A boy missing

Returning home to Temecula from a trip to Traveland in Irvine, the long time friends were inside their house watching a film with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Being a hero again in the film, he fails to be these days in politics.

The question the friends was asked was where the children were.
They were in another room watching a film called “The pirates of the Carribean”.
Having been the whole day away, good to go and say hello to them.

Pearl, the 13-year-old girl on the bed watching the film.
A chat.
And then the question, where is your brother Buster?
The 5-year-old boy.
As adolescent girls can be, Pearl replied as uninterested as she could be:
“I don’t know”.
The other room was checked and it was empty.
The bathroom?
Nobody.
Back to the TV watching friends, the grandparents of Buster.
If they knew where he was?
In the room watching a film with his sister.
Well, he is not.
This alarmed the grandmother of Buster.
She went looking herself.
Asking sister Pearl again where he was.
“I don’t know”.
Where could Buster be?
Nobody had seen him or heard him leaving the house.
But then everybody had been watching movies.
Not exactly alert to the activities of a 5-year-old boy.
It was supposed he had been going out of the house to entertain himself wondering around on the 12 acres property.
That is for a large part pure nature with hills and trees and bushes and cactuses and coyotes and rattlesnakes.
The grandmother went outside and called the enterprising boy.
“Buster, Buster!!!”
But no reply.
A search party went all over the property.
Calling out his name.
Looking everywhere.
And as time progressed, the worry grew.
Coming close to becoming desperate.
Where could he be?
What had happened to him?
What to do?

It is very interesting in such a situation what the fantasy is doing.
It is imagining the worst possible scenarios and situations.
Buster bitten by a rattlesnake.
Buster fell down from a rock.
His lifeless body somewhere in the bushes.
Buster abducted.
The police involved.
No good portrait picture of the boy to publish on leaflets.

And the amazing thought, while panic levels were almost reached after 45 minutes of searching and searching by four people that, hell, we damn care for this boy.
We love him and don’t want to lose him.

As a last action before to call the cops, the grandmother went again into the room where his sister had been watching Johnny Depp and where Buster had been last seen.
She looked in a closet and he wasn’t there.
But she heard a faint sound.
Like a purring cat.
Coming from underneath the bed on which Pearl had been watching the film.
Immediately the grandmother recognized the sound as that of her beautiful grandchild.
She looked underneath the bed, and yes indeed, Mr. Buster was there sound asleep.

Somehow, unnoticed by his sister, he had crept underneath the bed and had fallen asleep.

He was not woken up.
He was left there to sleep his sleep.

Eventually he appeared and was asked what had happened.
He explained he had gone underneath the bed to read his comic book.
And had fallen asleep.

Of course he was not punished or reprimanded.
The adults had been worried and had been faced with their imaginations.
That’s theirs.
Not Busters.



.