“No sermons, please. Just the cash.”
After three hours of watching other kids play football, my son came up to me and said, “I’m bored.”
I was having a coffee between matches, several of them played by a friend’s son who we’d come to watch at a club in Buenos Aires. I motioned to my 10-year-old son to sit down at the table in the cafe and listen to a bit of my wisdom about taking advantage of life.
He slumped down in the chair opposite me.
“Life is good,” I told him. “It’s for living.”
He looked at me despondently and said, with an uncanny swiftness, “Life is food. Life is for eating.”
I laughed.
He didn’t, and without smiling, he stretched out his palm to me.
I gave up on laughing, reached into my pocket and forked over some cash for him to buy candies at the kiosk.
He smiled and ran off.
