Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson for August 07, 2010

Are you sure you’re still best friends with Sofa…um Sophie, Alice?

If poor Petey makes any more friends he’s going to asphyxiate.

What’s this with “playdates”? You just run over to the kid’s house and shout really loud, “Can Andre come out and play?” That’s how it was in the way back when days….

But Andre has no arms or legs!

That’s OK, he’s second base!

^Sisyphos, that only works if they live close enough to do that. Alice does that with the neighborhood kids, but since they met at camp, it stands to reason that they are not neighbors. I’m not sure Soapie Sofa will go for the playdate thing, but Andre the Giant Mouth is a good kid for Petey (if Petey survives).

“No SISYPHOS Andre is having a time out for being politically incorrect and calling his sister girlie. Have your mother schedule another play date, preferably when the nanny can supervise.””

Petey should have a playdate with Loris. She’s way cooler than Viola.

We call her couch for short

Petey–The thinking man’s Charlie Brown

Those Otterloop kids need help when it comes to making new friends. Alice needs a nap and Petey an inhaler.

What the fudge is a playdate?

smizzlybob, a playdate is like fun, with dayplanners.

“I can squeeze you in 2:00 Thursday. Is that good for you?”

“No, I’ve got Summer Math Adventures every Tuesday and Thursday. How’s Friday at 10:00 look?”

“Well, I’ll have to move some stuff around, but if you can hold off until 10:30 I can give you the rest of the day.”

“10:30 Friday it is. Have your people call my people to hammer out the what and where.”

That doesn’t sound very fun. That sounds like work.

I didn’t say it was fun, I said it was like fun. But it’s highly structured rather than spontaneous, akin to a married couple who have sex once a week whether they want to or not. (With their parents watching, to make sure nobody loses an eye…)

If Andre uses up all the oxygen in the room, Petey should learn to metabolize carbon dioxide.

I think Petey would like being a plant: Putting down roots, drawing nutrients directly from the soil; it would be a much less-complicated existence… If he could develop into some sort of fern, he wouldn’t need exposure to a lot of direct sunlight, and he could curl up his fronds whenever he needed some “Petey-time.”

Sounds good to me, fritzoid…

When I was that age if I didn’t have anybody to play with I would go outside and yell, “OLLEY OLLEY INFANT! OLLEY OLLEY INFANT!” Within a few minutes at least one boy about my age who was looking for someone to play with would appear, and even if we had never met before we would instantly be friends.

Later my family moved to the country and that strategy didn’t work any more, because there usually wouldn’t be another boy my age in earshot.

-Cougar :{)

That’s kinda why playdates are sort of necessary for Petey, Cougar. Dill lives across the street from the Otterloops, and Nara and Beni seem to live in the general vicinity, but we’ve never seen any older children in their neighborhood. (Viola seems to live within walking distance, but Ernesto is only encountered at school, to the best of my recollection.)

Well, maybe one of Dill’s brothers is in Petey’s age range, but I can’t imagine their ideas of “fun” would overlap much…

When I was Petey’s age, my two best friends lived within a block from my front door (which kind of required that they’d be either my best friends or my worst enemies), but most of the other kids in the neighborhood were younger. My brother is only a year and a half older than me, but he was only within bicycle range of his classmates from school. My sister is two years older still, and she was the youngest of the next bulge of “big kids” in the area (at least it made her a prime candidate for baby-sitting jobs). And we were at the tail end of the Baby Boom; nowadays, I don’t know what the population density of children-per-square-block would be, but my understanding is that it’s substantially lower, even in new suburban subdivisions like Cul de Sac.

Yes some of you brought back the 25 cent movies and walking for an hour to go to the roller rink where we spent a day and walked an hour back home (through forest preserves etc -without a worry). AND the playgrounds had tall slides and run-hop-on merry-go-rounds all on plain DIRT!

When we were little, my brother’s friend, Steve (who had a slight speech impediment) would come to our door and yell “Can Donny pray?”

SOFA!

Does anyone else think that Sofie is Miss Bliss’s daughter?