Outside of a Dog Read Online Free PDF

a quarter.
    I was the only one of the children who was able to climb the posts of the low white picket fence that surrounded the bungalow, along which poppa placed pots of trailing geraniums, to lever
myself up on to the roof. I could overhear the grown-ups talking on the back porch, only they rarely said anything interesting, and when it was, it was likely to be in Yiddish. But I knew that
granny’s vocabulary – narishkeit, ganif, mishigas, meshuginah, shlepper, chutzpah, kvetch, tsouris – demarcated the myriad ways in which life could try and disappoint.
    Hidden behind the sloping roof line, I was as invisible as God with a handful of sugared almonds. One time I vanished sufficiently from the collective memory and was allowed to lie up on the
roof as the light faded, and the moon came up. In the slow darkness the fireflies’ bottoms glowed like embers descended from the canopy of stars. The honeysuckle odour sharpened as the air
cooled, and I looked upwards at the meaningless immensity. I felt alarmingly diminished, and reasoned that surely it must end, somewhere. In a wall perhaps? How high would such a wall have to be?
How thick? What above? Beneath?
    I never repeated the experience. It was too unsettling. I decided to domesticate the roof instead. Often I’d take a cushion from the porch, and a book to read to ward off the silence of
those infinite spaces. What did I read? It is hard to remember. Early things always are, you may be thinking. But childhood reading, for an American child of my period, is difficult to recall. To
remember an American reading childhood you have to engage in manifold acts of recovery of what is almost irretrievably lost.
    This was not true for English children of the same time, at least for the middle and upper-class ones. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century England had produced a body of
children’s literature – from Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll through the great period of high Edwardian whimsy: Barrie, Milne, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame – that became the
lingua franca of an English childhood. It was impossible to grow up as an English child in the first half of the twentieth century without reading – indeed without owning – copies of
the Alice and Pooh books, The Jungle Book , Peter Pan , the Beatrix Potters, The Wind in the Willows , as well as various Famous Five s or Just William s.
    The message of these was remarkably similar: life may be a little dangerous, but not very; energy is hardly required to combat such dangers; it pays to be shoulder-shruggingly loveable and
hapless. Think of Pooh or, indeed, of Bertie Wooster. If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, which supplied the manpower for the next generations of Empire, that Empire
was lost between the covers of Winnie the Pooh .
    I have vague memories of Alfred Olivant’s Bob, Son of Battle (dogs), Treasure Island (parrots and hooks), King Solomon’s Mines (diamonds) and Peter Pan (fairies and crocodiles), but more particular ones of Franklin W. Dixon’s Hardy Boys series. The Hardy Boys books were great. There were loads of them, and you could talk about them to your
friends, even read them together. Everybody read the Hardy Boys. (Except girls. If you were a girl you read the Nancy Drew books instead. Boys never did that. Nancy Drew was stupid.)
    The joy of the Hardy Boys series was not that the individual books were particularly exciting, but that there were so many of them. They were remarkably similar. The two brothers, Joe and Frank,
aged seventeen and eighteen and in all respects except hair colour indistinguishable, were boon companions and super sleuths, packers of one-punch knockouts, and energetic associates of their
father, an investigative police officer. They could solve any plot devised by a sneaky foreigner, and though frequently thwarted or even kidnapped, they never came to the slightest harm. Neither
did the foreigners: all they got was