The Walk

Most days we walk to school, to save time but mostly because it’s a pleasant walk and a great way to start off our day.  Although we’re looking at a 15-minute stroll here, this short journey does have its challenges; three of them to be exact:

a) In hot weather, I sweat like a pig.  Consequently by the time I get to school, I am soaked with perspiration, and the sight of an overheated and soggy principal plus the associated odour that usually emanates from such a sweat ball would most likely scare the kids and chase away my secretary.

b) A certain section of our path to school is often fraught with dog excrement. Call it a regrettable quirk of mine (like always loosing my keys) if you like, but I seem to have this thing about stepping into dog shit; if a turd is there, my feet will step in it. Again, this adds to my already perspiration fueled malodorousness mentioned in (a), which only succeeds in attracting flies and repelling people I am meant to work with during the day.

c) Madeleine works very hard and often gets carried away with bringing her schoolwork home. Consequently, everyday she more often than not lugs around a ton load of marking to and from school, which also includes all the other primary school teacher paraphernalia that primary teachers are akin to hoarding, such as workbooks, notebooks, textbooks, every-colour-known-to-man marking pens, not to mention the empty cleaned out yogurt containers, toilet paper cardboard tubes, stickers, a whole lot of stickers, empty sandwich bags, cut out alphabet, rubber erasers, rubber bands, small bags of Hersheys Kisses (to remind the kids that the teacher loves them), glue sticks, fluorescent coloured sticky notes, scissors, and a sleuth of other miscellaneous primary school sundries, just in case one day she gets stuck on a deserted island with twenty-two 8-year-olds and you never know, this stuff could come in pedagogically handy. And of course, moi, being the ever so gallant spouse that I am, I usually end up carrying most of this melee of pedagogical resources, and fuse this with me sweating profusely while stepping into dog shit, well, this does not make for a very happy camper first thing in the morning. 

Resourceful people as we are, it took us a while but we have come to terms with these walking to school challenges which has meant that we now walk to school on most days, that is the days that its not raining heavily, which for some reason it hasn’t yet this year, and also the days that it is excessively hot, which again, for some reason it hasn’t been yet this year.  Must be the cooling global warming phenomenon.

In regards to my overly productive sweat glands, I have solved this problem by bringing with me at all times sweat-absorbing baby powder, lots of deodorant, and an extra shirt.  In the case of the unfortunate gravitation pull that dog dung appears to have on my feet, Madeleine has kindly accepted to act as my personal DSR (dog shit radar) on our walking trail to school, alerting me of the approaching offensive mounds of dog pooh. And lastly, to facilitate the conveyance of all the pedagogical primary school cargo, Madeleine now packs everything in one of our many roll away suitcases. 

So voilà, we are quite a sight to behold every morning as we set off, I, my school bag in one hand, a shirt and tie in the other, and my harbinger of a wife rolling her well stocked teaching toolbox, the rumbling sound of those suitcase wheels punctuated by her occasional alerting cry of ‘dog shit’.  Off we go, let the trumpets blow...

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