The Penguin Race

I recently bought this toy for Jessica and Reuben.

Well, Reuben is allowed to watch it. Only Jessica is allowed to touch the penguins and woe betide anyone else caught clutching one of them.

I don't know how long the penguin race has been around for. It must be decades. I remember desperately wanting one in the 1980s. Now, over twenty years later, my dream has been fulfilled. Dreams can come true people. At last, I share a house with racing penguins.

Sadly, my dream did not include the awful, awful squawking noise that the things makes. But still, dreams always come at a price. 'Be careful of the thing you want, you'll get it,' as my grandmother used to say darkly.

The penguins hop up the steps and then skedaddle, pell mell, down the slide. There are three penguins, red, blue and black.

Jessica has scratched away the eyes of our red penguin. Her initial chants of, "weeeeeeee" and "wait for me" have been replaced by a slightly more sinister version which consists of "no eyes, no eyes" when the red penguin mounts the stairs.

I don't know what poor old Mr. Red did to deserve this fate. Perhaps he looked at her funny? Got too cocky? We'll never know.

So he now hops and slides around in the dark.

And this tortuous metaphor is finally about to reach its conclusion. You may breathe a sigh of relief.

I don't think my life is that different from the penguin race. I wish it could be more accurately represented by something elegant or charming. But . . . it feels somehow right that my life boils down to a cheap, plastic toy. That makes hideous squawking noises.

We can't all have grand lives. Some of us are just stuck being penguins in a eternal race that is never won or lost. We can't even change our position in the running order. We race. Until our batteries give out. And if we're lucky we get to keep the stickers that represent our eyes.

I have a feeling that me and Old No Eyes Red aren't that different. When I see him hopping and sliding gaily away, blindly, I have a pang of fellow feeling. Because I'm doing the same, hopping and sliding. Sometimes it's scary, sometimes it's plain boring and sometimes, just sometimes, it's exhilarating. To slide down into the dark, plummeting, wondering if something will change this time.

If we'll be snatched up and have our eyes have scratched off for instance? Like Mr. Red.

We might go whizzing down breathlessly expecting things, two babies for example. And something terrible and strange will happen and our expectations will be stretched and twisted. We'll get to the end of the race and we'll have only one. Or none at all.

But regardless, we'll soon be hopping up those stairs once again. There is no help for it. Because the race doesn't end at that point. Your eyes might be scratched off. Your baby might have died. But that darn penguin race, well, it simply doesn't care. Up you hop, once again.

Or perhaps, perhaps, something good will happen on this particular slide down?
I'm not going to rule it out. Not yet.