One Man's Trash

It turns out that, yes, Joey truly is sick, but with no symptoms apart from a low fever and sleepiness.  So Dennis and I, unsympathetic parents that we are, decided to take advantage of the situation: after Dennis had his morning run, the three of us went to Google for breakfast.

And it was lovely: Joey sat and quietly ate his bread while Dennis and I made up for Joey's small appetite. Only Google could make a continental breakfast taste so good, with their  seeded croissants and homemade jellies and oatmeal that I swear must be half cream. I think I prefer breakfast to their lunch, even.

On our way home, since Joey was so content in his stroller, we made a stop at the thrift shop; a half-hour later we left with five board games in my shopping bag. I swear, they always have the best board games at Brockiland, and half the time the boxes have scarcely been opened. Never mind that the instructions are in German, and I'll have to commission Dennis to translate them. They were ten dollars: it's still a bargain.  It's always the same woman at the check-out desk, a gaudily dressed woman, large in body and personality. Prices seem to be subject to her particular whim, and she always seems to charge me less when Joey is in tow.

The only game that I managed to translate on my own is a preschool game called Obstgarten, or "The orchard." And I probably could have figured it out without the instructions: You roll a die, and depending on what comes up, you either get to pick one of the four fruits, or else you have to add a piece to a puzzle picture of a crow.  If, cooperatively, you pick all the fruit before you fill the crow puzzle, you win.

It's the simplest game in the world, and it's all Joey wanted to do for the rest of the day. He got just as much pleasure from setting it up, everything in its place, as he did from playing it, with his little running narrative "I got the crow. I'm trouble. Not you, you're lucky. Oh, I get to pick the chairs! You get pums."

The game was obviously loved by other children before Joey: two of the fruits were missing, and these were replaced by little clay fruits, molded and carefully painted, obviously by a child, but a careful one.  I thought it was so cute how those little clay pieces were the ones that Joey, and then Alex, thought were the best.  They were always the first ones they picked. "I pretend that they're the magic fruits, momma," Alex told me.

The kids wanted to do some treasure-hunting of their own today Ever since Knabenschiessen, Ella and Alex have been begging me to take them back to the festival grounds. They understand that the rides and game and portable candy and toy shops have packed up and moved on to the next festival. No, they're after something even more exciting.  BBs!

"Please, mom, can we go today? The fairgrounds should be ripe for harvesting!" Ella pleaded.  She was convinced that, after a weekend of pre-teen boys running around with their rifles, the carnival grounds would be thickly carpeted with BBs for them to shovel into their pockets.

Since the fairgrounds are only a four-minute bus ride away, and since their search would get them into the fresh air and sunshine, I was hardly going to say no.  So they grabbed a baggie a piece, and spent the bus ride to Albisgütli negotiating the terms of their hunt.  Should they work together, and divide their findings equally? Or should they draw a line down the center of the field, and each search on one half?

Unfortunately, the fairgrounds were had already been cleaned, and by Swiss groundskeepers. I swear, I think they vacuumed the dirt.

But Ella and Alex found a few dozen little plastic balls. They did end up walking together, and swinging from communism to the right and then back again, depending on how many BBs they sensed the other had found. But they were happy, with Ella spouting platitudes to encourage her brother: "We must press on, Alex! With great effort comes great rewards!"

The hunt is on.

Eventually, Alex asked the question that I'd been wondering all along: "So, what are we supposed to do with these?"

Well, Ella had it all figured out. "I was thinking that we could use the BBs as a system of money! Two yellow ones are worth one white one, and an orange one is worth five white ones. And the golden ones, well, woah! Those are beyond trading! And then we can give them to each other in exchange for doing chores and things. Like, I could give you ten yellow BBs if you close all the windows for me at bedtime."

Alex liked this very much. "Okay! And if you give me a golden BB, I'll let you hold my purple kitty for fifteen minutes!"

"Um, Alex? I don't know how to say this, but I'm not sure I need to hold your purple kitty right now. Or probably later, either. It's just...well, some people would say your offer is too generous"

Hmmm. Economically minded, and slickly political: I wonder if Ella might end up abandoning her lifelong dream of being a substitute Kindergarten teacher, in favor of becoming Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Except it turned out that Ella and Alex couldn't find a single thing that the other one wanted: Ella brought out some seashells to sell for BBs, and she offered five minutes of play-time on her water-ring game in exchange for a mere yellow BB, but Alex wasn't interested. And he decided that he didn't want to part with any of his "special things," no matter how many BBs were on offer.

So I'm not sure if this new currency is going to take off or not, but I'm really, really hoping it does.  You know those golden BBs, the ones beyond value? Apparently I could get 6000 of them for $10 through Amazon.  Think of how clean my house would be!