The Rolly-Polly Dilemma or "Let the Great World Spin"

My daughter has a fascination with the rolly-polly or pill bug.  She likes how they look and what they do, but mostly she likes to care for them, her little body all folded up in an effort to get closer to them.  When I see it, it is one of those moments as a parent where you want to laugh and dance in the sunshine or where the back of your throat get's all tight and achy.

As the majority of our rolly-polly live in an area where we also have quite a few lizards, frogs and toads, a lot of my daughters time is spent worried that they will run across each other and what will happen at that point.  Quite a few of our midnight conversations have her working out, in detail, the possibilities of a rolly-polly meeting up with a toad or a lizard--their conversations, the adventures they might have or about those times when things go horribly wrong very quickly.  In the background of these stories is our family, especially her father who spends time on the porch at night smoking and reading.  His footsteps have both saved and doomed many and various of the rolly-polly much to her delight.

It is a small view, the barest of understandings, of her and her friends place in the world and how they are effected by larger forces, but sometimes as her stories play out, I get the sense that her curiosity about cause and effect drives more of the action than just straight imagination.  Her little voice in the dark huffing out, "Oh, well.  Harold (a rolly) would have preferred to be eaten by the toad, but of course, Daddy's foot drove him right into the Lizard. Poor Harold...", makes me laugh--She has total control over the story,  yet her bitterness at the outcome is biting.

All of this reminds me in a way of the book I'm reading now, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.  I orginally looked at it because it was set around Phillipe Petit and his inspiring and petrifying walk on a wire between the World Trade Centers in 1974.  I love the documentary, Man on a Wire and wanted to know more.  However, I found that this was just a background and catalyst for the real stories--small lives intersecting to create bigger things..sometimes horrible, sometimes happy.

The beauty of these lives are in their convergence where singular becomes plural and the ripples more interesting than the drop that preceeded it.  As with my daughter and her stories of the rolly-polly, this book is lyrical in how it swirls in and out of the chance versus fate philosophy of life. 

And,  regardless of whether you are a "chance-ist" or a "fate-ist", you'll love this book, only don't get it on the Kindle as I did...it is a book worthy of the visceral feel and weight and smell of a book.   Just like my daughter gets in close and personal, pets and pauses, thinks and re-thinks, so to will you, I think, with this book, whose story, like those of the rolly-polly to a parent,  can inspire a throat to both laugh and ache.

In the future I can see it on my shelf, its raggedness speaking for how much I cherish it... much like a droopy rolly-polly in a small hand on a hot day.