The enchanting Jim Dale sweeps us up into our weekly fairy tale: "It's been 76 days, two hours and 37 minutes since young Ned's father deposited him at the Longborough School for Boys, and this, young Ned felt, was long enough." Like a woebegone Christopher Robin and his faithful companion Pooh, Ned and Digby, wander through the forest until they happen upon a class of kindergarteners, from a nearby school -- wearing butterfly wings. Their beautiful young teacher, Miss Moss, believed that every child was a butterfly at heart and her students knew that every caterpillar eventually learned how to fly. Miss Moss tries to reach a bird nest set high up in a tree, to show the contents to her young charges. Wanting to help this happy group, Ned climbs up to discover three dead yellow canaries, which the narrator informs us are dead thanks to environmental toxins. Ned, deciding that new beginnings are a wonderful thing, revives the birds before the children can see their corpses. As the canaries pass the minute mark of their second lives, Ned knows something else will have to die, and assumes those something elses will be small, hidden woodland creatures. (Like Thumper, and Bambi, and Flower?) Miss Moss decides to show Ned their class project. She lifts up something that looks all too much like a covered bird cage, probably because it's exactly that. Poor Ned's face falls, as have all three of the red-breasted woodpecker chicks the kindergarteners had nursed back to health, and were ready to set free. Horrified at the fruits of his "gift," Ned (with Digby) departs, as the children cry. Ned, of course, is already too broken to do so. I wrap him in cotton batten, take him to my house, and feed him warm soup and pastries and he lives happily ever after, all right? Because the stories of Ned's childhood are too sad to accept, so I can't hear you Jim Dale. La la la la la la. La. Mr. Dale is as harsh as he is lovely and continues to break my heart. "As the boy and his dog returned from whence they came, young Ned concluded that new beginnings only lead to painful ends." I think my soup plan was kinder.

Twenty years later, the boy is our pie maker who is in love -- but Charlotte "Chuck Charles has already been gone from his apartment two days, 10 hours and 28 minutes. "Whilst Chuck had called it 'apartment sitting' the pie maker sensed a new beginning beginning." Ned and Chuck meet up in the hallway outside their apartments. Chuck, as usual is thrilled to be alive, to smell eggs cooking, toast cooking, and seeing dappled sunshine, and she's spectacularly obtuse to Ned's feelings. Ned, as usual, is hiding those feelings, however ineptly, as well as the fact that he's unable to sleep now that she's gone, and pretends to be happy in a way that fools exactly no one. I'm going to need a bigger soup pot.