Christmas in Shiny Prize: toddies, the storm-cellar acid collection, and "just His Way"

pivotal · Dec, last B.S. year

• When: Christmas through New Year's Eve of Orin's freshman year — the last days of pre-Subsidized time
• What: The one time the record puts an outsider in the man's house: Orin's first Christmas away from home, flying to Paducah and driving to "kudzu-hung Shiny Prize" to drink toddies under a little white reusable Xmas tree "with Joelle and her mother and Personal Daddy and his loyal pointers." The visit's centerpiece is the chemistry: "a storm-cellar tour of Joe Lon's incredible Pyrex collection of every solution in the known world that can turn blue litmus paper red, little red rectangles floating in the flasks for proof" — the same cellar acid collection that Notkin's Thanksgiving account will arm (event 8), here shown off as a hobbyist's pride, with Orin "nodding a lot and trying incredibly hard." He does not warm to the boy: Joelle glosses "Mr. van D.'s not once smiling at him" as "just His Way" — her hedge, kept as printed, and the only direct attestation of how the Daddy received Orin. (This freshman-year visit is the narrated frame's; Notkin's account counts Thanksgiving Y.T.M.P. as the third time Joelle brought Orin home — the visit arithmetic is left to the source texts, Dating notes.)