It started quite innocently, really.
"Papa, da Pirate!"
"The pirate?"
"Oui, da Pirate, Papa!"
"The pirate, what pirate?"
"Come, I show you. Come, come."
He leads me to the Boot Room, and peers up at the series of bags and cases, stacked high upon the shelves. He points vaguely at a section of the stack, as if all the bags are interchangeable, as if each and every bag is going to contain this pirate, rendering the actual choice of bag miraculously unimportant.
It occured to me: what if it were true? What if every one of those bags up there has a pirate in it? I would not have to go searching through all those bags, which, at this point, I am already certain is my cruel destiny.
You know, like those Epiphany cakes you get in Europe, where one piece of cake always has a prize in it, and I know you have to be the lucky one to get that piece, but what if every piece had a prize in it?
That would be really cool.
My rather engaging thought process was, however, cut promptly short.
"Pirate," he says.
So, here's the deal:
a) I don't like getting out the ladder. That kills me.
b) We are never gonna find this pirate fellow, no-how, there is zero question about it, and Natalya is not even here all day, or she would have found it in two seconds, because she packed the darn thing, and besides that, I didn't sign up for this.
"Dare," he says, still pointing vaguely up in the general direction of innumerable cases.
He means, "There".
That's okay. It is his third language. But I tell you what: I sure would like to be teaching him English at the kitchen table, instead of looking for a needle in a haystack while balanced on a ladder in a dark Boot Room.
Well .... I do get the ladder. And we do go through a whole bunch of cases. And if Gabriel has one quality which shines through with perfect clarity above all others, and I can assure you he has lots of qualities, it is this: persistence.
As if my worst nightmare came to immaculate fruition, like a perfectly crafted scene by John Carpenter, I went through every case.
Worse than that, we found no pirate.
"Okay, little one, I am sorry, but there is no pirate. I am putting the ladder away now."
He was not so much dejected as, well, determined. His body posture showed no signs of capitulation, and although I did not have a full-length mirror handy, I am sure my own body was doing a good job of resembling a heretic broken on the wheel.
Then, it occured to me. There are some more bags in the bathroom next door.
Can I be perfectly honest here? It did cross my mind not to tell Gabriel about my mental discovery. It did. I admit it.
However, I made up for this cowardly parental waywardness by striding boldly, sure the idea was groundless in any case, to the bathroom and announcing: "Okay, Gabriel, what about these bags up here?"
He was transformed. The light bulb went off.
"Yes, Papa, yes!"
I knew I was about to hit the motherload of pirate nests.
"C'est le blanc, papa."
"The white one?"
"Oui," he declared, with utter certainty.
I mean, he couldn't have thought about the white one with such cool mental finesse before, right?
And sure enough, I mount the ladder, take down the white bag, dump it on a nearby steamer trunk, unzip the bag, and what do we find? The pirate! But not a pirate figure, like a little Spider Man or something, but a pirate costume.
Gabriel giggled with delight, plowed through the bag, digging out every element that was fit and proper for a pirate, and changed clothes right then and there.
He may be a pirate, but he was a beaming, friendly pirate.
From that point forward, things got increasingly animated, until the two of us were laughing ourselves silly.
