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Grandad was fun to have around. As little kids, we'd irk him to death, but he never complained. I loved it most
when he'd call the Wizard. He wouldn't do it often, but when he did, my sister and our cousins would all gather around. First, Grandad
would get a deck of cards. Then he'd say, "Pick a card." We would. Then we'd show it to him. Next, he would dial the phone and say, "May
I speak to the Wizard?" After a bit, he'd go, "Okay, hold on," and he would hand the phone to one of us. The voice on the other end would
say, "Your card is the six of clubs," and then the line would go dead.
The Wizard was always right. It took me years to figure out the trick. Turns out... Well, I promised my Grandfather I'd never tell. A promise is a promise. All I can say is that when I was a kid, the trick would blow my mind.
 Childhood is full of mysteries. For me, one of them concerned the house next door, the one I could see from my bedroom window. No one ever lived there for very long. One great thing about transient neighbours is that they don't sink much money into curtains. If they have curtains at all, they're flimsy, thin, and always hanging open. This fortunate circumstance is how my neighbours Nathan, Terry, and I got to see underwear on people other than those in our family. Across the street was a double-storey house. Mr and Mrs Naumann would sit in the living room and look out their window all day long. They knew everything that happened on our street, and even in our house. My father used to say that he once called up the Naumann's and invited them over to dinner, and they said, "Thank you, but we don't like green beans." Mr Fitzgibbon lived on the other side of our house. He was a grumpy old man who kept any balls we hit over his fence. We'd never ask for them back because we were so afraid of him. Fitzgibbon also had a little white poodle named Susie. Nobody liked her either. Susie was one of only two possible old-peope-type dogs. The first is the ugly little white poodle with the very pink belly and the lactating eye problem. The other is the Chihuahua with the grey nose and cataracts that is so obese its nipples stick out sideways. Tell me there's not an old-people pet shop somewhere where you can actually buy only these two animals. I finally got brave enough to crawl into Mr Fitzgibbon's yard one night with my trusty penlight. I was eleven and I wanted revenge for all the missing tennis balls he'd kept. So I tore thumb-size pieces from all the leaves in his vegetable garden. My plan was to make it look like some psychotic guinea-pig had gone on a rampage. Or maybe Susie would be blamed. Unfortunately, old man Fitzgibbon never said anything. If he noticed at all, then, as with our tennis balls, he just kept it to himself.
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