Pest and cholera

She got to pick out her own clothes this morning, so she’s wearing a party dress. It’s diaphanous and a little short on her because she’s finally growing and the wind whips it around her knees. She wants to feed ducks. She knows we have two old rolls no one will eat.

So we walk to the bridge. It’s the wrong time of day; I’m still disoriented from lunch and the light makes everything look dangerous and I have to squint and the streets are empty. The wind whips her dress around her knees and her long hair is ratty-looking from the wind, with several large clumps of glitter from a cosmetic set someone gave her sometime. Barely six and already I can’t keep track of her cosmetics.

No ducks are in the water. It’s too hot. Wind blows green summer scum upstream. She looks for a space in the railing without any spiderwebs, but between each pair of bars there is another web dotted with mosquitos and gnats and small lacy-winged things. “Why are there so many spiders here?” she asks. I tell her I guess it’s a good place to catch little bugs on account of the prevailing wind.

She leans her scooter against the railing, it falls down. I mess with it for a while getting it into a position where it will lean there without falling over, until finally leaving it lying there on the sidewalk. She didn’t want to come by bike. She’s postponing that decision. Actually, it’s like this. This morning she decided not to try to learn. I understand her perfectly. It’s not a choice between riding a bike and not riding. Like any real choice, it’s a choice between two anxiety-producing alternatives. In German this is called a choice between “Pest und Cholera” – between the plague and cholera.

In this case, the alternatives are not being able to ride a bike, and learning to ride one, one humiliating, the other scary and painful.

Like her dad, she usually opts for the status quo, no matter how absurd in the long run, although she can surprise you.

We find some clunky black ducks with white heads and red on them in the shade on the bank under the bridge and throw them bits of stale roll. She has to stand on her tiptoes to toss them over the railing.

After this we spend some time at the playground. I get her going good on the merry-go-round and sit in the shade to look at the Sunday paper. She wants to go on the seesaw, so I stop the merry-go-round and do the seesaw with her, with her at the end of her side and me up near the fulcrum on my side. After this she swings for a while, then I somehow talk her into going home.

2 responses to “Pest and cholera

  1. That sounds like a lovely way to spend a weekend.

    Growing up in the city – a densely populated city with Very Steep Hills and Wildy Careening Buses – meant there was no opportunity to ride bikes at home. I had to wait til the summer, at a grandma’s house, and then I had to wait for the day when there were simultaneously a) a bike to ride, b) a grandma’s quiet neighborhood to ride it through, c) the impetus to learn, and d) someone to teach me. I got so frustrated, dreaming of bike rides and waking up to the cold foggy trafficky steps-carved-into-the-sidewalk-so-you-don’t-slide-to-the-bottom city, then of course wanting to sleep or read in the air conditioned dark rather than let my uncle Garfield coax me onto the banana seat. Hooray for Norwegian persistance, is all I can say; he did a good job.

    Now I only ride in the desert, when it’s 120

  2. D

    That was very poetic Mig, I greatly enjoyed reading it.