Every letter that my father wrote … every unspoken remark before and after every raised eyebrow … every comment that something was “highly iconoclastic” … every mild mannered query to every sales clerk as to whether or not she “accepted Confederate money?” … and every warning to “watch out that the guy doesn’t put knock out drops in your drink” … all, all had about them an enpurpled intensity … a flair … an escalation of objects and events out of the mundane and into the celestial.

Not for us such blandishments as to look both ways before crossing the street, because for the Reuben children, even the ionosphere was within easy reach. That’s where the oatmeal was stored. In the upper strata. Over the “elongated vestibule,” next to the “air of maximum dehydrogenation.”