Outside of a Dog Read Online Free PDF Page B

captured by our heroes, and sent off to the pokey, muttering, ‘Sacré bleu! Zese ’Ardy boys ’ave done eet again!’
    It didn’t matter what books I read. The key was to be seen to be reading. If I wasn’t up on the roof, I would retreat to my room (‘ I’m reading and I need some peace
and quiet! ’) but I made sure to leave the door open. (‘ He’s reading and he needs some peace and quiet! ’) What I was reading was a book . It didn’t
matter what the book was, and I hadn’t the faintest idea that one might be better than another. But to garner credit, to be approved of, left alone, quietly commended, it had to be a book.
Comics wouldn’t do. Reading books gave the signal that intelligent life was going on: I didn’t merely read them, I displayed them like trophies.
    I was an anxious boy. Before Ruthie was born we lived in a garden apartment in Alexandria, a suburb of Washington DC where my dad worked as a lawyer for the federal government, and wrote short
stories in his (little) spare time. When we went shopping, over the weekend, and needed to split up to pursue different tasks and purchases, I would insist on accompanying which ever parent had the
keys to the car.
    It may have been in response to this anxiety that my parents sent me to a recently opened progressive school in rural Alexandria. Burgundy Farm Country Day School had been founded by a
cooperative of parents in 1946, and was based on Homer Lane’s child-centred principles of learning by doing. There was a motivated and engaged staff of young teachers who were called by their
first names, an outdoor swimming pool, goats and other farm animals wandering about. We pupils fed the livestock and helped in the general running of the farm, which was presumably intended to
establish some organic connection to the natural world. It left me with a life-long aversion to doing the chores, and any relations with animals unless accompanied by gravy and potatoes.
    I called my parents Bernie and Edie. They were products of the 1930s: socially committed, progressive, anxious for the world to become a better place, partly by creating in their new family a
microcosm of a world in which everyone was treated with respect. Even children. My mother’s social work training at the University of Pennsylvania had included large doses of A.S. Neill and
Homer Lane, while my father would much rather have been a writer, university teacher, or psychoanalyst than a lawyer. He worked for the federal government’s Rural Electrification
Administration, and though he argued a case before the Supreme Court he never made much money. My mother was largely at home for the first few years with Ruthie, who’d been born in 1948. It
must have been a hard time financially, but neither of them ever complained of it, though mom occasionally joked about being footsore from selling World Book encyclopaedias door-to-door.
    While she shlepped her books about I was having fun. There were very few set lessons at school, and children were encouraged to read whatever they liked, and to pursue what interested them most.
There were no exams, lots of play, handicrafts and painting, swimming and sports. It was the purpose of such an education to produce children who had their own voices, were not cowed by authority,
learned enthusiastically, related to each other generously, and played uncompetitively.
    When, in 1954, we moved to Huntington, Long Island, I was barely aware of the reason: as the McCarthy era progressed and the House Un-American Activities Committee began to name and pursue more
and more ‘communists’, my father’s position in the government became increasingly untenable. Both of my parents had been ‘card-carrying’ in the 1930s, like many
intelligent young people with a conscience. It was only a matter of time before he was hunted down, humiliated, and fired.
    Huntington was the obvious place to go. Poppa Norman and Granny Pearl were there in the summers, and