Monday, June 1, 2009

more small children!

Got to talk to my sister on the phone last night for a good long while - thank you, Ruthy, for calling! And we talked about those kids in the woods, and she told me something, and I told her something. 

She told me that reading my blog post about the unaccompanied kiddywinkles reminded her of all the times she'd seen five-year-olds (FIVE!) out along off by the side of the road, herding cows, in Ethiopia. Clearly, they managed. 

And I told her that yesterday, on my way back from yet another childless jog in the woods, I stumbled on childers in the cobbled dip between Winkler Strasse and Koenigsallee, the wonderful little walkthrough called Hasensprung, aka Bunny Hop, which I have mentioned before. It is fabulous because it hangs down low like a hammock slung between the two streets (Winkler Strasse as I have also mentioned before means cornery street and it does do that, turn corners; Koenigsallee is not named after any kings at all it turns out but Felix Koenig, whose dates I don't have in my head any more) - but a hammock paved with cobblestones and punctuated in four places by sets of two offset metal gates (to stop cars and seriously slow down bikes) and, at its lowest point, straight and walled by two bridge sides with long lean hares atop, looking out over the lake on each side.

So there I was at the lowest point in the hammocky pedestrian street and coming towards were two tiniest of children, each with a pug puppy on a leash and all of this being herded by a short adult. Smallness was of the essence here. And the little girl was I think at least watching the puppy at the end of her leash but the little boy was surely looking elsewhere, and every few steps the puppies just basically fell all over each other and tripped and rolled and stumbled, and then they kept walking as if nothing was (as they say here in Germany), and I thought: amazing. Why didn't we think of getting a pug puppy instead of a full-grown Rottweiler/Shepherd/Chow mix when we got Jesse - since poor Felix, maybe 6 at the time, was completely unable to walk our new full-grown puppy. 

Or, going back to the Ethiopian example: why didn't we just get a cow?

No comments: