Wonka

IT CAN PAY to hang out with granddad. Company, conversation and chocolate. Early on at a Sunday afternoon get-together my six-year-old daughter spied a bag of chocolate Kinder Eggs. The find quickly became top-of-mind for her, to use a marketing term.

“Egg, egg, egg,” she chanted to me in a hushed voice.

She didn’t want to draw attention to her discovery, not with her younger brother and sister milling around.

She continued to chant with the hope of getting me to ask granddad to fork them over.

“You ask,” I said.

But she wasn’t going to, not yet, at least.

When it came time to go as the younger two were getting feisty, the six-year-old said she’d hang out a while with granddad and the other guests. It was then that I gathered at least some of her intentions. So it came as no surprise when she got home that she came up to me and whispered in my ear, “Don’t tell anybody but I ate two eggs.”

Patience can pay, I thought.

Or was it lust?

A Long, Long Way

I’M 13,394 WORDS into my 50,000-word novel and the November 30 deadline is staring me in the face. A long, long way to go.

I could sure use an escalator.

Piecing It Together

I AM MOVING ahead with the novel, with 11,461 words on paper. That leaves 38,539 to go in 14 days to win the challenge of writing a 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month as part of National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/).

Can I piece this piece of literature together in time?

Or will I get left in pieces?

A Real Christmas

WE’RE SAT OUT on the porch in Pinamar and my six-year-old daughter is drawing and writing in her notebook while her younger brother and sister play in the garden with four-ton, the dog. The six-year-old stops and looks up at me and says, “How do you spell real?” I help her spell it out and she writes it down, first once and then a second time. I can hear her sounding out the word as she writes it.

“What are you writing?” I ask.

“My Father Christmas list.”

“What’s the real for?”

“I put it after jewelry and camera, to make sure Father Christmas knows that I want real jewelry and a real camera.”

“Oh,” I think.

All Work and No Play…

IF I DIDN’T already write enough words in the day as a journalist, I’ve taken on the challenge of writing a novel in a month. It isn’t really a novel idea. More than 100,000 people have signed up for National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/) with the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel from scratch by midnight November 30. That’s 1,667 words a day. As of day two, I am at 1,284 with another 2,000 or so scribbled in notebooks and on scraps of paper, carefully kept out of the reach of kids and animals.

Can I do it?

The synopsis (so far) is:

Evan Donnoley is a young reporter and even younger husband. His wife is pregnant and Evan has a bright idea. He’s going to make a documentary about having a baby, even against his wife’s protests. What he discovers with his camcorder is more than he bargained for and this will turn his life upside down.

Intriguing? A sleeper?

At the pace of this challenge, who knows?

What may be certain is that I will probably wind up strung out on mescaline, cannabis and whiskey like Raoul Duke out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or turn dangerously inward and start writing line after line after line of the same thing like Jack Torrance in The Shining. Watch out kids!

Or maybe I’ll come out of this as the next Hunter S. Thompson or Stephen King?

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.

Up In Smoke

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 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.