Table for Eight

There were eight of us hardy campers, just in from the wilds of Maine’s West Branch region, where we’d hung out with timber tigers (red squirrels), survived a bear alert (never saw one), and rafted the Class 5 rapids of the West Branch of the Penobscot. As all campers know, the rules of polite society are shucked as soon as the tent is pitched. Belching, scratching, and farting are all allowed (aloud!), even encouraged.

We did have one little lapse into etiquette while rafting. We’d just done the 10-foot drop down Nesowadnohunk Falls, and had pulled off to the edge of the stream to bail the raft. A snazzy white Crabapple Adventures raft bounced out of the foam at the bottom of the Falls and pulled over next to us. Robert, one of our party, glanced over and politely inquired, in the words of a popular mustard commercial of the time, “Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?”

His question was met with blank stares from the Crabapple raft. Amy, Robert’s sister-in-law, smacked Robert smartly with her paddle and barked, “You idiot – they’re Canadian!”

Back to the story: so after 5 glorious days in the wilderness, the eight of us – 4 men, 4 women – had moved camp to Seawall Campground on Mount Desert Island, home to some of Maine’s tonier Downeast communities. Seawall Campground is a lovely coastal campground run by the U. S. Park Service. It has fire rings and flush toilets, and features slide shows by the rangers on occasion.

That night’s slide show was an introduction to Seawall Campground and coastal Maine in general. Geared to the younger members of the audience, the show began with a series of contrast slides on animals and where you’d not expect to find them.

Ranger: “Would you expect to find this…”
Slide: a camel
Ranger: “...here?”
Slide: the frozen north
Kids: “Nooooo!”

Ranger: “Would you expect to find this…”
Slide: a red squirrel
Ranger: “...here?”
Slide: coral reef scene
Kids: “Nooooo!”

Ranger: “Would you expect to find this…”
Slide: a whale
Ranger: “...here?”
Slide: vast desert spaces
Kids: “Nooooo!”

Ranger: “Would you expect to find this…”
Slide: a big ol’ rhinoceros
Ranger: “...here?”
Slide: the sign at the entrance to Seawall Campground
Karen, into Shaun’s ear (having recently seen The Gods Must Be Crazy, with its campfire-stomping rhino fire warden): “Nooooo – we’d lose our fire!”

Shaun, in hysterics, fell off the log bench, disrupting the show until he managed to get a grip again.

Back to the story: so there we were, the eight of us, and we’d seen the slide show, slaked our thirst, and decided we were up for a meal that somebody else had cooked. So off we went to a colorful little lobster boil eatery called Duddy’s, in nearby Bass Harbor (pronounced HAH-bah).

Shaun and I had dined there on a previous trip, finding the food tasty and the waitress – well, she was cool. She sat down at our table and told us her life story. We had the impression that this wasn’t uncommon at Duddy’s. Some of the other wait staff looked like they might have been on work-release.

So Duddy’s was an appropriate choice for a bunch of hygienically challenged campers looking for a good feed. We were ushered into the Large Group room, which featured two long tables which neatly seated eight each. The other one was already occupied by another party of eight, but the head count was the only similarity. Male and female alike, they were attired in khakis, Topsiders without socks, and polo shirts. We guessed that they were slumming from Northeast Hahbah or Bah Hahbah.

We lost no time ordering mass quantities of mollusks, crustaceans, and beer, which we fell upon ravenously. It was in the relative silence created by the first wave of ingestion that the neighboring table began to make its presence known. Although there was a form of general conversation going on over there, the woman at the head of the table had something important to say, and by God, she was going to make sure everyone heard it. Her braying became louder and louder, occasioning some irked looks around our table as she began to dominate our conversation as well.

Our waitress arrived to clear away the first round of debris by the simple expedient of pulling up a trash can and sweeping the throwaways right off the table into it. She was handing around the next set of plates when a booming pronouncement from the dominatrix of the next table stopped us all cold.

“So there I was, trapped between the fourth and fifth astral plane, and couldn’t get back to my body!”

That’s when the madness took me. I leaned over to Polly, next to me at the end of the table, and said, “Campers’ Rules. No holds barred. Pass it on!” She did.

