“Move over, Sherlock Holmes. Here come the three sleuths!”
When I was in elementary school a mystery lay under our feet. I forgot who first told me but they must have heard it from an older kid. Grenades, guns and rockets – they and other weapons were stored in tunnels that ran under the asphalt banks at the edges of the school and probably elsewhere. Access was off bounds. It was somewhere in the janitor’s quarters. We were certain of this.
This was the Cold War era so we were sure the weapons were a precaution if the Russians were to strike. Weapons under our feet and in schools across America. I seem to think we once tried to get down there but to no avail and the dreams of sleuthing and mystery faded with the years and the asphalt banks became better for running up and down and then for skateboarding and then sitting on and chatting about what to do after school. Real stuff, not imaginary.
Well, my six-year-old daughter came home from school the other day with her imagination flying. At school, she told me, three dead bodies were buried up on the roof. It was very dangerous and scary, she told me, shuddering at the thought. Her and two friends are going to find them. They have to sneak up the stairs to get there, right under the noses of the teachers. They may get caught. They’re going to go and take a photo of the three dead bodies and take it to the police so they can solve the murder.
The joy of the imagination, I think as I listen to the mystery and the adventure of the three sleuths. At least, I hope it’s all fiction.
There’s a new joint in town and authorities are not too hip on it.
Cannabis lived a short life as the name of a new sushi-bar in Pinamar.
It’s opposite our favorite video rental shop in the new and trendier part of town. We saw it on the grand opening day, freshly painted and with chairs and tables set up outside and doors open for visitors.
The owners, no doubt, were thinking what a smoking name for the joint.
But the town officials weren’t so amused.
A day later we went to return the video and there across from us the “C” was gone. It had been replaced by a “W.”
A promotion of the high life replaced by an endorsement of trying to be something you’re not: Wannabis.
“Catch them, cook them, eat them.”
We’re in Pinamar and a friend of my two eldest kids has come over. They’ve made the garden-cum-forest their playground and within minutes they’ve become Indians and are racing around and hooting. They’re dodging gunslingers, sheriffs and villains – and from getting shot, scalped or burned at the stake. There they go now over there, running up the pine needle-covered slopes with sticks in their hands and now down the sandy bank over there and through the bramble and back up the other side and down again and up a tree. Now they’re at the clubhouse and then the top of the garden – the edge of what’s known to them. Beyond lies a great forest run wild with baddies. They gather together and talk hurriedly among themselves, seeming to confer on how to keep the house – and us – safe.
Or are they thinking of turning bad themselves?
There’s no time to think. They’ve rushed to a clearing in the garden and set about to build a bonfire, throwing in sticks and pinecones, bigger and bigger it gets. Now the friend has found a long stick and they’re jabbing it into the middle, all three of them working together to jab it down. The stake! They dance around the bonfire, round and round, hooting wildly, round and round. Then they stop and they turn and race down the hill to us the parents and the youngest girl, still too little to play such wild adventures. They’re rushing down the hill fast and gaining speed, their eyes glazed as if in a trance of their own war dance. The bonfire, the stake! And now they’re upon us and they start circling us. I pick up the youngest as the savages circle in closer, hooting and chanting what we cannot understand. The stake! I think.
Then they stop and my eldest daughter is the first to speak. “We’re hungry,” she says. The others join in. “We’re hungry. We’re thirsty. We want to watch TV. Please!”