When you are four you sit at the table in a full size chair and eat food with metal utensils and drink milk from a glass made of real glass. Four-year-old Mabel's new mealtime drinking glass has an extra heavy bottom to encourage its own stability. She spilled nothing – not one drop – when I came over on Saturday to share her evening while her parents went out to dinner in the Mission for Daddy's birthday.
Mabel told me her memories of the vacation in Portland this summer when she rode on a ferry boat to get to a zoo where there was a real train that she also rode. She thinks that BART (like we have here) is sort of like a train but the train in Portland was really a real train.
And then she slowly disappeared down to the land underneath the table and became a worm going underground and wriggling secretly through the earth and then popping up right next to her unsuspecting grandfather on the other side of the table and scaring the bejeezus out of him.