There ensued such a cacophony of belching, slurping, farting, and general rudeness that the waitress collapsed against the doorframe in hysterics. I should note that all this was from the women of our party. The men, who certainly had not been deficient in the noxious emissions department earlier in the trip, seemed unable to muster up as much as a mouse fart, and had to settle for singing extremely bawdy sea chanteys at the top of their lungs. Our table of eight had dispatched the khaki-wearers to their own astral plane, leaving us in clear possession of ours.

Seagulls

Spindrift is one of those things that sounds a great deal more romantic than it is. I can always tell when it's spindrift weather by watching the seagulls. There's a point of wind velocity when a sensible gull figures it's pure foolishness to go aloft; another notch higher on the anemometer and he won’t even try to stand up. When you can see hundreds of gulls but no gull feet, it's spindrift time. The air will be full of little blobs of dirty suds scudding past and skittering along the shore, rafting up in trembling yellowish clots. The gulls hunker down in feathered stoicism, beaks dead into the wind, blinking and flicking their wings as the occasional bits of foam bounce off them.

Now, a hunkered-down gull is nothing but pure appetite tacked to a rock. The longer the blow goes on, the hungrier the gull gets. It's a good thing the coast is littered with gull goodies after a gale; by the time the storm ends, the seagulls are running on empty, and heaven help the creature that gets between them and the beach buffet.

On the New England coast, you're more likely to be bedeviled by gulls than by ants when you picnic. Of course, the gulls have a vast natural advantage, hanging up there on the high breezes, taking inventory of your menu with that preternaturally acute vision of theirs; then, mewing approval, they'll plummet abruptly to a landing just out of reach, where they strut and preen and yammer and nag until someone finally tosses a tidbit into the crowd - then all hell breaks loose. Flipping a single pickle chip into a dozen-gull flock is about the same as dropping a meatball into a school of feeding sharks. The winner and all the sore losers will then scream hideous slanders about the morals of your immediate ancestors, until bribed by more goodies. In no time at all, you'll find your feast stripped of all its trimmings, while you gnaw guiltily at the last chicken leg under the gimlet gaze of your feathered luncheon guests, who are, of course, waiting for the bone.

Gulls are such dedicated omnivores. I once shared a sunny half-hour on a dock with a gull that was dead-set on ingesting a smallish, extremely dead yellowtail flounder that had evidently been sun-baked to the hardness of cold-rolled steel. If it had been, say, a skinny little smelt or such, maybe he could have choked it down; but that broad, flat flounder oval was more than he could get his beak around. Not that he didn’t try to whittle it down to size, worrying away at the edges with that scissor-edged beak, but to no avail. He was still gnawing when I left.

The sheer capacity of the individual gull is staggering, as illustrated by the case of the deep-dish apple-rhubarb pie. There had been more than half of it left after the three of us Maine campers had had a piece, but then Sam the dog took an unauthorized sample, and the third of a pie that was left lost its appeal for the rest of us. But we figured Oscar would appreciate it.

The cabin was perched precariously on a rocky hillside that pitched steeply down to the frigid waters of Prettymarsh Harbor; seven or eight camps are tucked away, all but invisible, in the pines that ring the cobbled shore. You can hear a screen door slam on the far side of the water, or a fish break the surface half a mile away. Oscar easily picked up our cocktail-hour chitchat and cruised in from the spiraling thermal where he’d been hang-gliding.

Oscar was a standard-model herring gull with a brassy self-assurance that brought him daily to our porch railing for hors d'oeuvres and idle gossip. Deep-dish apple-rhubarb pie being a rarity in those parts, we figured it would get him even more excited than his usual handouts of popcorn and crackers. Wanting a ringside view of the action, we carefully laid out a tempting trail of pie bits, starting at his usual landing spot at the far end of the rail, and ending at the pie plate, which was stage center on the rail in front of our chairs. Sure enough, Oscar ate his way down the rail, morsel by morsel, watching us with yellow-eyed suspicion as he inched closer - three more bites, two, then only one - Oscar stalled momentarily, but gluttony beat out caution and he pounced on the pie with a croak of glee. Carefully pinning down his prize by planting one webbed foot firmly on the edge of the foil plate, he scissored out one hunk of pie after another and gulped it down until there wasn't a crumb left. Then, as if to show us he still wasn't full, he gave the plate a couple of good chomps before tossing it disdainfully at our feet. His takeoff was a bit sluggish, but a deep-dish pie is serious ballast, after all. Fortunately, he cleared the porch before he blew the ballast tanks.

