SNEAK PEEK: Joseph's Excellent Bad Day
Chapter One
“Strike two.”
“Strike three. You're out!”
Joseph quietly put his bat on the ground and walked back to the dug-out. He was embarrassed and sad. That was one strike out too many.
Joseph's Papa was watching the game from the bleachers. When he saw how his grandson's head hung down, he knew that he was feeling pretty low about himself.
“Hey Joseph!” Papa called from a few meters behind, “Do you want to go get some ice cream after the game?”
“Sure Papa”, he mumbled.
They'd just climbed into the car and shut the door when Joseph slumped in his seat and complained “I'm no good at anything!”
“Nothing?”
“I suck at baseball. I messed up my speech at school I went skiing with my class last winter, slid right into a big tree and spent the rest of my day in the sick room. And I'm short! The other kids think I'm only nine or ten – they can't believe I'm almost twelve.”
Papa listened quietly for several minutes as Joseph listed all the things that were wrong with him. They drove up to the drive-through Dairy Queen, ordered two chocolate ice cream sundaes and headed back toward home.
“Come with me to the back yard for a couple of minutes Joseph. I want to show you something very special to me.” It was July and so Papa's flower garden was in full bloom. The old man and his grandson walked past pink petunias, white begonias, yellow marigolds and bluey purple hydrangeas, to the back corner of the yard.
And there it was, a three meter high apple tree chock full of unripe fruit, each about two centimeters wide. “I can hardly wait until late August Joseph. You and I can pick buckets of these tasty apples and Nana will bake us a delicious apple pie.”
“It is a very beautiful tree Papa. You are a good gardener, and fortunately I love Nana's apple pies, with ice cream of course, but why are we here looking at a tree?” Papa motioned for Joseph to sit on the big home-made swing seat, it was pretty obvious he had something important for his grandson to hear.
