March 22, 1978

by Slouching Mom at Slouching Past 40
Posted on October 8, 2007

We'd spent the morning at El Morro, the citadel in Old San Juan. My brother and I chased one another by the ramparts and into the damp and dark tunnels. The wind whipped our shirts into billowy sails. It's a magical place, El Morro. My brother had a new camera, and he took some shots of the fort, and then of me against the sea, my hand brushing back the hair that kept blowing about my face. When after our trip he developed them himself during photography class at school and took them home to my mother, she gasped but wouldn't say why. She framed one of them. One day much later she told me that they showed me exactly as I was, on the cusp of adolescence, one foot in planted in childhood, the other stretched out toward a darker and more troubling time.

As my brother and I waged pretend battles on El Morro that day, Karl Wallenda of The Flying Wallendas, one of a family of high-wire artists, prepared to walk on a wire between the towers of the Condado Plaza, not far from where we stood gazing first at the roiling sea and then at the sweeping view the citadel afforded of the city. Today I wonder if Wallenda felt that this was his last hurrah, because he was 73, or whether the risk-taker in him was ageless. Read more...

Fireworks, Circus Clowns, and Things That Go Bump in the Night

by Slouching Mom at Slouching Towards 40
Posted on July 7, 2007

At our hotel last week we slept the peculiar and stuporous sleep made possible by relentless air conditioning and heavy, double curtains. Sleep so drugged that when it finally releases you from its grip you have no idea where you are or what time it is. So when we awoke on Independence Day, cocooned in our room, we were unaware for some time that the threat of severe thunderstorms had left fireworks organizers concerned and dithering. They had not officially cancelled the evening's festivities, but we learned that they might do so at any moment.

All week Jack had been asking pointed questions about these now-iffy fireworks. Could they come close enough to people to burn them? How loud would they be? Would there be an actual fire? No? But then why are they called fireworks? We had suspected that he might be anxious about the fireworks. (Last year he had hated them so much that we ended up fitting him with a pair of headphones, enabling him to tune them out altogether.) But along with these suspicions we had hoped that a year might make a difference, that Ben's enthusiasm for them might prove infectious. Read more...