My good friend Leonne is seven years old, which means that I usually have the drop on him. He screams louder than me but I can reach the candy jar. He is endowed with all the charm, but I can explain things in grown-up speak, which frequently leads to my acquittal and his inculpation. That’s quite alright because he is always the one who gets us in trouble in the first place.
By some path of gruesome injustice, Leonne recently acquired a brand-new football game; one of those green tubs with burley football guys standing stoically on springs. The original idea seems to be that the players patiently place one ball somewhere in the tub and then take turns pweeioning the football guys so that they propel the ball towards the other player’s goal. Foolishness, of course.
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| Missing football guy |
Leonne and I - surely inspired far beyond the compass of the original designers - emptied the canister of spare balls onto the field and made it the game’s goal to hit our opponent in the head with either a ball or else one of the football guys, who for some reason came loose en mass about ten seconds into the game and were flying like wounded sparrows all over the place.
I was winning. And that generally doesn’t sit well with Leonne, who asserted with some force that the balance of power was tilted due to one of his football guys being AWOL. I scored. Leonne wailed. I was awarded a hit from the candy-jar. Leonne wailed even louder. Leonne’s mother came whirling in, ready to split some wigs and serve justice and was pelted by a virtual cloud of little plastic footballs and football guys until she retreated and let us go back to doing guy things.
The missing football guy was found sticking out of a wad of cookie dough.