The beggarly nature of seagulls makes them easy marks for the likes of the TOWN & COUNTRY photographer who was doing a high-fashion shoot on the Newport gold coast. The scenario called for a Christmas picnic by the sea, so the boulders at Price's Neck were artfully sprinkled with flaked Styrofoam to simulate drifting snow. Out of camera range, a truckload of ice-cubes lay heaped on the beach, chilling a case of champagne and a couple of dozen baskets of strawberries. More ice cubes were tucked into a hollow in the rocks, cradling two bottles of champagne and a pretty bowl of berries; right next to it crackled a healthy bonfire. Draped over the rocks by the fire and ice was the sleek daughter of an old and wealthy Newport family, tastefully arrayed in a fisherman's sweater, faded jeans, and an ankle-length lynx coat. It was August.

Various artistic types clambered over the rocks, adjusting lights and grooming the lounging heiress. Just across the little cove waited the extras, a couple of dozen gulls milling around peevishly and squabbling amongst themselves. They’d been primed for action with a handout of day-old bread tossed by two flunkies standing on the sidelines of the shot. Every time the photographer had a shot framed and lit to his satisfaction, he’d call "Gulls!", the flunkies would heave hunks of bird bait into the air, and the sky behind the shot would immediately fill with flashing black-and-white wings. Turned out the ratio of bread to film had been sorely miscalculated, though; the bread ran out early, as did a couple of bags of potato chips. In the end, economy was flung to the winds and the strawberries were flung to the seagulls, basket after succulent basket.

Marie Antoinette would have appreciated the solution.

Flight Feathers

Manhattan: July, 1984. A filthy-hot Sunday afternoon in Soho, prime time for gallery-hopping. The kulturati were stalking their prey from boutique to gallery to showroom, ready to swoop in for the kill; the sidewalks were aswirl with trendy humanity. On West Broadway, there was a string trio playing in the open window of the restaurant/gallery Central Falls. Farther up the street, live mannequins robot-danced in the show window of a boutique, to the giggles of a crowd outside. The street kids splashed color all over the streets with their fluorescent hair, face paint, and funny sox, lounging on corners and stoops, watching and posing, smoking suspect cigarettes and letting on they were bored.

My Australian friends, attracted by a high-voltage window display, wandered into a big boutique on Spring Street. Since I’d more or less appointed myself tour guide, I followed, relieved to be getting out of the sun, but not overly thrilled at the decibel level in the place. A real, honest-to-God disquaire stood behind a bank of fancy electronics, pumping non-stop New Sound into the shop.

From there, though, things started looking a bit better. Not far from the front door, a pretty cat was curled into a furry cushion on the seat of a tall chair. A chattering sound penetrated the curtain of disco; I traced it to a pair of black-faced lovebirds in a cage hung amidst greenery. Not far from them was another cage with a pair of Amazon parrots. Still another snoozing kitty turned up farther on. How astonishing to find all these creatures amidst the blare and jostle!

I turned around to look for my friends, and found myself face-to-face with a really big cage – big enough that I couldn’t at first locate its resident, who blended beautifully into the green of the ficus tree beyond. His stillness didn’t betray him, but the patch of maroon feathers above his beak did – a very handsome military macaw, with all the dignity of considerable size.

I spoke to him in macaw, a language I’d been well schooled in by my own feathered child, Panama Red. The big fellow didn’t respond. I moved around the cage to get closer. He straightened up, flattened the feathers down tight on his head, and looked at me with what seemed to be alarm. Poor thing! I spoke again, as soothingly as I could, in English and in macaw, running on in a sort of chant of reassurance, getting as close as I could so I wouldn’t have to speak over the pounding sounds filling the air. Gradually, the head feathers started to lift. His pupils dilated, calming his gaze. He inspected me, leaning a bit in my direction. I circled back to the end of the perch that didn’t terminate by the ficus tree; I’m not crazy about lurking in the shrubbery, particularly not the indoor kind.

