"The Particulars of Peter" by Kelly Conaboy

In the book The Particulars of Peter (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2020), author Kelly Conaboy lists the times when she loves to watch Peter her dog: when he's eating, sitting still, choosing a toy, sleeping, and

While he's pounding his front paws on the ground and thrashing his body around upon my return home, seemingly unable to control his indomitable joy.... While he's sniffing a single leaf for a very long time. While he's paused, one paw up, catching a scent in the air like a tiny detective. (89)

That all these particulars of Peter also describe my Brandy -- and Mia before her, back and back through half a century of dogs (see my page Loving Dogs) -- may suggest to an unsympathetic person, you've seen one dog, you've seen 'em all.

There's truth to that. I've been re-reading Montaigne, who was fascinated 450 years ago by his sleeping dog's dreams of chasing rabbits just as Conaboy and I are today. So there's a true corollary: You've met one devoted dog caretaker, you've met us all. So is there some problem with that?

Like Conaboy, we spend money on merchandise and time on activities, all because we do not want to disappoint our dogs. She takes Peter to a dog festival "Woofstock" (32), dance lessons, obedience training, DNA testing, and ghost hunting. Peter generally doesn't seem too excited by these, but Conaboy enjoys interacting with him in these different situations.

Like Conaboy, we shell out monthly for pet insurance. It's worth it to know, when the vet tells her how many thousands of dollars Pete's surgery will cost, that she doesn't have to think about the unthinkable alternative. At least, not yet.

One chapter lays out answers to the inevitable question, "Will My Dog Go to Heaven?" Conaboy interviews theologians who disagree. She quotes the Catholic Catechism's teaching that animals bless us "by their mere existence" and so "they deserve kindness," even as we eat some and wear some (226). She concludes that there's "beauty" in being

...lucky enough to have an ephemeral piece of light as a part of your life, aware of its impermanence from the beginning and loving it wholly anyway. Knowing someone who is only good, and getting to be their caretaker. Letting this dog believe that you are the sun and moon, even though you are just human. Protecting them until you no longer can. (228)

So this document of Peter's particulars, being also a reflection of Brandy's, and Mia's, is a way for Conaboy and me and all of us to cherish and honor our dogs. Only Conaboy makes money on it. "What a scam!" she writes (intro, p. xiii).

Thanks to Suzanne for this book, a Christmas gift. She has known me and my dogs Beau, Luis, and Mia. We've taken long walks to get to know Brandy. She invited me for Christmas with her, tiny Tabby, and tinier Darcy.

Because I do look for any excuse to include photos of Brandy, I add Conaboy's list of Pete's poses that Brandy also performs:

1. Cinnamon roll: Curled, circular, ready to be picked up by a large spatula.
2. Superman: Arms stretched out before him, soaring through a dream.
3. Gossip sphinx: A modified "sphinx," which is when he sits like a sphinx, gossip sphinx finds his head lowered between his paws, perched and ready to hear who did what. (109)

My photos include Brandy in her cinnamon roll/gossip sphinx combo, and also a pose I call "Squirrel Patrol."

Left: Suzanne's little guy Darcy on a day that followed weeks of daily visits to feed him and Tabby, when he decided he could trust me. Now we're best buds.

Cycling America Virtually: Elko, Nevada

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275 miles to Elko, Nevada From Pocatello, Idaho, I completed the 275 miles to reach Humboldt National Park near Elko, Nevada. (I actually ride around Atlanta, but I'm logging miles across America, with photos courtesy of Adobe.)

I connect to Elko, home of the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, an event now called plain "Elko" by cowboy cognoscenti. I relate through radio commentator Baxter Black, "cowboy poet and former large animal veterinarian" who provided poems and commentary on NPR for many years. In tribute, here's my poem about an actual experience at the end of my bike ride:

Doggerel

When I had a-pedalled to virtual Elko,
I groaned as I hoisted myself from the saddle.
Unsnapping my helmet, unstrapping shoe Velcro
I came face-to-face with some actual cattle.

This suburban fam'ly had put up a stable.
A calf stared at me with eyes widened and soggy.
I said, "Little dogie, I'd chat, were I able,
but it's late. I'm awaited by my little doggie."

[Photo: Same cows at that fam'ly home, ready for their closeup]

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.

