Kindred Spirits...

Due to an unexpected lack of imagination I've decided to write this story using the same techniques, or lack thereof, that I used to write A Flea's Small World. It might just be easier to rush out and buy yourself a copy, if you haven't already done so, if it's available yet, that is, because- feathering my Nest aside, which would Always be very appreciated- you'll never find out about the Bogey-Hole Cutter if you don't.

What you won't find in my other little book, however, are these next few stories about me and my Kindred Spirit...

We are walking home from school this day; I know it is a Friday afternoon because I had a lunch order from the canteen today. I got a party pie which I smother in tomato sauce and a packet of Chicken Rollers- exactly the same as what I got last week. My Kindred Spirit gets a salad cup. The only good thing about them is that you get a Kraft chese-stick to go with the limp lettuce leaves and carrot sticks. We are both five and in Kindergarten.

She sits at the Green table and I'm on the Yellow table. I don't envy her because Crazy Linda sits right next to her. We live on the same block, but her house is further up on the hill and around the corner, so we don't really live on the same street anymore because they have different names. She also lives a little bit closer to the Park than me, and every afternoon as we walk down the lane from school, we take a shortcut across it.

This day we are pretending to be Indians; chanting, patting our open-mouths to get that authentic American-Indian war-cry just right as we jog around and round in circles. The day was overcast and threatening rain anyway, but surely it was our Rain Dance that finally swayed the rain-gods to unleash the torrents of water that quickly left us freezing and soaking in our little blue and white tunics. That afternoon, early in the Summer of seventy-nine, we decide that if we think it's going to be a hot day on the following Monday that we will wear our swimmers underneath our uniforms, and will stop on our way home to play under the sprinklers in the park as they water the dusty cricket pitch. This is reminiscent of another time that we went in with our uniforms still on, and we both got into trouble for coming home soaking wet- even though it was so hot that day that the tar on the road was melting.

So we decided to solve that little problem...

I can almost picture us there, wearing our little crocheted bikinis under the sprinkler that waters the grass- the familiar tick-tick-tick muted by our childish squeals as we leapt in and out of the rainbow-spray. Afterwards, we get mostly dry, with our socks, and put our shoes back on our bare feet, because there's heaps of bindis, and walk home.

Somehow I have the feeling that my Parents may have preferred it, afterall, if we'd kept our other clothes as well, while we enjoyed the sprinklers in the park, or a least gotten re-dressed after we'd finished; at least that's how it seemed to me when we got into even more trouble than the time we did before. I wouldn't be happy if my kids walked the streets nearly naked, neither, but that was both the first and the last time that I walked home from school in my swimmers.

Then there was that other day- the day that we tried to steal the puppy with Her skipping rope. We used to pause at this particular house every afternoon, to pat the dogs through the fence. There were three of them, all Dachshunds, of various sizes, so that we assumed the largest one was the Father dog, and the middle-sized dog was the Mother dog, and then, of course, there was their baby, whiose tiny collar identified him as Pepe.

This was the one we coveted the most, because he was by far the cutest- although I wanted to change his name to Cocktail Frank. Just to be different. We thought it a bit unfair that they had three dogs when neither of us had even one, so we decided that the next time that we walked past the house and they weren't home, that we would jump the fence and just take him.

It might have been a few days or as long as a few weeks until we got our chance, I can't remember exactly now, but when the chance came up we took it...

I still reckon we would've made it out of there with the puppy if it weren't for the fact that the owners came home right in the middle of the Great Dog Heist; She even had her skipping rope through his little collar - all she had to do was pass him to me, climb back over the fence and then run as fast as we could all the way home. But we didn't. The car pulled into the driveway and we fled, even leaving the skipping rope behind as evidence. I'm sure that they saw us as we ran off, and what was worse was that now we couldn't play skipping at lunchtimes anymore, either.

That was the real reason we started walking home the long way also; because neither of us could ever face walking past that house again in case the owner of the puppy recognised us and called the police.

That afternoon we both decided to ask our parents for a puppy, and I must have pulled out all the punches, because that was how I got to get Boney, my little tri-coloured Beagle bitch, who I got for Christmas that same year...

Like my pen-pal the Hot Scot, my Kindred Spirit has remained a part of my Life. I don't see her as often as I would like these days, and I haven't yet seen her youngest child, but if She ever reads this I just want to let her know that she's the only person who's ever called me their Kindred Spirit and meant it.

And that it meant a lot to Me.