Assorted Prose by John Updike Page B

stippled, its color a blackened but still fairly lambent reddish-brown. The shell was less than an eighth of an inch thick; its fragments adhered to the rock with a gentle, even tender convexity.
    The little children in their Easter clothes, emerging goggle-eyed from under the horrors of the adjacent Tyrannosaur Hall, tended to pause by the egg.
    “There’s an egg!” a mite cried.
    “I
wanted
you to see this,” a schoolteacher told her brood. “It’s shaped funny,” a little boy complained.
    Most of the onlookers rushed up to the case, gazed a long moment, and walked away silently. Nearby were Iguanodon footprints a yard square; bones the size of boulders littered the wall. Comparatively, the egg was a pebble. The emotions of its viewers seemed to be, in sequence, expectation, surprise, readjustment, a certain ineffable content and pleasure, and, lastly, disappointment.
    A man and his son, dressed in matching lumberjack shirts, came up. “There’s the dinosaur egg,” the father said, with a pride almost paternal.
    The boy, plump and saucy, stared and said, “It doesn’t look like a dinosaur egg to me.”
    “That’s what they look like,” said the father.
Upright Carpentry
    May 1958
    W E RECENTLY had a carpenter build a few things in our house in the country. It’s an old house, leaning away from the wind a little; its floors sag gently, like an old mattress. The carpenter turned his back on our tilting walls and took his vertical from a plumb line and his horizontal from a bubble level, and then went to work by the light of these absolutes. Fitting his planks into place took a lot of those long, irregular, oblique cuts with a ripsaw that break an amateur’s heart. The bookcase and kitchen counter and cabinet he left behind stand perfectly up-and-down in a cockeyed house. Their rectitude is chastening. For minutes at a stretch, we study them, wondering if perhaps it isn’t, after all, the wall that is true and the bookcase that leans. Eventually, we suppose, everything will settle into the comfortably crooked, but it will take years, barring earthquakes, and in the meantime we are annoyed at being made to live with impossible standards.
Crush vs. Whip
    June 1958
    A PPARENTLY , the St. Louis Cardinals are much more friable than they used to be, for a paper in San Francisco recently ran the headline “ GIANTS CRUSH CARDINALS , 3–1.” Now, we don’t want to suggest that our city’seldest franchise has got in with a group of orange squeezers who don’t know real pulverization when they see it. There’s been too much of such carping already. When a boy leaves home, a mother’s duty is to hold her tongue, we always say. While voices around us cried that the West Coast was, variously, a vile limbo, an obscure religious sect, a figment of Walter O’Malley’s fevered imagination, and a tar pit of busherism certain to fossilize whatever it enveloped, we kept mum. As a reward to ourself for restraint, therefore, we
will
offer some advice about the science or art of baseball-headline verbs. These we have seen evolve from a simple matter of “ WIN ” and “ LOSE ” into a structure of periphrasis as complex as heraldry in feudalism’s decadence. New York City, now a quaint port known principally for her historical monuments, once boasted three—we swear it,
three
—baseball teams and a dozen daily newspapers. The lore accumulated here should be passed on to headline writers in all the fresh, brash towns likely to be visited as the major leagues, driven by a dark fatality, continue their migration toward Asia.
    The correct verb, San Francisco, is “ WHIP .” Notice the vigor, force, and scorn obtained, quite without hyperbole. This table may prove helpful:
    3–1—WHIP
    3–2—SHADE
    2–1—EDGE
    1–0 – (Pitcher’s name) BLANKS 1
    Turning back and working upward, we come to 4–2, known professionally as “the golden mean,” or “absolute zero.” The score is uniquely characterless. The bland