Punching the Air: Teen Poet Imprisoned

Writer Ibi Zoboi and poet-activist Dr. Yusef Salaam collaborated on a young adult novel in poetry, Punching the Air, drawing on Salaam's experience. In 1989, he was one of the five black males in their early teens arrested for the rape and near-fatal beating of "the Central Park Jogger." I remember reading with incredulity -- not enough! -- that bands of feral black boys roamed the city nights looking for white people to assault; "wilding," they supposedly called it. "Wilding" turns out to have been just a reporter's extrapolation from a misunderstanding of one remark by one boy.

Recent movies - a documentary and a drama - tell the story how police jumped to conclusions, how prosecutors bullied the boys into confessions, how the press hyped the crime. During the trial, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad to call for a public lynching. But after more than ten years in prison, all the young men were exonerated and the true culprit, a white man, was imprisoned.

Zoboi and Salaam have refracted the first part of that story, updating it, universalizing it. The protagonist named Amal ("hope" in Arabic) is well-loved, well-read, an artist, but guilty of fighting back when white teens attack him and his friends. A white teenaged boy lies in a coma, and Amal lands in prison. The story is how Amal learns to fight back against the external walls of the prison system and the internal walls of doubt that suffocate his spirit.

Each chapter is a poem with enough in it to reward re-readings, but you don't have to read Punching the Air twice to get the story and the feelings. Sometimes you feel angry, sometimes you ache, sometimes you smile at the sweetness. Often a word in one poem becomes the topic for the next, drawing you from page to page with no pause to look back. But as you read, you'll pick up many strands that tie disparate chapters together. To read Punching the Air a second time is like stepping back to appreciate a mural like the one that Amal wants to paint (130).

I paint with words, too Amal tells us, relating his poetry to his drawings. Many of the poems are titled after works he studied in AP Art History class -- The Thinker, The Watch, The Scream-- though he angered his art teacher by asking whether anyone outside of Europe made art, a fair question. He imagines a Black Mona Lisa and a remix of his favorite painting Guernica to be about him and his friends, with "distorted faces and bodies / in war in war in war", but, like dust in Maya Angelou's poem, "we rise we rise we rise" (353).

The rising of dust is one motif that we see in several poems. Some poems develop the analogy of Amal's prior life with friends and family as "Africa," the court process as "the Middle Passage," and his arrival at prison as the stolen African ancestors' arrival at America (61, elsewhere). He takes hope from the "butterfly effect," i.e., the theory that waves created by a butterfly's wings can have outsized influence on destiny. He longs for super-powers to withstand the bullying and intimidation he experiences in prison. The real walls around him also are a symbol. His few allies in the prison become "walls" to him, and he also makes himself a wall. So drawing his art on walls becomes more than just a pasttime; it's an image for what he can make of his life. In one short poem, one in a series titled "Brotherhood" the metaphor of a wall helps to express a development in his friendship with his "four corners":

Brotherhood VI

And maybe
there are small
cracks in our walls
and we start to see
a sliver of light
shine through

in each other.

(338)

I have a personal reason to be especially affected by another theme in the poems -- how others see him. In our school's upper division, a young black man told the Senior class advisor that only one teacher in all his years at the school had ever "seen" him; I was not that teacher. I looked back on my time with him in Middle School, how I managed his oppositional behavior, how I encouraged his talents, how I made corrections with respect -- I wondered, what does "seeing" mean? Then I heard the poet Zoboi read "Clone" from Punching the Air, about how his teachers in fifth grade "watched" him "so hard, so close" after a playground fight "that I thought I was trying to break out of prison." The poem continues

Every dumb s--- I did
they thought it was because of

trouble at home
an absent father
a tired mother
not enough books
not enough vegetables
not enough sleep

They believed those lies about me

and made themselves
a whole other boy
in their minds
and replaced me with him

(56)

Echoing what I read in those newspaper accounts at the time of Dr. Salaam's arrest, Amal develops the idea of how the media sees him and the boy in the coma: "I am ink / He is paper...I am man / He is boy... I am criminal / He is victim...I am black / He is white" (20).

In a later poem, imagining himself on the slave ship, he addresses his tormentors: What do you see when you see me? / The enemy? The inner me? (91). Truly, I don't know -- yet --what I could have done or thought differently regarding that student in my class, but I recognize myself in those teachers, and him in this character.

