shoelaces.

Art waits patiently over the next year for a grownup to show him how the
blocks-from-pictures trick works, but none ever does. Many other mysteries are
revealed, each one more disappointingly mundane than the last: even flying a
plane seemed easy enough when the nice stew let him ride up in the cockpit for a
while en route to New York -- Art's awe at the complexity of adult knowledge
fell away. By the age of five, he was stuck in a sort of perpetual terrible
twos, fearlessly shouting "no" at the world's every rule, arguing the morals and
reason behind them until the frustrated adults whom he was picking on gave up
and swatted him or told him that that was just how it was.

In the Easter of his sixth year, an itchy-suited and hard-shoed visit to church
with his Gran turned into a raging holy war that had the parishioners and the
clergy arguing with him in teams and relays.

It started innocently enough: "Why does God care if we take off our hats, Gran?"
But the nosy ladies in the nearby pews couldn't bear to simply listen in, and
the argument spread like ripples on a pond, out as far as the pulpit, where the
priest decided to squash the whole line of inquiry with some half-remembered
philosophical word games from Descartes in which the objective truth of reality
is used to prove the beneficence of God and vice-versa, and culminates with "I
think therefore I am." Father Ferlenghetti even managed to work it into the
thread of the sermon, but before he could go on, Art's shrill little voice
answered from within the congregation.

Amazingly, the six-year-old had managed to assimilate all of Descartes's fairly
tricksy riddles in as long as it took to describe them, and then went on to use
those same arguments to prove the necessary cruelty of God, followed by the
necessary nonexistence of the Supreme Being, and Gran tried to take him home
then, but the priest -- who'd watched Jesuits play intellectual table tennis and
recognized a natural when he saw one -- called him to the pulpit, whence Art
took on the entire congregation, singly and in bunches, as they assailed his
reasoning and he built it back up, laying rhetorical traps that they blundered
into with all the cunning of a cabbage. Father Ferlenghetti laughed and
clarified the points when they were stuttered out by some marble-mouthed
rhetorical amateur from the audience, then sat back and marveled as Art did his
thing. Not much was getting done vis-a-vis ser