He took a couple of steps away from the ficus tree end and gave himself a good shake, fluffing his feathers still more. The forward head feathers were standing well up by now, a sure sign that a parrot is feeling friendly. I poked a couple of fingers through the bars in a scratching motion, still keeping up the idle chit-chat. He split the difference between us, sidling halfway over, and stretching his head toward my hand. Not quite close enough! Another couple of steps, and he was in range. This was the tricky part. I knew all too well from my own big macaw just what that beak could do. Brazil nuts were easy; fingerbones could be too. He nudged my finger with his beak; he stuck out his funny black tongue and licked it. I rubbed his beak lightly; he moved a little closer. I worked my way up the beak to the maroon feathers above, and brushed them gently against the direction they lay. He started a little, then decided I had the right moves and bent his head toward me. Within moments, he’d surrendered completely, closing his eyes blissfully as I scratched under his chin and in back of his eye patches where his ear-holes were.

“OMIGOD DON’T DO THAT HE BITES!”

I jumped, and so did my new friend. Between the thick disco and the thick carpeting, I hadn’t heard this guy, salesman or manager or whatever, coming.

“He does not,” I snapped, surprised by my own temper, holding up my hand to prove it was intact. “He’s sweet and he’s lonely. I’ll take responsibility for it if he does bite me.” I turned my back on the man and resumed my conversation with the bird.

That brief flash of anger had crystallized a cloud of thoughts – images, really – that had been floating around wordless in my head. It dawned on me that the bird’s initial composure hadn’t been due to dignity, but to depression. He longed, like any other intelligent, social creature, for physical contact and warmth. Even now he was pressed hard against the bars of the cage, crooning hoarse little RRRRRs of pleasure as I scratched. But what he got was an assaultive environment of unremitting noise and humans who wanted nothing to do with him.

What was it, I wondered, that would lead anyone to spend in the neighborhood of $2000 for a living creature that served no purpose except set decoration? A purebred dog or cat costing much less would be a family’s pampered darling, even though equipped with fang and claw worthy of as much respect as a macaw’s beak. A saddle horse could cost as much or more, and would be stroked and groomed and given treats despite the occasional nip or kick. Why, then, should a four-pound bird of beautiful hues and fanciful shape be an untouchable?

I think it’s the feathers. They strike some ancient chord in us, the tribe of furred and hairy creatures; dinosaurs and reptiles were the ancestors of birds, and scales the ancestors of feathers. All scaly pets – fish, lizards, snakes – are kept isolated and on display. Look but don’t touch. Slimy. Cold-blooded. Okay, most people know birds are warm-blooded, but they aren’t like us. They aren’t mammals. They lay eggs like lizards. They have beaks. THEY CAN FLY!

That’s the answer right there. We live among these flying wonders, and a mean small corner of our souls envies that joyous flight. It’s too absurd for us to comprehend. Never mind that it’s just daily business to a bird – it looks like too much fun.

I once confronted that awe of free flight in a half-finished shell of a house by the ocean. A young kestrel had gotten in through some opening or other and couldn’t find his way out. He was a dead bird if I didn’t do something, so I cornered him in a hall and threw my lightweight windbreaker over him. Carefully, I reached in and disentangled him from the fabric, wary of his hawk beak and talons. Oddly, he chose not to struggle or strike; he simply lay on his back in my hand, his black eyes remote, resigned, while I admired him. What a tiny, beautiful, noble creature he was! Mostly I remember the surprising frivolousness of his pretty speckled breast, and the firm, compact feel of his powerful little body in my hand.

I took him outside and set him on the ground. He didn’t move. I began to worry that I might have hurt him when I netted him. I picked him up again, one hand under him, the other lightly on his back, starting to check for injuries. Somehow, I don’t know exactly how, he pushed himself out of my hands and dropped toward the ground. At the very last instant, he fanned his wings and was off with a crack of pinions against air, a single cry ringing behind him.

It is that which we, earthbound in our own bodies, can never do nor ever understand – free flight from free fall. Betcha can’t say that three times fast!

A Long Night's Journey into Day

Nocturnal habits. Four in the morning, and I was thinking about nocturnal habits, which happens to be one of my nocturnal habits. I had a cup of tea and the Sunday Times of London cryptic puzzle, and it was the best of times. No telephone, no traffic noise, no demands on my attention, just velvety night quiet and contentment. Then the dawn bird started up.