In Amal's story, there's the art teacher, important for what she taught him, but who also laughed when he said that he wanted to do a whole mural instead of a paper portfolio (130). "I failed the class, and she failed me" (133). But a black woman who teaches creative writing and a guest professor in African garb capture Amal's imagination.

Reading the poems weeks after George Floyd suffocated with a policeman's knee on his neck, I was chagrined to read these two lines repeatedly throughout the book: "There's a stone in my throat / and a brick on my chest" (11, 410, passim).

For all the darkness, there's light here, too. Loving family, friendship in prison, inspiration for art, and a letter from Zenobia, the cute girl he was too timid to talk to in school. He sends her his portrait of her "to let her know that / I saw her / I see her / I remember her" (176). If "time moves you away from me," he writes to her, "I will always remember / you remembering me" (177).

That acrostic poem, each line starting with a letter from Zenobia's name, inspired my kids to write acrostics of their own. Punching the Air is a beautiful book for readers of any age, of any race.

Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam. Punching the Air. New York: Balzer and Bray, 2020.

Midnight Atlanta: Layers You Didn't Know Existed

Murder, cops, feds, an investigative reporter, stake-outs, fist fights (baseball bats included) and shoot-outs: Thomas Mullen gives us all those elements for Midnight Atlanta, latest novel in his Darktown series. But the emotional through-line is a love story, as cops black and white in Atlanta, 1956, learn to appreciate and trust each other.

The murder of Arthur Bishop, editor of Atlanta's black-owned newspaper, sets off an investigation that involves many of the high-profile tensions that roiled the country in the mid-1950s. The editor Bishop had traveled to Montgomery. Was he involved with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the bus boycott going on then? Bishop had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, as many black leaders had done. At a time of intense Red Scare, was he a blackmailer, or blackmailee? Atlanta's modernization meant destruction of black neighborhoods but also opportunities for the black middle class. Had Bishop fallen afoul of one side or the other in that conflict? Just two years after the notorious acquittal of Emmett Till's killers, has Bishop outraged white supremacists by uncovering love letters from a white woman to the black man she accuses of rape?

Mullen maintains a third-person narrative voice but follows several different characters who are following different threads of the investigation. These are appealing people whose personal development is at least as interesting as the crime story.

Readers of the series will know and love Tommy Smith, the reporter who discovers Bishop's murder. A veteran of World War II and one of Atlanta's first black cops, he hung up his uniform at the end of the previous story, and now he's wondering why. He thinks of his own father home from World War I lynched for wearing his uniform, "an event [Smith] had no memory of, yet it was the defining moment of his life," still "haunting" him (344). He's also having second thoughts about Patrice, a restauranteur who gives him grief when he seems to be seeking a second-night stand. He's getting serious about her at a time that her white clientele are boycotting her for openly supporting desegregation.

Smith's ex-partner Lucius Boggs, upright and uptight, seems to be softening his self-righteousness and hardening his ambitions. Tiny powerhouse Dewey Edwards makes a good new partner for him. When they team up for a potentially dangerous visit to a white private detective in the boonies, Dewey slaps Boggs's shoulder and says, "Oh boy. This gonna be fun" (210). It is!

But Smith's ex-boss Sergeant Joe McInnis has most to learn about his relationships -- to Smith, to the black men he commands, to his family. In the earlier books, we learn that his command of the new black police force was punishment for his uncovering corruption on the all-white police force some years before. Though unhappy with the job, McInnis has been tough but fair. In Midnight Atlanta, he's offered a new position, and, to his own surprise, he asks for time to think about it. The rest of the novel, he's studying his own relationships and beliefs.

We first see him with his teenaged son, trying to explain whether his command of the black force makes him a "n----r-lover." McGinnis responds, "I work with them. We solve problems together"(40). He adds, "They're just folks." In the course of the investigation, McInnis reads Atlanta's black newspaper and reflects

It was like reading dispatches from a different reality.... McInnis had been operating in this other realm for the past seven-plus years, yet to read their perspective on stories he'd heard differenty elsewhere -- or, in most cases, hadn't heard at all -- was a reminder how separate from them he remained. (146)

Meeting people on his beat by lunching at black-owned restaurants, he becomes aware of the "layers" that black people deal with "that he didn't even know existed" (219).

This case puts McInnis on the side of his men against other police and the FBI. When Smith is hospitalized, McInnis brings gruff sympathy and a proposal to work together. He asks Smith to trust him, and is genuinely offended to be doubted (287). Smith points out that McInnis risks retaliation from the department if not from the FBI: "Why bother?"

