Gabriele and Michael returned with two German Shepherds as well as five or six tree roses in the back of the pickup. Caring less about the plants, Gabriele was eager to witness dog meets boy and boy makes dog into a friend but the joy was stymied in stepping inside the house. When they went in they saw mercurial Mr. Petulant executing punishment against the son of Mr. Phlegmatic. Nathaniel had Rick's head under the running water of the faucet. The crime was spilling a glass of milk; the punishment was a near drowning; and the perspective she chose to take for a fuller understanding of this situation, as Michael pulled off his belt, was Piaget's idea of the moral absolutist. As the brazen non- flinching boy was being whipped, she thought to herself that she would need Betty to monitor their every move from now on for children's system of government was more procrustean and draconian than that devised by adults in most, but not all, areas of the global jungle. On a Monday built vapidly on the vacuous graves of wasted hours, she heard the school bus return and the barking of the two hounds. Curious about how Nathaniel related to his dog when she was not around, she went to the studio window to witness this interaction of dog and boy inconspicuously. Outside the window there was the same rectangular wooden container where, at the trailer, she had planted a flowerbed which an owl then used as a domicile. Now it was fastened under the studio window with a different choice of flowers. She remembered the days preceding that move to Ithaca: having climbed onto a tree, which had been the umbrage of the trailer, with slow, surreptitious movements, shooting the owl with a tranquilizer gun, and pulling its body into a laundry bag without falling from the limbs of the tree. It had been a time consuming undertaking and at the time she had doubted whether it would actually succeed; and yet here the owl was well acclimated to its setting. Looking onto the bird now she was pleased: it had succumbed to the belief that the trailer had been nothing but a dream just as she had awakened or succumbed to the belief that her arduous efforts to paint visions imagined in her head had no substance and that only filling one's mind in the clutter of activity that involved others did one actually live at all. After all, contemplation involved having to contemplate something and what else was there but this ball, this planet of movement? A racket ball player was called such because she played racket ball and a rebel because she rebelled--all people had self-worth by defining themselves in words of action.