cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Elmo Balloon That was a nice weekend. Not a very productive one, but a nice one. Saturday was given over to Ida. We went fishing at my parents' place. First we had to go buy a couple of fishing rods because the reel on my old rod was broken. And Ida didn't have a rod at all. We brought the canoe back over there while we were at it. The weather was cooler there than I had expected. I always forget that spring is about 2 weeks behind at my parents' place than it is at mine. They are on the other side of the same County I live in but its right in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains. 'Nestled', a real estate agent would say. We only caught a few fish. Some large mouth bass about the length of my hand. Too small to keep. I would have liked to spend more time actually fishing and less time doing other stuff around my parents' place, but I didn't want to make the whole thing into a chore for her. Sunday was mostly given over to the baby. Who is not really a baby now that he is 2 years old. Trish and Ida went to get their hair cut and run errands while I stayed home with him. We brought a pocket full of carrots over to the horse farm across the street. The horses were on the far side of the meadow. I stood there against the fence and he stood on the second board of the fence looking over the top. He called to the horses and we waited there for a while for one of them to come and see us. The sky was very blue and there was not a cloud in sight. It was warm. Harry was wearing his cow-patterned rain boots. We wondered whether the small black animal near the ponies in the far meadow was a goat or a dog. Swallows zig-zagged over the grass plucking invisible insects out of the air. A great big chestnut-colored Arabian ambled towards us. He stopped, pawed up the earth into dust beneath him and knelt down on the ground. The horse rolled around on its back like an enormous dog. Then he stood up, very gracefully, and trotted over to us. The horse had big, round jowls. His massive head snuffled at my face and hand. I reached into my pocket and held a carrot in my flattened hand for the horse. His chin was soft and fuzzy. Harry was not afraid of the horse at all. He did not want to pet the horse, but he smiled and liked being very close to it. We fed the rest of the carrots to the horse and I scratched it between the ears. Then the horse walked off and I put Harry on my shoulders and we walked back home. Then when we got back to the house we got a bowl of grapes and ate them in the front yard. He smiled a lot and then got serious and told me again about the Elmo balloon that flew away. The loss of this Elmo balloon is, so far, the pivotal and defining moment of Harry's life. It was after his birthday party last month. They got home (Trish and I were in separate cars, long boring story why) and got out of the car and Trish handed Harry this balloon from the party to hold while she got some other things out of the car. This was a shiny, helium-filled, mylar balloon shaped like Elmo. Trish heard him cry out and she turned around and saw him standing there looking utterly forlorn, reaching futilely for the sky as his Elmo balloon rose higher and higher away from him. This happened over a month ago. He still talks about it every single day. "Elmo balloon flew away. Up in the sky. Over that workshop. Elmo balloon's all gone. Flew away." At least a dozen times each day he presents either Trish, Ida or myself with a piece of paper and a crayon or a pen and asks us to please draw him a picture of a balloon. Yesterday morning I was telling Ida about this dream I'd had, which involved a very small walrus. Ida couldn't remember exactly what a walrus looked like, so we googled pictures of walruses and then found a good picture of a baby walrus. I clicked to make the image full screen. In fact, look - it was this picture exactly: http://image55.webshots.com/155/3/7/25/444630725FRWwMj_ph.jpg Ida and Harry looked at this picture, seeing a baby walrus for the firt time in their lives. And what does Harry say when he sees this picture? "Balloon! Red balloon!" That's right. He completely ignored the baby walrus and wanted to talk about the red ball, which looks kind of like a balloon. This naturally led to yet another discussion of the loss of the Elmo balloon. 7:52 a.m. - 2009-03-23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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