"For the same reason you're nearly getting yourself killed trying to find out the truth."

Smith wondered if that could be true. Hoped so. Wasn't sure.

[McInnis said], "First the Bureau jerked me around and then they beat up one of my former officers."

Smith doesn't say, "I didn't know you cared," but that's the feeling.

Mullen doesn't make it easy to oppose racism in Atlanta 1956. McInnis's son gets beaten up. A character, Cassie Rakestraw, who has been sympathetic in previous novels, now leads opposition to racial desegregation. McInnis and his wife are ostracized by the PTA. When you fear for the safety of your children, when the value of your dream home plummets if a single black family moves nearby -- can you afford to do what you know is right?

Some other crime novel series have nearly choked on personal miseries and flaws that the authors pile on with the goal of character development. Henning Mankell's Wallander, Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta, Ann Cleeves's Perez all became morose, angry, unbearable to read about; sometimes I skipped over Sue Grafton's chapters about Kinsey Millhone's personal life. At least so far, Mullen's characters are developing in ways that make them more appealing and more tightly bonded -- to each other, and to us.

More about Thomas Mullen's Darktown series.

• The first novel in the series had special resonance in the weeks after George Floyd's murder: "It seems that we white people have felt like the heroes of noir detective fiction...good men who discover their environments are far darker than they realized" (216). See "Darktown: Good Cops, Bad Cops, and Race in Atlanta, 1948" (06/2020)
• "Lightning Men: Dark but not Bleak" (07/2020). The book's title refers to American fascists who adopted Hitler's lightning insignia in the 1930s. After the war, they're back to intimidate communists, foreigners, and any blacks who dare to buy homes in white neighborhoods.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: Comedy Turns Tragic

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, movie (2020) and play (1984), is a comedy that flirts with tragedy. Tragedy hits back hard. [Photo: Detroit News]

The story is set in a Chicago recording studio one hot afternoon in 1927. Ma Rainey is (and actually was) a Blues diva, with a retinue of musicians, a servile nephew, and a sulky mistress Dussie Mae. The comedy of it starts with the way the title telegraphs Ma Rainey's basic attitude, Kiss my a--.

Two white men who kiss it throughout the film bend to her ever-more-whimsical whims, all the while telling each other "I know how to handle her." So Ma arrives late? Ok. She rejects their play list? Ok. She wants a Coke? Here you go. The men gape from the recording booth while Viola Davis as "Ma" downs that Coke with gulps of ferocious satisfaction. Her nephew gets to record the intro to her song? He stutters? No problem. While they kowtow, her game is, How Low Can You Go?

Comedy thrives on pairings, and there's a second diva in the group, the new trumpeter Levee, played by Chadwick Bozeman. Before Ma Rainey arrives, the dialogue is all trash-talking among the musicians, Levee calling the others a "jug band." The insults fly with laughter, there's singing, there's some playing, and Levee even dances on his brand-new pointy-toed yellow shoes. It's good-natured fun. When we see Levee flirting with Ma Ranee's girlfriend, we can see, complications will ensue.

So far, so comical.

But Ma Rainey's identity comes from her past. She's "mother" or "queen" of the Blues, though she doesn't take credit. "I don’t sing the blues to feel good. The blues is a way of understanding life," she tells her sideman Cutler. Her imperious manner protects her from the indignities inflicted on a black woman. She tells Cutler that, once they've got her voice on record, the white men will just roll over in bed, zip up their pants, and leave her behind.

Viola Davis, ensconced in padding, layers of make-up, and gold teeth, shows us that Ma keeps her guard up all times. We sense bitterness, loneliness, weariness. Only a couple of times -- cuddling her girlfriend and finishing her song -- does Davis let Ma express joy.

Meanwhile Levee's identity is wrapped up in his future. He's a band-leader-to-be, a star soloist-to-be, a composer who writes lying down while his jokes with the band hit home harder than the players are used to.

Bozeman has a winning smile, but in his eyes we see relentless energy with an edge. He feels like he's stepping into his future now, and he's not letting anyone stand in his way. Those yellow pointy shoes make a good symbol for Levee's ambitions.

During breaks in the recording session, Wilson gives his lead characters stories so well-told that they move the action forward, though we only imagine the scenes. These aren't funny, but painful, eerie, horrific. Levee is the last to tell his story, and Bozeman invests it with such passion that we understand what drives Levee and what makes him dangerous when his identity is threatened.

