Imaginarium

Every day on the way home from school, the little rascal and his friend Annabelle have a number of regular stops that they make. Our first stop is often Annie's house, their classmate who lives around the corner from school.  Her building has a outdoor ramp to the basement that can't be passed by untrodden.  They run down and up it and launch themselves down the block where they lock themselves in a sidewalk gate and taunt their parents from within.  Then they take off and run into the pizza store to admire the gumball machines.  We finally forbade that, so instead they run into the deli next door and admire the car-shaped candy until we have to threaten precious belongings to get them out.  The next stop is an old payphone at the corner.  They place a number of important calls until some imagined crisis forces them to slam the phone down and run around the ice cream stand's sitting area.  And around and around and around.  Eventually, we grab them and force them to cross the street and continue home.  Then they visit "work," the brownstone block's lone red gate.  Every day they express surprise that work is closed again.  On to the next stop, a horizontal bar that serves as the world's worst yard fence.  Rather than keep anyone out, such as small children, it attracts them like flies.  They climb on it, slide across it, swing under it, etc.  Both Annabelle and Sasha have left this stop in tears from getting hurt or arguing over bar territory but it never stops being awesome.  Then it's on to the forbidden corner garden where the monkeys attempt to stomp on plants, steal decorative stones, and help each other climb onto the 3-foot high pedestal.  Naturally, they are forcibly removed from this slice of heaven, and we cross the street to the apartment building in Pennsylvania.  Or maybe it's the station where they call Pennsylvania?  Something mysterious that has to do with Pennsylvania.  Where they also sell portable TVs from the electric utility box near the front door.

Finally, the last stop before our building and Annabelle's bus stop: the mailbox and its drab counterpart, the olive-green mailbox (a "relay box" for those in the know).  The mailboxes are more fun than I thought possible.  A small person can hide between them, or two small people can chase each other around them, and then when it's time to go, you can get candy or "bad medicine" dispensed from the door lock on the green mailbox.  This week, Mama and I both walked Sasha home from school and after the kids played with the mailboxes, he demanded that Nerdy and I each have some bad medicine.  We dutifully did.  Then we crossed the street, and as we left, Nerdy said "Bye, Mailbox!"  Sasha acted like she was crazy and corrected her, "It's just a mailbox, Mama.  You don't say goodbye to it."