“Have I got a story to tell you…”
I’ve not written for Pine Tree Paradise for more than a week, not one story.
Beginnings came, but not the rest. The stories about my family’s life here in Argentina didn’t pan out. They went half a page and fizzled, and I thought is this it, is that the end of my muse, is that the end of these years of tales, some funny, some wacky and some tearful?
I couldn’t figure it out.
Could it end just like that after such fervor, and be gone forever?
I told myself not to fret but to take a break, to rest and rekindle that zeal, and the days went and nothing came, not even tonight as I made a pasta dinner for the three kids while my wife went out with her girlfriends, and we sat down, the two-, five- and eight-year-olds, with our four-ton dog under the table, and we talked about our day, about friends, the walk home, the squabbles at school and the best ways to swat the swarm of mosquitoes in the kitchen, and the one now feeding on the youngest.
Yet it was not enough of a distraction to my melancholy and my distress over my incapacity to get a story out for this blog because the muse was waning, until just then, just at the bottom of my despair, my eldest daughter deftly squashed a fat-ass mosquito on our freshly painted kitchen wall and turned to me and raised her voice and said, “Dad, what if we turned back the clock and went back in time…”
My eyes lit up.