We've been set up from the start for a face-off of the divas. The tragedy is that the showdown is refereed by the white men in the room who can bank more on Ma's past than on Levee's future.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom comes early in August Wilson's career-long project to dramatize black life in 20th century America, one decade at a time. To give the story its historical context, the film begins with images of Ma Rainey singing for a crowd of black men and women in a tent set up in Georgia woods, then images of the Great Migration north, and more images of Ma Rainey the star on stage in the city.

Denzel Washington, a producer of this film and star of the movie Fences made from another Wilson play, has announced his intention to bring all ten plays to the screen.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Chadwick Bozeman's final work, is dedicated to him.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

• Director: George C. Wolfe
• Writers: Ruben Santiago-Hudson (screenplay by), August Wilson (based on the play written by)
• Viola Davis ... Ma Rainey
• Chadwick Boseman ... Levee, trumpet
• Colman Domingo ... Cutler, trombone
• Glynn Turman ... Toledo, the pianist
• Michael Potts ... Slow Drag, the bass player
• Jeremy Shamos ... Irvin, the agent
• Jonny Coyne ... Sturdyvant, studio owner
• Taylour Paige ... Dussie Mae, girl friend
• Dusan Brown ... Sylvester

The Sabbath: More than a Day Off

At the start of a slender book The Sabbath (1951), Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel avers that civilization advances by conquest of spaces. Judaism offers something else, a civilization rooted in time. (The Sabbath. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.)

We commonly say "time is fleeting" but Heschel points out that only things don't last. When the Romans destroyed Jerusalem's temple, Jews re-conceived a temple in time, "an insight that made history" (53). Judaism remains; the empire of Romans, supreme conquerors of spaces, passed long ago. Judaism already differed from their neighbors' worship of gods identified with sacred objects, sacred animals, and sacred sites. The burning bush that manifests God to Moses is an image for time: "Though each instant must vanish to open the way to the next one, time itself is not consumed" (100).

Heschel's book is on the reading list of Education for Ministry (EfM), an extension of the Episcopal School of Theology at The University of the South, Sewanee TN. Our group had just considered the way that Mary's song Magnificat conceives of past and future being already present, as if time were a building or container, not a road. One of our students with close knowledge of Spanish told us that Spanish expressions for time speak of volume, not passage. So I was primed to read the first chapter of this book, "A Palace in Time."

But I got pretty confused pretty quickly. Noting that EfM calls The Sabbath a "prose poem," my EfM co-mentor Susan says that I shouldn't try to find a sustained argument in the book.

Good idea. I came to the book expecting the rabbi to enumerate good things that stem from obedience to the third commandment. I would say a day of rest, with a worship service, is a ritual that solidifies a religious community; is a nice retreat from the pressures of civilization; is good for your mental health; is for (everybody say it together) "recharging your batteries" before the work week. His daughter Susannah Heschel shoots down all of those ideas in her preface, adding that, for her father, "the Sabbath was a complement to building civilization, not a withdrawal from it" (xiii).

Heschel's real mission is to open us up to loving the Sabbath, an "intuition of eternity" (ch. VIII) that crowns the work week. "Work with things in space," he writes, "but be in love with eternity" (48). The book is a grab bag of ways to help us to see the Sabbath.

He cites ancient Rabbis who called the Sabbath both a bride to be loved and a queen to be obeyed (62), and he takes some time to write why we should take the metaphor seriously, but not literally -- which would be idolatry (59). To think of the day as a bride is "not personification of the Sabbath but an exemplification of a divine attribute...God's need for human love" (60).

To me that seems a stretch, but I'm not sure if Heschel's colloquy with rabbis of other centuries is not a sort of scholarly banter, a game. How seriously are we to take a rabbi's statement that telling a falsehood on the Sabbath is impossible, not because lying is forbidden, but because of the nature of the day itself (20)? Heschel relates some weird allegorical stories --such as one about a rabbi who spends 24 years in a cave buried naked in sand up to his head -- and then derives lessons from the stories. As he piles on the lessons, I feel like he's sculpting with smoke.

