The Night Owl

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“Catch me if you can!”

I have had a lot of work these past weeks, so much that I have had to work nights, returning to the computer after dinner and getting the three kids to bed. Except one. The youngest is a night owl. She lights up at night and goes into fifth gear, playing and racing around the house. To catch her and put her to bed, we have to race behind her or try to steer her toward her bed, saying, “Play here, over here, yes, in your bed,” hoping that the sheets and pillows will lull her to sleep.

Not tonight.

Tonight she’s in sixth gear. She’s racing. Yet in such a way that it is cute and adorable. She makes us laugh and smile, makes us happy, even with our eyelids heavy with sleep and me with deadlines to meet. [continue reading…]

The Storyteller

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“Have I got a story to tell you…”

I’ve not written for Pine Tree Paradise for more than a week, not one story.

Beginnings came, but not the rest. The stories about my family’s life here in Argentina didn’t pan out. They went half a page and fizzled, and I thought is this it, is that the end of my muse, is that the end of these years of tales, some funny, some wacky and some tearful?

I couldn’t figure it out.

Could it end just like that after such fervor, and be gone forever?

I told myself not to fret but to take a break, to rest and rekindle that zeal, and the days went and nothing came, not even tonight as I made a pasta dinner for the three kids while my wife went out with her girlfriends, and we sat down, the two-, five- and eight-year-olds, with our four-ton dog under the table, and we talked about our day, about friends, the walk home, the squabbles at school and the best ways to swat the swarm of mosquitoes in the kitchen, and the one now feeding on the youngest.

Yet it was not enough of a distraction to my melancholy and my distress over my incapacity to get a story out for this blog because the muse was waning, until just then, just at the bottom of my despair, my eldest daughter deftly squashed a fat-ass mosquito on our freshly painted kitchen wall and turned to me and raised her voice and said, “Dad, what if we turned back the clock and went back in time…”

My eyes lit up.

Pretty Please

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A sunny day. That means no rain, at least not right now.

My son likes maps. He draws one most days before we go out, even to school. He knows the route to school by heart, and he likes to go the same way each time. And he complains about a variation. “No, this way!” he’ll yell, pointing in the direction of the usual route, and then looking down at his map, a bunch of lines that make little sense to me but all the sense in the world to him.

The five-year-old – nearly six – knows where things are. He’s got a good memory, and is observant. Very observant. We once picked him up from swimming class and promised to buy him sweeties at the shop, but we had to change course and not go to the normal haunt. He yelled, “Hey!” We calmed him by saying we’d swing by the kiosk on the way home, the one near our house. “It’s only a two or three blocks from here,” I said. He looked at me and pondered for a moment before saying, “Eight. It’s eight blocks from here.” Sure enough, it was eight blocks (including one we never really noticed before), and he said, “See!” in a way as if to say, “Geez Louise! Who are the adults here?” [continue reading…]