As soon as we take the main avenue ...

As soon as we take the main avenue he takes off his glasses and places them in its case. I like to hear the sound of the case when it closes. He'll produce them again a few minutes later, in the classroom, when he needed them. A little daily detail which shows a teenager's concern with his image.

This is a tiny part of today's routine. There have always been some - plenty - at any given time.

As this one (ST, May 12, 2006):

Every now and then we walk but mostly we drive. I fancy walking outside in cold days. But not when it rains, and, sure enough, it's raining almost everyday. When we walk he takes my hand and he seldom talks to me. We say the numbers aloud, from one to twenty, both in Spanish and in German. At some point we cut our path short through a lovely park where dozens of ravens slowly move on the ground in little jumps, eating all sorts of insects. Despite we get quite close to them they don't seem to care. We spend a little time deciding which route to take, the upper one, closer to the sun and the clouds, or the lower one, when feeling less adventurous and when our most immediate concern is to kick the pine nuts lying on the ground. He chooses. We see the usual bunch of dogs with their corresponding owners, old people chatting and strolling at a slow pace. Dog-powered friendship. I remind him of the little dog, a she, which always moves the slowest, always following an undefined wake left behind by the rest of the group. She looks at us. We look at her. We cross the road and climb the steep-sloped path alongside the church overlooking Bayern Munich's training football lawns. Isolated blackbirds eventually hide, hurriedly, as we pass. We barely see them flying. They seem to spend the whole day on the ground, searching for food amidst the bushes which separate the walkways from the lawns, splitting the parks in multiple islands of green. Blackbirds move gracefully among the bushes, on the damp ground, over a sea of rotten leaves, brown and dark, in the company of the inevitable fragments of broken glass from bottles of beer smashed to pieces, used kleenex, empty cigarette boxes, plastic bags, cans, all sort of debris and junk. Plenty of hidden trash piling up in every hedge of every street, that is the disgusting environment where blackbirds let the days go by. We left the park turning first right and then left to enter the street at which end we see a dog's head apparently floating in the air. I say the head's cut. He says it's not. As we get closer we see the head's attached to a body. A fine dog's brass sculpture at the door of the Kindergarten. And then he rushes to the door and rings the bell that will let the door open, which I push with some effort. He gets in and, abruptly, I feel he's another boy. He's been replaced all of a sudden by his cautious self, his discreet self. We both take his winter clothes off. He changes his shoes. I greet his Tantes and I kiss him goodbye.

Or this one (ST, Mar 15, 2006):

The ruling characteristic of the car we board on to during our early morning ride is the presence of house maids coming into the city from the surrounding suburban towns. These women, most of them well below their fifties, are always chatty and good-humoured, gossip devotees, eager to talk in loud voices about the hottest current affairs in the much too scrutinized world of the so-called very important people. Such equivalence class has seen its domain vastly enlarged lately to include all sort of weirdos, from illiterate beauties whose popularity is driven by glimpses of remote corners of their anatomies, gratuitously provided in low-rank reality shows on TV, to particularly unpleasant, royal-like individuals whose proudly arrogant behaviour seems legitimate by their farcical majestic aura. Phew.

Or this one (ST, Apr 20, 2001):

Chances to coincide with some colleagues on the train are usually high. Every now and then I see this woman with a fuddy-duddy look on her face and clothes, as those coming from some Eastern European country may have. She always wears the same old-fashioned clothes. She's not a beautiful woman, far from it in fact, but, nevertheless, there's something remarkable on her appearance. I can tell she notices me. We both know we both go to the same place everyday on that train. However, we've never talked to each other. Once, she was caught red-handed by a ticket collector with an invalid ticket on her wallet and was forced to leave the train. Besides, she was fined. I was close to talk to her then, to cheer her up. I didn't, though, and she knew I was there. Gazing.

Or this one (ST, Mar 4, 2002):

All along our short trip on the metro we usually remain silent. When we emerge from the underground we talk a little bit while we walk to his German school.

'Why is the earth going around in circles around the sun?' he asked me.

I was glad to listen to his question. I explained to him that the earth, as every other planet in the solar system, goes around the sun because of the gravitational field of the central body, which after formation adjusted itself in such a particular way to have all the planets in stable equilibrium orbits around our star.

'Is the solar system round?' he went on.

This was, technically, more difficult to answer in simple terms if I was hoping he would understand it. I told him that the solar system is not exactly round, strictly speaking, but more like an elongated sphere, so to speak, like the oval ball people who play rugby use or like a melon. I was hoping that two such visual examples would help him to get the idea. But then he said,

'Is it then a white or a red melon?'

I looked at him smiling quite openly. He was being quite serious, though. I told him that it is more like a white melon, which is not exactly spherical as he knows, instead of a red one, a watermelon, which is usually quite round-shaped. He seemed satisfied with my answer but after a while he continued,

'Is the sun then at the center of the melon?'

I saw then it clearly that it would be difficult for me to escape from introducing some technical aspects if I were to be accurate in my answer. I told him that the sun is not at the center since the orbits of the planets around the sun are not circular but rather elliptic. I explained to him the concept of ellipse telling him that it is the geometrical shape one obtains when cutting a white melon in two halves. The melon itself has the shape of an ellipsoid. The sun, I followed, is not located at the center but in a position slightly away from it, a position which grown-up people decided to call the focus. And in an ellipse there are always two such points. If the orbits were circular instead, then the two focus would coincide with the center of the circle.

He seemed to like knowing about this and proceeded to ask me about comets.

'Do they also follow ellipses?'

I told him that is true. As any other celestial body bounded gravitationally to our sun the comets, most of which come from a region known as the Oort cloud at the far end of the solar system, describe ellipses rather than circles, at least those that live long enough and do not crash with the earth.

'And kill the dinosaurs', he remarked.

'Yes', I said.

'Halley's comet didn't kill the dinosaurs', he said after a little pause in our conversation, once we were about to enter the school.

'You're completely right!' I exclaimed. I continued saying that Halley's comet could have never killed the dinosaurs since it's never crashed on to the earth. Instead, it gets very close to us every seventy something years and then turns around towards the place it began its journey, with its energy renewed thanks to the gravitational pull exerted by the earth.

We reached his classroom and he took off his jacket. I put his backpack in a large wooden box especially designed for such purpose. I kissed him goodbye telling him that I love him and that I'll be back from Munich in just two short weeks.

'But I thought you said fourteen days!' he complained.