He mines more solid material when he and the rabbis pick at lines in Scripture. We read that God on the seventh day both "rested" and "finished creation." How could He be said to do both? Heschel and his rabbi friends of ages past offer the ingenious solution that God finished creation by creating the day of rest. That makes the Sabbath, not an absence of work, but a positive presence, the crown of all creation (22). When Exodus 19.1 tells us "on this day" the Hebrews came to Sinai, why doesn't it read "on that day?" Heschel concludes that this day is that day, an everlasting eternal event (98). I'd call it a typo, but I'm glad to see it Heschel's way.

Chapter VII is more poetry than prose, an insider's view of Sabbath liturgy, an appreciation of how chanting from the Psalms and Song of Solomon can affect us.

Just as I was reading Heschel's book, the latest issue of The Atlantic (Jan-Feb 2021) arrived with an article about "the Sunday scaries," an affliction that staff writer Derek Thompson describes as a "flood of anxiety" that we feel "as the weekend winds down." We feel worry about not being prepared for the work week ahead, and guilt for being unproductive. Thompson reviews an anthropologist's recent book about a tribe of hunter-gatherers who seem nonchalant about the future and indifferent to getting ahead of each other. Thompson concludes that anxiety on Sunday is a price we pay for civilization, at least until we can tamp down our need to compete with each other.

Thompson could look closer to home for a solution. His article never mentions church or sabbath.

Heschel's prescription for the Sunday scaries is also his prescription to make Americans truly free and independent. "There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things" (89). He advises, "All our life should be a pilgrimage to the seventh day," not as a day off, but as the day that gives the other six days their meaning.

Let Us Now Praise Bats

Bats possess super-powers. Alone of all mammals, they fly on their own; they emit high-pitched sounds through specially-convoluted nostrils and from the echoes locate with deadly precision erratically-moving targets such as moths; to viruses, they possess immunity that scientists are now trying to understand. And they sleep upside down!

[Information and the photo of the handsome upside-down bat come from "The Virus, the Bats, and Us" by David Quammen in The New York Times, December 11, 2020.]

Bats live as long as 30 years.

Bats spread pollin and seeds necessary to the life-cycle of vegetation from which we derive nourishment, including many fruit trees.   They eat hordes of crop-destroying insects.

A bat of some sort makes one of every five species of mammal on earth.

Bats are accessories to the spooky stories that both frighten and delight children. See in my photo collage two of the batmen I adored in primary school, Adam West as "Batman" and Al Lewis as "Grampa Munster." Another batman, Dracula, is pictured in my appreciation of bat-mospheric art that I posted on Halloween 2017:

This time of year, when our first cold days hammer shut the coffin of summer, before we experience sunlight sparkling on the frost of winter, it's natural to sense what the ancient Celts called a "thinning" between our world and the world of our fears, embodied by those scary monsters.

Bring on the bats, the howling wind, the branches scraping the window, and the ghosts of decades past. (10/2017)

Bats need our help. North America's bats are being wiped out by "white nose disease" caused by a fungus imported from Europe by some tourist spelunker. Immune to rabies and other viruses, bats don't spread them; our species has to invade theirs to catch anything from them. Yet some media figures blame Chinese bats for COVID-19, some misguided communities in the world go on periodic genocidal rampages, and my own neighborhood chat board re-circulates falsities about the little creatures.

The Bible mentions bats only one time. Bats are listed with birds in a list that includes eagles, gulls, and pelicans, all branded with the word "abomination" (Leviticus 11.19). But "abomination" here specifically means "not to be eaten." So I like to think of this as a stricture for the mutual good of Israelites and bats, two of God's chosen species.

Let us cherish -- at a respectful distance -- bats.

O Christmas Ladder

Why decorate a blue A-frame six-foot ladder for Christmas?

• God "has lifted up the humble and meek," sings Mary in the Gospel of Luke. This humble household instrument makes a fine analog, lifted from the cobwebs in my carport, festooned with cards from friends and family, made a beacon of colorful lights to my back-facing neighbors.
• Jacob's vision of angels ascending and descending a "ladder" on their errands to earth is likewise a symbol of what this season is truly about, God's involvement down here with us.
• The ladder is shaped like a Christmas tree.
• The ladder saves $499 - $799, prices that knocked me out when I searched for reusable trees yesterday.

In case you're wondering, to stand Big Boy where others place a star or an angel is no sacrilege. He's a family legacy, symbol of Frisch's restaurants, created in Cincinnati by Dave Frisch, whose daughter Blanche was my aunt, and whose son-in-law was my Uncle Jack Maier, longtime CEO of the business.