There’s always that one bird, always has been, as far back as I can remember, just as the night sky starts to go from black to luminous deep blue. He’s high up in a tree somewhere and gets the hint of coming light before I do. That damn bird always starts up just then, an hour before true dawn, in every place I’ve ever been. The dawn song is distinctive; I know the notes, but I don’t know the singer’s name, his species. But the song is the same, wherever I am, uptown, downtown, crosstown, out of town, out of the country. Maybe it’s the same bird, following the thread of my life like some guardian angel or ancient mariner’s albatross. He was there outside the college dorm in Virginia years ago at finals time. I heard him when I was nine or ten months pregnant, too oddly shaped to find a comfortable position for sleeping and anyway always poised for the next phase. As I leaned on a piling and watched the glassy-still water of Newport harbor turn opalescent, I heard him explain the light shift. As I slapped mosquitoes and raced the spreading light at Third Beach, putting disaster makeup on an actor in a night-time movie scene, he nagged me to go faster. When I strayed back to my tent from a bluegrass festival jam in the woods, he mocked my immoderation.

This is real time this bird deals in, sun time, not calendar time. Standard time, daylight savings time, Greenwich Mean Time in the meantime mean nothing to him. The sun will come regardless. I sigh. I don’t want to know. It means my favorite time has fled again, and all those mundane daylight things are on their way.

The night hours, the dark hours, have their own rhythms. Hospitals have noted that those most delicately balanced at the edge of life are more likely to slip away around 3:00 a.m. than at any other time; the scientific conclusion is that the absence of natural light and the shifts and changes that accompany the sun’s transit create a sort of biological stillness, a slowing of metabolism that can tip a frail balance.

It has also been observed that the onset of the long winter nights of lands far from the equator can trigger deep depression in some people; remember Hamlet, the Melancholy Dane? This depression is treated either by relocating the patient closer to the equator, or more practically, by extending the perceived day by the use of daylight-emulating artificial lighting.

On the other hand, there are those who love the dark hours. I am one, as I’ve explained. There’s an extraordinary sense of freedom in that time for me, a sort of anarchistic glee at the destruction of schedule and routine. The grownups have gone to bed; it’s time to play. Concepts, designs flow effortlessly; problems are solved; ideas are born. What could be work is pure fun.

But there’s serious business going on out there in the dark – not just human business like depression and dying, but the all-in-a-night’s-work, bringing-home-the-bacon sort of business that belongs to the natural night creatures. There are gatherers and crops and hunters and prey. Have you ever been driven mad by a hyperactive hamster in the small hours? The silly little thing is only doing what he would do in the wild, which is gathering food in the dark, when it’s much safer for small furry creatures with wretchedly bad eyesight and very little brain.

But for every gatherer in nature, there seems to be a predator, and the owl is one of the best. Like eagles, hawks, and buzzards, he’s a raptor, with talons meant for seizing prey and a sharp hooked beak for tearing flesh; but unlike his cousins, he’s specially designed for night work. Those great round eyes allow him to hunt by starlight, and heaven help the field mouse who rustles in the grass, because the owl’s keen hearing will surely pick it up.

Imagine him soaring on those great pinions, surveying the landscape as if it were a pastoral smorgasbord, nothing to betray his silent patrol but perhaps a little moonshadow. He likes almost anything in the key of rodent, and since in the rodent world silliness seems to increase as size decreases, field mice are a staple of his diet. I once heard an owl get really lucky, though, just as I was dozing off in a cabin in the Virginia woods. A scream ripped through the inky quiet of the night, a sound so nearly human I know it couldn’t be a wildcat. Maybe it WAS human? In that moment, I learned the exact sensation of having one’s hair stand on end. The sound wasn’t repeated, and I wasn’t about to venture into the copperhead-infested fields to investigate. But late the next afternoon, as I was walking along the far edge of the cornfield, I found the mostly-devoured remains of a recently deceased cottontail. It was the first I knew that rabbits have voices.

There are other mysteries, just as haunting but far more beautiful, that the darkness reveals, like the tiny, phosphorescent creatures that glimmer and sparkle in the friction between ocean and rock, a tiny sea-borne galaxy outlining the night-time shore, or trailing like a comet’s tail in the hissing wake of a sailboat. And for really glorious phosphorescence, nothing beats a school of squid rocketing along just under the surface on a moonless night. One can’t see these things except in the absence of daylight, so when the herald of light, that damnable dawn bird, announces the coming of day, I mourn the end of enchantment. It’s just as well I don’t know his name, his species, for his song always reminds me that in more barbarous times, it was considered good form to kill the bearer of bad tidings. I’d cheerfully add dawn birds to the list of endangered species.

