told me not to write about his lights as I have done before in Pine Tree Paradise. So I won’t. I won’t write about our chuckles about the shape of the lamps or that all the light could be scaring away the wild animals and pixies that my three children say roam the darkness of our garden.
I won’t. [continue reading…]
