Pine Tree Paradise

Give me freedom, give me River!

I never had a team as a kid, not a professional baseball, basketball or football team to really support. I tried the Los Angeles Dodgers at one point but they seemed too close to home in my native West L.A. I thought about striking out further a field, being exotic and not running with the masses. I settled for a time on the Oakland Athletics and then shifted to the California Angels because my favorite pitcher was Nolan Ryan.

No matter, I didn’t get into following pro sports. I was more into individual challenges – biking, running, skateboarding and surfing. I knew the names of all the top surfers at one point, and followed the pro tour as it wound round the world, even checking out the competitions at Huntington Beach and my favorite pros like Tom Curren and Mark Occhilupo.

I’m still an individualist, but that is not so easy in Argentina, my adopted home. Soccer, or football, is hard to escape. People talk about matches in detail and with hand gestures, even body gestures. “Did you see that?” one will say to another. It’s all over the streets and all over the media. The top players become celebrities. You breathe the sport and the passion, and soon you are buying a ticket and standing in the stadium – nobody sits – and bouncing up and down with the masses as the stadium shakes. You go again and again. You come to follow a club – Huracan, for me – and make friends with fellow supporters, cheering at wins and wincing at losses. The fever, however, waned for me with the years. I am still a follower, but not a die-hard anymore. I am an informed fan.

My seven-year-old daughter, on the other hand, is catching the fever for River Plate, one of the country’s biggest clubs. How she came to select River as her team is unknown. She just came home from school one day and was a fan. She didn’t say, “Dad, I’m going to support River. What do you think?” No, she came back a supporter. And a die-hard at that. When we were looking for a new place to live, one apartment on the 12^th floor had a view of River’s stadium. She smiled with glee.

“I want to live here!”

Another was a house two blocks from the stadium. You could smell the burgers and choripanes on the barbeques and hear the emotion of the fans. Even the referee’s whistle. Well, almost.

“I want to live here!”

In the end we moved to a house in Colegiales, where the closest clubs are first-division Argentinos Juniors and lowly Atlanta. That’s all right with my daughter because River Plate is not too far away, and Boca Juniors, the cross-town rivals of her beloved team, is well enough away in a place we don’t ever really need to go.

Except on an occasional weekend outing. We drove down to have a look around the old streets of La Boca and the Caminito. We showed our daughter Boca’s stadium, La Bombonera. She frowned and asked when we were leaving. I said that maybe we’d have lunch and wander around a bit more. “You can take some photos,” I told her.

She refused to take her camera out of its case.

“I’m not taking photos of Boca… only River.”

“Don’t blame me!”

Two weeks – that’s what it’s been, just me and my son at home alone while my wife and the two girls have been at a wedding in England. Two weeks of twice the work (cooking, washing and keeping on top of school work) – and a load of fun.

With three kids, it’s not often you play with just one or that your thoughts can be focused on just one because the littlest one is in the kitchen and the water is boiling, and your eldest? Didn’t she ask for help with her homework? Mind you, I love the clamoring for my attention… well, unless I’m on deadline for my work or until the clock strikes 9 p.m. and my wife and I are ready to chill without the kids.

Bedtime has been easy with my five-year-old son. He likes to go to bed, to follow a routine. Dinner, bath, pajamas, brush his teeth and to bed and a story. “Lights out in five,” I tell him as he flicks through a book. By the fourth minute he’s asleep.

Chill time!

But my son, who has autism, is starting to become quite the comic. Or maybe he always has been, it’s just that now with only him getting my attention I’m really seeing it.

Without the girls, we’ve had free rein to make boorish sounds at mealtime and blame the dog. He giggles and we do it again.

But in the car?

“No,” he tells me, “you can’t blame the dog. She’s not here.”

Very true.

I continue driving to one of his therapy sessions and then a large blast comes from his booster seat followed by, “The dog did it!”

“Nah, nah, nah,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “The dog did a very loud one.”

Ah, yes, I get your drift; we can hear it across town.

So the poor canine continued to get the blame throughout Buenos Aires without her knowledge whatsoever, becoming a source of many giggles in our Hyundai station wagon.

Cracking good fun!

That’s not all, mind you. My son’s awakening to his capacity for humorous antics. We are wrestling on the bed when the phone rings. I take the call and go to my desk to jot down a few notes and as the conversation is ending I hear my son yelling for me. “Daddy, daddy. Come quick!”

I hang up and walk to the bedroom and my son is lying in his underwear, belly up.

“What’s up?”

He turns over and says, “Poo!”

And sure enough there’s a huge one in his underwear. My face turns white and I say, “Quick! This is not good. We’ve got to get you to the bathroom. Why didn’t you tell me you had to go?” I pick him up and rush him to the bathroom, holding him out like a wet rat. Down he goes on his feet in the bathroom and up he looks at me with a great big grin. He giggles and stuffs his hand down his backside and pulls out an apple, and with a giggle says, “Joking.”

My tension eases and I say, “That’s disgusting!”

“No,” he says. “It’s a good apple.”

And he takes a big bite.