Collage: My other DIY decorations, up for twelve days of Christmas (i.e., until Epiphany), clockwise from top left: candles in the window illuminate colorful gift bags; a Christmas landscape on the baby grand, with ornament-tree, reindeer, and a golden tray of Christmas martinis; Charlie Brown sits at a winter-scape painting that my parents bought from a Chicago artist in 1967; "Mom" portrait with stylish Santa hat; Grandmother's decanter, silver tray, and ornaments.

A Boy Who Sees Everything: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

The 15-year-old narrator of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time sometimes daydreams of a global pandemic. He is Christopher Boone, 15 years old, aware that he does not read feelings from facial expressions, understand figures of speech, and laugh at jokes as others do. His dream illness spreads like a computer virus with code transmitted by words or facial expressions, even through TV. Soon, the world is left only to people like Christopher, and he's happy to have the streets and candy shops to himself, no one to touch him or to confuse him with emotional demands.

Christopher tells us his dream in one of the chapters that take him away from his own story at moments when he has feelings too strong to handle. Charming, funny, informative, these intersticial chapters concern his interests in math, language, science, and what he has learned about his own mind from his teacher at a school for kids with special needs. Christopher also digresses to tell us about Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes matters because this is Christopher's own detective story. It begins with Christopher's discovery of the neighbor's dog stabbed to death with a pitchfork. The apt title alludes to a famous line of Holmes from The Hound of the Baskervilles. Christopher shares with Holmes "the power of detaching his mind at will"(73).

Christopher emphatically does not admire Holmes's creator Arthur Conan Doyle because the author, yearning to contact his dead son, swallowed the lies of spiritualism (88). Christopher himself rejects afterlife as something made up by people who can't handle death -- although he likes to think of molecules in smoke from his mother's cremation now float in clouds over Africa or Antarctica (33). When Christopher's investigation uncovers lies he has been told, the detective story morphs into an odyssey through the underworld of the London Underground -- a harrowing journey except for a delightful moment when, seeing an escalator for the first time, he laughs.

Christopher shares another trait with Holmes: "I see everything" (140). But this putative super-power is also a liability, the reason why Christopher can't bear new places. He explains

If I am in a place I know, like home, at school, or the bus, or the shop, or the street, I have seen almost everything in it beforehand and all I have to do is to look at the things that have changed or moved. [For example, one day] someone had graffitied CROW APTOK to lamppost 437 in our street, which is the one outside number 35.

But most people are lazy. They never look at everything. They do what is called glancing, which is the same word for bouncing off something and carrying on almost the same direction, e.g., when a snooker ball glances off another snooker ball.

In this passage, we see direct declarative sentences, schoolboy-perfect punctuation, and precise recollection of numbers, elements of the voice that Mark Haddon has created for his narrator.

Haddon's narrative voice is the glory of this novel, for Christopher's emotional detachment is funny and heart-breaking. While the boy cannot always identify his own feelings, we feel for him. He's so vulnerable, sometimes groaning to muffle his own overwhelming perceptions or gripping the Swiss army knife in his pocket when he feels Stranger Danger. Like his hapless father, we want to hold the boy safe. When Christopher's father arrives at the police station to take the boy home, Christopher describes how his father

held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan. I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other. We do this because sometimes Father wants to give me a hug, but I do not like hugging people so we do this instead, and it means he loves me. (16)

The boy can work complex math problems in his head, and he can recall everything he sees, but he's clueless in ways that he doesn't understand. We want to shield him from neighbors, cops, and shopkeepers who presume that he's mocking them.

But he's also wise. Seeing an ad urging tourism to "see new things," Christopher opines, "You can see new things by looking at earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of a solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness intersect at right angles." He could think years about the things in just one house, he tells us. "And also, a thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of being new" (178).

Mark Haddon's book, making us think about our world through Christopher's mind, makes us see the world as new. According to Wikipedia, Haddon is "a hard-line atheist." But to an Episcopalian like me, his story draws attention to the wonder of creation, the insidious consequences of sin (of which the death of a dog is just the first sign), the aching need for redemption, and a tearful joy when redemption comes.

[The image is my collage of photos and designs from various productions of the dramatization by Simon Stephens, first produced at England's National Theatre in 2012. They all share the motif of a three-dimensional matrix, an image of Christopher's mind.]