things move around

Yesterday, stooping to right my capsized proto-toddler in the playground, I noticed a little shard of glass on the ground and removed it. Otherwise you know what happens, it ends up in someone’s eye, sloshing around in their vitreous humour, and then at night it grinds its way up the optic nerve like a pebble on a streambed, and you wake up with a bad headache, and the doctors slice open your cranium and say, look, by crikey, glass in the brain, and if his lobes and cortices aren’t slashed to bits I’ll be a monkey’s uncle! You know how it is.

No sooner have I picked up the shard than I’m lurching off like a big spasticated kite in a roaring hoolie, at the whim of my marauding offspring whose grip on my index finger is savage. But a nearby mom has seen me. One thing I’ve noticed about the playground, apart from there always being kids there, the other thing you see is moms. They congregate there. You have to watch them or they’ll try and talk to you, and how do you explain that after a day spent trying to pick your way through the internet without being swamped by countless mommy blogs, the last thing you want is the 3D, living variety coming at you like zombies.

So I show her the thing in my hand, the potentially brain-eviscerating nugget of glass I found on the floor of the playground. It is tiny and of course I’m not serious about the chances of it going up an eye-hole and flensing the old grey matter into a fluffy broth. But the mom is having none of my reassurances, she flees in terror, she almost forgets to take her progeny with her. Or perhaps she wasn’t terrified but just wanted to get home in time to blog the incident before any of the other moms.

Tonight I’m going to pull the same stunt with something else, a rubber tarantula, or a gun or something.