Sometimes your mom chats up really cute fireman on the street at random and even though it’s 95 degrees out and you would like to go lie in the shady hammock sipping cran-raspberry juice and reading “Teen Titans”, your mom harangues you to study the gleaming dials of the firetruck, and you scuff your sneakers on the asphalt.
Then a terrifying burly fireman swings you up about 8 feet into the air to sit behind the wheel of the enormous house-sized firetruck where anything could happen. Horrible sirens could go off. The truck might start rolling. A fire might reach out sinister psychic tentacles to suck you right into some kind of unavoidable story where, like Pickles the firecat, you must help and be a hero.
I could see him imagining the fire, the disaster, the truck starting up and a nightmare of not knowing how to drive the thing. So, I took the photo quick and let him get down.
Next time I will just explain to the nice fireman that it’s me who wants to sit in the driver’s seat, courting chaos and imagining myself hurtling down the highway at 120 miles an hour with sirens blazing.
I would also like to drive a tank, and a submarine, and pilot interstellar spaceships. Sometimes as I haul Moomin after me on various random adventures or I demand he climb a tree or touch a bullfrog, I apologize mentally for the bumpy ride.
He looks happy enough though, don’t you think?
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