The Brown Treehouse

The monitor lizzard or the cobra?

For  those of you who don't know my two elder daughters, and for a better understanding of the story, please bear with these few lines that will give the bakground details necessary to fully appreciate.  This story, in my humble opinion, summarizes and illustrates my two elder daughters (and their completely different ways) to perfection.

Sixtine, 7, has the intellectual identity.  Alix, 5, has the joy of life.  Both are smart, and both are jolly. But Sixtine is often noticed for her analytical power, her capacity to strip down a problem to its core elements, and her command of concepts.  Alix, on her side,  is frequently remembered for her constant sweet smile, her marvellous laugh, and her always-delightfully-beside-the-point take on things.

Long story short.  Tonight, I take the kids to bed and, as they have been doing recently, they opt out of the traditional book-story for a family story.  I've run out of boyscout adventures and I'm running low on army campaigns.  So I tell them the story of my own grandfather's heroism, passed on to me by my own father when he was putting his own children to bed, back in the days.

Goes like this (I might be getting a few things wrong, it's been a while).  My grandfather is on a large lake (probably Lake Michigan, but I'm not sure), on his boat, with friends (a few children and their mother), for an outing.  The motor is running low on fuel, and he decides to fill the tank up.  Unfortunately, he forgets to stop the motor before doing so, and the motor instantly catches fire, endangering the boat and the people on board.  The motor is an outboard one, and it is tethered to the boat  and locked with a combination-padlock.  In spite of his terrible burns in his childhood, and the loss of his own father to fire, he rolls up his sleeves, plunges his arms into the fire, to seize the combinationon the padlock, thus tossing the flaming motor into the lake, and saving the woman, the children, and the day.  

Sixtine thinks about the story for a second.  She says "I understand.  He figured he could either go for certain injury to himself (high probability /medium gravity risk - editor's note) , or for possible death of everyone (medium possibility/high gravity risk).  He chose the former as the only acceptable choice."

Alix thinks about it for a second too.  She asks  "what was the combination?"