There and Back Again

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“I’ve got it all worked out, see…”

We’re in the city and my wife and I are talking about the logistics of our next trip to the coast, to our pine tree paradise. It is a four-hour drive and can get exhausting.

My seven-year-old daughter interrupts us.

“I have an idea,” she tells us. “We’ll build a bridge. And it’ll have one of those walkways, you know, the fast ones like at the airport. The ones that are flat. And it will go from our apartment to the beach. Roof to roof. It will be very, very fast. And that way we can live in both places at the same time. We won’t have to drive there and back anymore, so the trip won’t be so tiring. We’ll just get on the walkway and just like that we’ll be in Pinamar,” she says, trying to snap her fingers.

“Let’s think some more,” I say. “You’re on to something.”

An Apple a Day…

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“Now class. It’s pretty easy. You just add one to the other to get the answer.”

I’m back posting at the request of a hearty follower: my dad.

He asked me what had happened.

“Busy,” I told him.

Yep, earthquakes, the trial of seven dirty-war criminals, a film festival and a gasoline shortage, among other news events to cover. My day job as a freelance reporter stretched into the evenings and the weekends, sapping my output for this blog.

So to get back in the swing, it’s time again to post on what happens away from the job. I have been recording some of it, but in notebooks and on scraps of paper and on my hand if need be, and on the backs and fronts of paper napkins. Not on this blog. This has left my dad without his periodic fix and the chance to forward his son’s writings to a good number of contacts, much to my happiness. So it is time for a steady output of posts from my notebooks and scraps of paper, with encouragement from a challenge. It is the challenge to write a post a day from May 1 to May 31. A blogathon.

This was an easy post, but maybe not so entertaining as the next ones.

You be the judge. So keep tuned in, or as it were, clicked in.

When to be a Couch Potato

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“Mum, it’s really not that safe out there.”

You have to tread carefully in our garden on the coast. My four-year-old son just told me so.

In the grass just beyond the patio crocodiles dwell and they’ll eat you. And up there by the slide are giant beetles that will suck your blood. Huge spiders hang from the swing set. Big red ants will bite you like a dog. There are dragonflies poised to whisk you away and worms that stretch from one end of the patio to the other and up past the club house and into the forest where giant bats come out at night to feed on kids. On my son.

The sun is up now but still the garden is wild with dangerous and hungry creatures.

He is pacing back and forth.

There in the middle of the lawn is his soccer ball and we, the grownups, are too busy to fetch it. So he has to go on his own.

There he goes. Fast. Up the lawn and then back again, with the ball – and a limp.

“What’s the matter?” my wife asks from the patio table.

He doesn’t move.

“Come over here and I’ll give you a cuddle,” she says.

He doesn’t move.

“Come on.”

“Can’t,” he says

“Why not?” my wife asks.

“The dinosaurs got my leg.”

“Don’t be silly.”

He still doesn’t move.

My wife looks at him and pauses for a moment and then says, “Look, they got my legs, too.”

He can’t see her legs under the table and so he slowly lowers himself to peer under and at first he sees nothing and it looks like he wants to scream. But then he sees two sets of toes wiggling and the color returns to his face.

Then he turns toward the living room and hops on one leg to the sofa and the TV.

It’s too dangerous outside.