Maple Lane Hangs a Television Doris Mistakes for Art

Tamsin Measures the Wall

The plan was Tamsin's, and it was kind. Doris Kowalczyk, who has logged every borrowed ladder and casserole dish on the lane in her Lending Ledger, has a bare stretch of wall in her front room. The lane wanted it filled. Doris was not to know.

The set is a Hisense CanvasTV, 75 inches, and Tamsin explained it to me by the mailboxes in the voice she uses on adults. When it is off, it shows art. More than 1,000 pieces come with it, and you may add your own photographs. When it is on, it is a television, and she said this as if the second part were the less impressive one.

What won her over was the depth. It sits flush to the wall at 1.4 inches deep, and Doris will walk past it twice before she understands it is not a painting. The mount comes in the box. So does a teak frame, which Tamsin held to the light as though it had been rude to her personally.

She was honest about the other side. The set is 66.7 inches wide and weighs 76.7 pounds without the stand. She wanted four people on the job. Gus Ferreira said he could build a lighter one. Tamsin asked if he could build it by four o'clock. He went home to measure his garage.

It sits flush to the wall at 1.4 inches deep, and Doris will walk past it twice before she understands it is not a painting.

ORACLE Fixes the Wall

Mags Delacroix-Burke, as HOA president, asked ORACLE for a recommended hanging height. ORACLE considered the question with its usual serenity and announced that it had solved the problem of walls standing too straight, and proposed tilting every wall on the lane four degrees toward the street.

Nobody had reported a wall that stood too straight. Mags issued Memo 41 anyway, which thanks ORACLE for its initiative and asks residents to keep their walls where they are pending review. Tamsin read it aloud in the garage, set it down and measured with a tape, which has never once proposed anything.

The Caucus Guards the Evidence

The box could not be hidden, so it was left in the open, which is the only reliable way to hide a thing on this lane. It leaned in Mags's garage with Admiral Biscuit asleep across the top.

The Cat-Owners' Caucus, which holds that living with a cat is the highest form of human existence, had just published its annual report in The Maple Leaf, and Doris respects a primary source. The report lists the Caucus's achievements: Kept Unbroken Watch Over the Afternoon Sun. Presided at the North Cushion, Eyes Closed for Reasons of State. Held Seven Sessions Without Adjourning or Waking. I have read it twice and can find no accomplishment that was not a nap, but I carry mail and may lack the training.

Doris passed the garage, saw a cat on a box and a report that covered it, and concluded the box was Caucus business. She went home. Nobody has ever interrupted a Caucus session, and this one was technically in session.

Nothing arrived for Brenda again this week, and I said so to the porch at No. 2, gravely, since a domesticated bear is owed a report even when the report is nothing.

Doris Walks Past Her Own Wall

Gus and the Menons carried it in at four o'clock, four people, as specified. Tamsin had the bracket up before Doris returned from the library, and the screen was already showing a quiet landscape in a teak frame.

Doris came in, hung up her coat and walked past it without a glance. She came back, stopped, and looked for some time.

Her front window takes the afternoon sun, and a lamp stands behind her good chair. Tamsin said that on most screens this turns the picture into a mirror. The CanvasTV has an anti-glare finish, so the sun and the lamp changed nothing. The landscape stayed a landscape. Doris tilted her head and found no reflection of herself, which she later described as a first in that room.

Then Tamsin pressed a button, and the wall became the reference desk where Doris worked for decades. The twins had found the photograph and loaded it, with what I understand was a filing receipt. Doris sat down in the good chair.

"Let the record show," she said, and did not finish, which I have never known her to do.

She has opened the Ledger. The entry reads: One television, lent by the lane. Return date: blank. Condition: framed.

By evening the empty box was back in Mags's garage, and the Caucus had entered it in its annual report, retroactively, under Achievements. Admiral Biscuit is asleep inside it.

Signed for, as always,

Wendell