Wandering Son Update

Those of you who have been around for a while will know two things about me. 1. that my son, Alex,  lives in Taiwan and 2. we are a family of storytellers for as far back as I can remember. Here's my latest email from Alex that covers both areas. I just had to post this. He cracks me up!

It's Halloween Week in Taiwan. The cuteness of Asia babies is intensified even further and we get to play fun games and parade from class to class bellowing "TRICK OR TREAT! SMELL MY FEET!" ad infinitum.

For this year, my two main activities are 1) an impromptu first-person story about accidentally knocking on my neighborhood witch's door and, to my dismay, having her demand a birthday cake or my fingers. After delivering the birthday cake she begins to cry and admits that the source of her vileness is the misfortune of having her birthday fall on Halloween and hence everyone always forgetting to tell her Happy Birthday.

2) I colored about 50 orange ping pong balls to look like "witch eyeballs" and then carried them around in an orange pumpkin trash can. Kids throw the balls in the trash can for sugary prizes. It went over very well on Wednesday and Thursday and I was hoping for the same success this evening. Unfortunately, we never had the opportunity to play...

To transport the game from school to school, I put the trash can full of ping pong balls between my legs on my scooter. We have a bit of a weather system coming in this weekend and it was quite windy outside. As I accelerated at a green light a big gust came in and blew the trash can off of my scooter. The top dislodged and my fifty hand-colored witch eyeballs spilled out and began blowing around an intersection full of cars and scooters. Not even just rolling, the gust was actually taking the balls up into the air! I had ten minutes to get to work and unfortunately could only observe the hilarity of this situation for a minute or two before speeding off to work with a tinge of guilt for littering.

LOVEMYLIFE!
ALEX