The babysitting debacle: Bob Hope in the garage loft, and Orin's Rose-Garden alibi

texture · UNDATED (Hal and Mario at "crazed-toddler age")

• When: UNDATED (a day off during the Weston years, Hal and Mario toddlers — see the age-gap wrinkle in Dating notes)
• What: On Mrs. Clarke's day off, with Avril gone off to "overfunction somewhere" and Orin nominally babysitting his toddler brothers, Orin and Bain climb to the loft over the Weston garage to smoke Bob Hope and wander "disastrously" into the pseudophilosophical mental labyrinth of Marijuana Thinking (the letter's own sub-footnote a supplies the phenomenology), surfacing famished at dusk to find the whole afternoon of protective supervision skipped. Orin's alibi to Avril — he'd been on the phone for long periods, which was why she couldn't get through — explodes when Avril says the phone "had just rung and rung and rung"; Orin's entire salvage effort, delivered "as if from the Rose Garden," is "I have no response to that." For Bain the anecdote's point is Avril's response: she "never punished and refused to act as if she believed lying was even a possibility as far as her children were concerned." [Attribution note: Bain's testimony, n269; the S. Johnson/dog-forgiveness family thread is corroborated from the family side under event 7.]