“Thank god the beast is gone. More goodies for us, eh mates?”
My car is never too clean.
Occasionally I get out the bucket and fill it with hot, soapy water. I hose down my car and lather it in soap and scrub before taking the vacuum cleaner to its innards. The vacuum sucks up dirt, leaves, sand and parts of plastic toys. It sucks up crumbs and months-old French fries. A plastic bag is filled with books, flip-flops, notebooks, pencils, pens, pine cones, teddy bears, toys, shoes, seashells, sweaters and underwear. Yes, underwear. Another bag is filled with trash too big for the vacuum’s nozzle. In go candy wrappers, cookies, empty apple juice boxes, pamphlets and, yes, a half-eaten McDonald’s cheeseburger.
My car is many things dirty. It’s a moveable feast, a stink bomb and just plain filthy. [continue reading…]
“Now, there. We’d better keep clear of that wild bunch. Just look at the mess they’re making!”
I had a doorman at my apartment building in Caballito who loved bleach. Absolutely loved bleach. We lived there – it’s a neighborhood in the center of Buenos Aires – for three years before moving to the beach in Pinamar. Every morning the doorman would come downstairs to clean the sidewalk and the entrance hall. The first thing he did was to sniff around the sidewalk and the walls and pillars of the building.
“You get one pissing and you’ll get every damn dog in the city pissing on your walls!”
That’s what he told me.
He had a nose for dog urine. He knew before he even opened the front door. Out he stepped with his bleach and his face would scrunch up and his nostrils would do a survey until viola! There it is! A fresh urine mark on the white pillar. He’d attack with the bleach. The sidewalk? The driveway? All of it would get bleached. I’d watch and he’d hold up the bleach to me like a man with his bottle of whiskey. Then he’d scrub and hose everything down and if need be he’d do a second run to annihilate any remains of urine.
“If one cocks its legs, another will!”
I nodded in agreement. He must know. He’s in the business. But, I thought, wouldn’t something greener work just as well as bleach? Think of the rivers. Think of the water table and the environment. What about white vinegar? And pepper? Use something greener, save the planet, cut down on chemicals and find something natural to keep the dogs from squirting your walls. [continue reading…]
Let it rain!
It’s a rainy holiday and my children are stuck in the house and they are well beyond boredom.
“There’s nothing to do,” the seven-year-old girl tells me. “We’re bored,” the five-year-old boy says. They look at me glumly when I tell them to watch the falling rain as it splashes outside the window. It’s something I used to do as a kid.
Time passes by and the rain falls heavier and the boredom worsens until suddenly their imaginations start revving and the rain becomes an ocean and our house the last one standing. Now the house is floating and our lives are at stake. There are monsters out there in the wildly wet world. And they want to eat us up!
“Monsters!” the two-year-old girl tells me as she scrunches up her face and lets out a roar.
The eldest girl tells me we have an escape from the monsters. It’s an elevator. But not just any elevator. It’s an absolutely and wonderfully amazing elevator. It can take you anywhere, she tells me feverishly. Go down and you’ll find dinosaur bones. Lots of them!
“Wow,” I say.
“But don’t go much deeper,” she warns me.
“Why?”
“Because you’ll find real dinosaurs!”
“Oh my!”
“You will!” she says. “And they’ll chase you. You’ll have to run or else they’ll eat you up. You’ll have to escape in the elevator up, up, up to outer space, far away from the dinosaurs. And even the ones that fly, the pter-o-dac-tlys. That’s what they’re called, right?” [continue reading…]