The Bat in the Bedroom

"There's a bat in the bedroom," he said. Oh, sure there was. Turned out he was right, though - there absolutely was a small but very energetic bat up there, obsessively circling the plaster pendant at the peak of the dome, sonar working overtime to guide his angular flight away from the dome's eight planes. It was dramatically gloomy and Gothic way up there above the twelve-foot mark; he looked very Edward Gorey-ish.Waitaminute, you're thinking. Dome? Decent people don't have domed bedrooms with bats flying around. It just isn't done.

Well, hey, I didn't put the thing there, and nobody seems to know who did, or why; all we know is roughly when (about 1890). As a matter of fact, I'd owned the house for four years of pretty intense restoration before we ever laid eyes on it; before the big 'Yikes!" there'd been a dropped Masonite ceiling hanging there letting on that everything was just fine, nice and normal, not to worry, nobody up here but us ceiling panels. Then, in the course of some roof work, we discovered that there was actually plaster and lath up high under the pointy roof of the bedroom wing, way above the dropped ceiling. Down came a ceiling panel, and there, in the cold blue light of a fluorescent lantern, we got our first glimpse of IT, lurking there, huge and alien, like something from inside a mummified dinosaur's chest cavity, eerily organic.

The biggest thing about it is that it's so - well - BIG. Sixteen feet across at the deep cornice girdling the room ten feet from floor level, the dome slopes in eight tall trapezoids to an inverted octagonal bowl shape that tops out at nearly twenty feet off the floor. All this geometry, by the way, is noticeably out of kilter; visually more symmetrical than, say, Stonehenge, but much less centered in concept. The eight plaster panels are framed in heavy plaster ribbing. The centerpiece of the construction is a five-foot-long octagonal stalactite of distinctly phallic contours descending from the heights, neatly finished with a quartet of plaster roses bunched at the tip.

Back to the bat. I mean, he was still there, stuck in a holding pattern that had to be either his dream come true or his worst nightmare - who can tell? He looked great up there - the perfect Gothic garnish. Having a taste for the Gothic, I wouldn't have minded all that much having him stay for a while.

I have a fondness for bats - I guess not shared by very many - that's left over from the summer dusks of my Virginia childhood. We were all equal members of the hunt club in that dim silky twilight. The chimney-swifts and barn swallows would be wrapping up their last shift and heading back to roost as the next shift of bats and small children were coming on. It was lightning bug time, little scribbles of pale greenish-yellow neon rising from the grass, and we kids chased them with gimlet-eyed determination, clutching our icepick-ventilated mayonnaise jars. Overhead, the bats darted and twittered after those fat, arrogant Southern mosquitoes. I confess I never saw a bat take a lightning bug, though - I reckon it wasn't in their food chain. I know, because I watched those fireflies jealously, and I would have known if the bats were poaching. All in all, it was a pretty good working relationship - bats filling their bellies and kids filling their jars.

In the long run, it turned out not to matter that I was sympathetic to the bat in the dome, even though I knew it was only a minor miscalculation in his sonar and an unscreened dark open window that deceived him in the first place. The other household members were muttering darkly, dropping words like "lice" and "rabies" and "guano." Besides, it was bat dinnertime, and I was fresh out of bat chow.

The problem, however, was that shooing a flying beastie out of a room that inconveniently lacked a standard eight-foot ceiling presented a tactical dilemma. I fetched the butterfly net. Take my word for it, every household should have one for such occasions. Mine has three feet of bamboo handle, and if you add that to my maximum upward reach when standing tippy-toe - about seven feet - then tack on another foot for the diameter of the net's hoop, you'll get eleven feet, give or take a couple of inches.

It only took a couple of flailing swipes at the passing bat for me to understand that Plan A wasn't gonna work. The bat read the whishing net with his little squeaks and headed for the safety of the upper air.

A mystery of the brain's workings: "Zen archery" scrolled before my mind's eye. My mind obediently emptied (not a big job at that moment). All by itself, my net-holding arm went up, and the bat was in the net, just like that. I went to the window, held the net out, and off he went. Later, as I sat down to dinner, I said grace for the bat too, assuming that he was grateful for his belated meal.