“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.
“Get air, Dad!”
I had been checking out some YouTube videos of surf groms, of girls my daughter’s age.
So when we were on the coast of Argentina on a stormy day, I told my 12-year-old that maybe we could watch the videos, “you know, for inspiration.”
She looked at me and said, “I don’t need any inspiration.”
“No?” I asked.
“No, because I already know what I want to do: get air.”
I smiled and asked, “And get tubed?”
“Yeah, that too.”
I prayed for surf, and I think she did as well.
“Lose the glasses, Dad.”
I forgot my bathing suit at our beach house, the baggy surf sort. That left me with my Speedos for an afternoon at a friend’s pool outside the city.
“No way!” my 12-year-old daughter said when she saw me packing my skin-huggers.
“Huh?”
“Dad, you can’t wear those,” she said, taking them out of the bag. “You just won’t be able to go in the pool.”
“But…”
“Don’t even think about it,” she said.
I took my book instead, and while they all splashed around in the pool I tried not to think about the emergence of a new authority in the family.
