An empty beer can floated ashore outside my in-laws’ cottage one morning last summer.

Meghan the Elder snatched it up with a frown.

“People shouldn’t put garbage in the water,” she said with as stern a tone as a seven-year-old could be expected to muster.  

Colleen the Younger mounded sand into neat piles when she wasn’t exploring the inside of her nose, happily oblivious to our conversation.

Meghan inspected the aluminum can with increasing concern.

“What do you call those people who take the garbage away?” she asked.

I ventured aloud that she was probably thinking of garbage men.

“No, the other ones, the ones who clean up messes and things.”  

“Environmentalists?”

She nodded.

“I want to be one of those when I’m older,” she added without a trace of self-doubt in her voice.

Visions of our daughter chaining herself to great redwoods or taking to task corporate polluters filled my head and made my heart swell with pride.

Our car would bear bumper stickers informing other drivers of Meghan’s accomplishments, with messages such as “Our daughter torpedoed a whaling ship” and “My child goes out on a limb for rainforests.”

David Suzuki would probably come calling.

Yes, hers is a generation unspoiled by the greedy pursuit of money and worldly possessions at the expense of those things that are genuinely important.

Pardon me for a moment, Meghan has a question regarding her chosen career.

“Do environmentalists make a lot of money, daddy?”

This just in: Meghan the Elder is reconsidering her career path and is now mulling over many other possibilities for employment.

The job talk has now turned to thoughts of working as either an artist or a scientist.

“Maybe I could be both,” she’ll say with unflagging optimism, sure that the two occupations naturally complement one another.

I ventured aloud that she could most certainly do both, while mentally trying to reconcile the thought of a career requiring both beakers and brushes.

The girls are vaguely aware of what it is I do all day, having tagged along for the rare weekend assignment.

This involves me snapping photos and jotting down notes that will later be typed into my computer in story form under headings such as The Easter Bunny: hero or hoax, and Santa Claus: Enemy of the Chimney Sweep.

The girls giggle at the headshot that accompanies this column, finding it strangely amusing that their father’s noggin would have a place among all that tiny text, and was, in fact, arriving on their friends’ doorsteps every Friday.

When a fire truck or ambulance screams past, Meghan or Colleen will inevitably ask if I’ll be running out to take a picture of the burning building/treed cat/fender bender.

I suspect they’re hoping to join me, but have a nagging suspicion that children accompanying their father to a raging house fire would probably be viewed as an example of bad parenting.

I can see the headline now: Dad in doghouse for taking kids to late-night blaze – children show up at school tired and smoky.