It seems that the bocah nakal weren't using the villa wifi after all, as they are present in the parking bay just the same as ever, regardless of the password change. You see now, this is the unfairness set in motion when someone begins to make false accusations which have arisen entirely from his own presumptions and prejudices. He creates a convincing narrative which nonetheless ultimately collapses around its own paranoid core.
I suspect that these boys have chosen the villa parking bay as a cozy sort of personal clubhouse, its most alluring feature being no doubt that it is out of the sun--and believe me, finding a spot in the tropics that is out of the sun is a pretty difficult thing to do.
One remembers being a boy himself by watching the neighborhood boys. As I watch, I remember lost things, things long since engulfed in the obscuring tide of time. I remember how my friends and I would choose out places that seemed somehow inviting and make them our own nooks, far from the madding crowd, so to speak--away from parents, away from the prying, uncertain world, away from rules and supervision. Our choice became whatever we might choose. It was the platoon HQ, it was the marshal's office, a time machine, a box canyon, a frontier post. I remember a spot in Oakland, California, an old brick fireplace in a little dip of the land in my great uncle's sprawling back yard. This was central headquarters of our international spy agency, the place to which we spies reported when we returned from our far flung foreign missions to the neighboring block. And again, I remember the unused driveway and garage of a neighborhood residence, a submerged sort of area that once served as a bay for loads of coal back when folks still used coal to heat their homes. Here we could hide from boys we did not want to play with, or from bullies known to be on the loose in the neighborhood, from the world's ears and eyes and unreasonable expectations. We could talk for hours, play the most ridiculous sort of games, agree on extravagant plans of conquest, or discuss the intriguing and often inaccurate particulars of female anatomy. We could search the pages of the latest forbidden bodice ripper and read the best paragraphs over and over again, and then hide the scandalous volume under the cover of the coal chute before leaving. Whether in the city or the forest or at the seashore, we found such a place. There were countless such hideouts in our own seemingly countless years of youth.
I suppose that present-day boys don't pretend so much as we did back then. Now their cellphones do the pretending for them, and they enter a pretend world that has been fashioned for them. Nonetheless, I think the basic pattern is the same. Home away from home means the very same thing now as it did when I was a boy.
I suspect that these boys have chosen the villa parking bay as a cozy sort of personal clubhouse, its most alluring feature being no doubt that it is out of the sun--and believe me, finding a spot in the tropics that is out of the sun is a pretty difficult thing to do.
One remembers being a boy himself by watching the neighborhood boys. As I watch, I remember lost things, things long since engulfed in the obscuring tide of time. I remember how my friends and I would choose out places that seemed somehow inviting and make them our own nooks, far from the madding crowd, so to speak--away from parents, away from the prying, uncertain world, away from rules and supervision. Our choice became whatever we might choose. It was the platoon HQ, it was the marshal's office, a time machine, a box canyon, a frontier post. I remember a spot in Oakland, California, an old brick fireplace in a little dip of the land in my great uncle's sprawling back yard. This was central headquarters of our international spy agency, the place to which we spies reported when we returned from our far flung foreign missions to the neighboring block. And again, I remember the unused driveway and garage of a neighborhood residence, a submerged sort of area that once served as a bay for loads of coal back when folks still used coal to heat their homes. Here we could hide from boys we did not want to play with, or from bullies known to be on the loose in the neighborhood, from the world's ears and eyes and unreasonable expectations. We could talk for hours, play the most ridiculous sort of games, agree on extravagant plans of conquest, or discuss the intriguing and often inaccurate particulars of female anatomy. We could search the pages of the latest forbidden bodice ripper and read the best paragraphs over and over again, and then hide the scandalous volume under the cover of the coal chute before leaving. Whether in the city or the forest or at the seashore, we found such a place. There were countless such hideouts in our own seemingly countless years of youth.
I suppose that present-day boys don't pretend so much as we did back then. Now their cellphones do the pretending for them, and they enter a pretend world that has been fashioned for them. Nonetheless, I think the basic pattern is the same. Home away from home means the very same thing now as it did when I was a boy.
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