Sunday 9/29/24
The other day I FaceTimed with a certain four-year-old buddy of mine, my niece Amelia, as I was walking to Charlestown to run stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument.
As I recently wrote in this journal, I supplied the other kids with nicknames/handles so that no one would feel left out!
Lilah is my best pal and Charlie is my fellow C-Dawg. Amelia, of course, was already my buddy.
The first thing Amelia says to me: "I'm your best pal."
Here we go. This kid.
I say, "You're my buddy! We're buddies!"
"No."
"What do you mean, no?"
"I'm your best pal."
"It's very well established that we're buddies."
"No."
"Look, you, you are my buddy and you will always be my buddy whether you like it or not."
Big--albeit mischievous--smile on her face.
I have it on reasonably good authority--my mom told me--that Amelia has plans to be a unicorn for Halloween this year. She does not know that I know this. So I said to her, "Guess what I'm going to be for Halloween!"
"What?" she asked.
"A unicorn!" I said, to which she replied, "Boys can't be unicorns for Halloween!" and hung up on me.
Later I came up with a great message to give her via my mother/her grandmother, who I try to get to deliver these things, though with increasingly less success, so I ran the following past her yesterday while I waited in line at the Monument on trip number two.
"Tell Amelia that I was walking past the old school the other night when I heard the piteous moans of the Little Ghost Girl." (That's how all of these things start.) "I stopped to visit with her and she asked, 'What's wrong, Colin? Besides the usual, of course,' and I replied, 'Little Ghost Girl, I wanted so much to be a unicorn for Halloween but Amelia said that boys can't be unicorns for Halloween and now I don't have anything to be.'
"'Hmmm,' said the Little Ghost Girl, 'let's put on our thinking caps,' which she did by popping her head back on her ghostly body and her head had this winter hat on it that she wears because ghosts are often cold.
"We thought and thought and finally she said, 'Cooooooolllllinl...You're alive! Soooooo youooooooo can beeeeee a ghost for Halloweeeeeen!'
"What a great idea by the Little Ghost Girl. But she wasn't done.
"'And since I'm a little ghost girl,' she said, 'I can be a living girl!'
"Then she got another even more amazing idea.
"'I knoooooooow!' the Little Ghost Girl exclaimed.
"'What, Little Ghost Girl?' I asked excitedly.
"'I can be Amelia for Halloween!' she said and it was as happy as I've ever heard her.
"That's the message. Tell Amelia."
I think this might not get delivered.
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