“No monsters here, no monsters there. Just castles. Oh, but maybe there’s a dragon!”
My eldest daughter is eight and growing up. She has her own mobile phone (only for the games, so far) and an MP3 Player filled with her favorite songs, from “I Gotta Feeling” by The Black Eyed Peas to “Dancing Queen” by ABBA and the catchy DJ mix “Papa Americano.” She grooves to her songs in the car, at the dinner table and in her bed, looking the true teenager in this digital age, only not yet with the laptop and the capacity to race off 100 text messages in an hour.
Not yet.
She still has a wild imagination. She chases fairy dust and sees monsters, and asks for me to tell her stories from my imagination, all of them filled with adventures of three children fighting dinosaurs, giants and monsters. The three children – her and her younger brother and sister, ages five and two – are the hunters and the hunted in the tales that sometimes get me, the storyteller, kind of freaked out about what could happen, and racing to find a happy ending as the goblin puts the three children in a boiling cauldron. How can they escape?
The eldest loves these tales – and asks for more. [continue reading…]
“We’re going on an adventure to an island.”
We went on a trip to an island a few days ago, and the weather was better than fine. It was a river island, and we went with friends. Many families, many children. The boat took us up wide rivers and down narrow ones and past homes on stilts in Tigre, a delta region outside Buenos Aires.
I went with my wife and three children, who hollered at me to drive faster as we sped to get to the departure dock. They didn’t want to miss the boat and the island and the adventure.
They had no idea what to expect. They only knew that friends would be there and that the trip would be new. They didn’t know what to ask as we waited for the boat to arrive. They played with friends. My eldest girl, who is eight, paired off with a friend, and my son, who is nearly six, ran with the boys as more people arrived before the departure. The youngest girl, nearly three, played with another youngest girl, and together they charmed an older girl, who smiled and laughed and said, “They’re so cute.” [continue reading…]
“How do you say, “Dancing Queen,” in Martian?”
The world is dangerous, my eldest daughter tells me. She is relaying to me what she’s learned about the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, what her third-grade schoolmates have told her, all rather shocking and scary for the eight-year-old. She tells me that she remembers the earthquake and tsunami last year in Chile, much closer to our home in Argentina.
Then she dashes off to fetch her picture encyclopedia on the ocean and takes it to Mum, who sits down with her to read the page about tsunamis. I listen in. Our daughter looks disturbed. It’s best to be at sea, then, she says after hearing that a tsunami can go virtually undetected under a boat as it races by as only a ripple in the ocean compared to the devastating size and power when it hits shore.
I think that what if you tried to escape a tsunami not by running to higher ground but by racing out to sea to get to deeper water before the waves started to break. How far would you have to go out before you were safe? What if you didn’t make it in time?
I am still thinking about this when my daughter’s face turns from disturbed pale to pondering rosy. Is she thinking the same as me? [continue reading…]
