Cracked Window

Our little boy, Atticus, spots a bright moon at dusk. He’s holding a toy modeled after one that was around when I was a kid, the Dan Dare Planet Gun. Pull the trigger and it launches a spring-powered propeller disk.

I’ve wound it to the max. From our front steps he aims at the moon and fires. The disk whirs an impressive 20 feet into the air and lands a short distance away. I’m thrilled and assume he is too.

“Why didn’t it land on the moon?” Atticus asks, not impressed at all.

Two Austrian brothers marvel at the alien but wondrous world we take for granted. It was hidden from them. Until now their world was a cellar, a makeshift prison. The warden? Their father.

One of the boys, 5-year-old Felix Fritzl, asks upon seeing the moon for the first time:

Is that God up there?

How can the moon ever look the same to me again? This thought leads to a memory: when I was Felix’s age, my father read a bedtime nursery rhyme to my two brothers and me. We heard it many times, never tiring of the words. Even at that age, I could tell he relished reading them, delighting in their power to cast us adrift toward our nether worlds of sleep.

Read more »