The Gingerich Family came to dinner last night — our first dinner guests in the new house. Before dinner, Harrison helped me move boxes to the garage (he pulled the Radio Flyer wagon). After dinner, we played pirates.

Hank found a stick on the ground and began to brandish it. "This is my pirate sword," he said. "Argh. Ahoy, me hearties." He swished it in the air, cutting imaginary innocents to ribbons. He found another sword and gave it to me. We crossed blades.

I recently made an eBay purchase for just such an occasion. "If we're pirates," I said, "Then we need a pirate flag."

"Yeah," said Harrison. Swish, swish. "Yargh."

I went into the house and returned with the flag: a Jolly Roger. Harrison beamed: "Alright! A real pirate flag!" We raced to the flagpole, where he helped me lower the Oregon state flag and raise the skull and crossbones.

"We're really pirates now!" Hank said.

"But where's our ship?" I asked.

"Over there!" He sprinted — sword in hand — to the large appliance box that Kris and I had left out specifically for kids to play in. He climbed inside. "Ahoy there, Emma. Grab a sword."

Emma had a glass milk bottle in hand, and was walking from rose bush to rose bush, pulling off petals and stuffing them inside. She turned to look at Harrison and, with much patience, explained, "I am a princess. Princesses do not have swords."

"Yargh!" said Harrison. "Ahoy, me hearties!"

"Well," I said to Emma, "Maybe pirate princesses have swords." She thought about that for a moment, and then returned to plucking petals.

A mosquito bit me. "Crap," I said. "Pirates hate mosquitoes."

"Yeah!" said Harrison, crouching in his ship, sword in hand. "Pirates hate mosquitoes!"

"But they love fire," I added as I fetched a citronella candle from the porch. Harrison docked the pirate ship and came to help me light matches. He really wasn't very good at it, but he tried. When our pirate fire was burning, we sat in the nearby chairs and looked around at the ocean.

"Look!" I said. "What's that."

"A cat," said Harrison.

"A pirate cat," I said.

"Yeah! Let's get him!" And so we charged poor Simon, who slumped to the ground in defeat. We petted the pirate cat. The pirate cat glowered at us.

"Pirates like cats," I said. "They especially like pirate cats."

Harrison considered this, and then he said, "Pirates like cookies."

"Yeah," said Emma, who had joined us by now, carrying her bottle of petals in one hand and a newfound pirate princess sword in the other. "Pirates love cookies." We went inside to get some chocolate chip cookies. Emma struggled to hold three objects with only two hands.

When we had finished our cookies, the pirates wanted to run after the pirate cat again, but Simon hid in the bushes. "Maybe we shouldn't chase him," I said. "He doesn't like it. And besides, he's king of the pirate cats. If we chase him, he may have us killed."

"Yargh!" said Harrison. Instead of chasing the pirate cat, we found more milk bottles and filled them all with rose petals.

Later, I sat with Jeremy the pirate dad sat on the back porch. We shared a bit of Scotch and a smoke: I smoked my pipe (and the Brandybuck leaf); Jeremy held a cigarette in one hand and a cigar in the other.

We took our ease.

"It feels good to take a break," said Jeremy. He's been working non-stop on their new house. It was a challenge to get him to take an evening off to visit.

"Yeah," I said. "It really does."

On this day at foldedspace.org

2003 — Purge   In which I ride my bike. In which I throw away a decade of computer magazines. In which I read self-help books.