conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled Closing Time about Having, Flight, School with the genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers & Suspense?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I am a retired commercial pilot with 11,000 hours flight time in the general aviation industry. Having served as chief pilot of a part 61/91 Flight School, I also spent a short time as an airline pilot. I live in Burleson, Texas, with my wife Doris and a spoiled basset hound named Mattie.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Terry, Bella, Weisz with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Literary?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Closing Time'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a plot for a book titled Closing Time about Having, Flight, School with the genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers & Suspense?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Closing Time (Doctor Who): Nearly two hundred years have passed for the Doctor since he left Amy and Rory in "The God Complex" and he is on a farewell tour of his friends as he knows he has only one day to go before his death (depicted in "The Impossible Astronaut").\nHe stops by Craig ("The Lodger"), who is living with his girlfriend Sophie in a new home and is raising their baby, Alfie.\nCraig, struggling to care for Alfie alone while Sophie is away for the weekend, suspects the Doctor is investigating something alien.\nThe Doctor prepares to leave, but he notices a strange electrical disturbance in the area and decides to investigate.\nCraig, while at a new department store with Alfie, discovers the Doctor working in the toy area.\nThe Doctor reveals that he has traced the electrical disturbances to the store and is using the job to allow him to investigate further, hearing rumours of the disappearance of several shop assistants and the sightings of a "silver rat".\nThe Doctor and Craig enter a lift and find themselves teleported to a Cyberman spacecraft.\nA Cyberman emerges from the darkness and comes towards them but the Doctor manages to reverse the teleporter and disable it.\nAs Craig returns home, the Doctor sees Amy and Rory shopping but stays out of their sight.\nWith Craig\'s help, the Doctor enters the store after hours and catches a Cybermat, which has been siphoning small amounts of energy to the spacecraft.\nThe Doctor also encounters a malfunctioning Cyberman in the building\'s basement, and is curious how it arrived in the store.\nAt Craig\'s house, while the two are distracted, the cybermat reactivates, but they are able to stop it, and the Doctor reprograms the unit to track down the Cybermen signal.\nThe Doctor leaves on his own to locate the Cybermen at the store but Craig shortly follows, bringing Alfie along.\nThe Doctor finds the spaceship actually sits below the store, underground, accessed by a tunnel from a changing room.\nThe ship has been slowly siphoning energy from the store\'s power lines, reactivating its crew.\nThe Doctor is captured by the Cybermen, who tell him that their ship crashed long ago but, with this new energy, will soon have enough power to convert the human race.\nCraig, leaving Alfie with a store clerk, follows the Doctor into the tunnel, and is also captured and placed into a conversion machine.\nThe Doctor reveals his own impending death and urges Craig to fight, but the conversion appears to be complete.\nAlfie\'s cries over the closed-circuit television echo in the ship.\nCraig, encouraged by the Doctor telling him that this is his chance to be a father, fights and reverses the conversion.\nThe rest of the Cybermen painfully experience the emotions they have repressed from Craig\'s struggle, and their circuits start to overload.\nThe Doctor and Craig escape via the teleporter as the ship explodes, the blast contained by the cavern.\nCraig reunites with Alfie, while the Doctor slips away unseen.\nThe Doctor tells Craig that Alfie now has a much higher opinion of his dad.\nThe Doctor leaves just before Sophie returns.\nNearby, the Doctor tells the TARDIS he knows this is his last trip in her and offers some parting words to a small group of children.\nIn the far future, River Song, recently made a Doctor of Archaeology, reviews eyewitness accounts made by those children when they were adults, and also notes the date and location of the Doctor\'s death.\nShe is interrupted by Madame Kovarian and agents of the Silence.\nKovarian tells River that she is still theirs, and will be the one to kill the Doctor.\nAgainst River\'s will, they place her in an augmented astronaut\'s suit and submerge her in Lake Silencio to await the Doctor.\nTwo hundred years have passed for the Doctor since the events of "The God Complex", taking him to the age his older self was in "The Impossible Astronaut".\nHe spent this time "waving through time" at Amy and Rory, which is seen at the beginning of "The Impossible Astronaut".\nThe Doctor takes the blue envelopes he uses to summon his companions from Craig\'s flat and Craig gives him the Stetson he wears at the start of "The Impossible Astronaut".\nFrom River Song\'s perspective, the final scene takes place immediately before the picnic in "The Impossible Astronaut", and she is confirmed to have been that episode\'s eponymous astronaut.\nCybermats are shown for the first time in the revived series.\nIn the classic series, they appeared in The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967), The Wheel in Space (1968), and Revenge of the Cybermen (1975).\nThe Doctor examines a toy and remarks, "Robot dog; not as much fun as I remember," alluding to K-9, a robot dog who accompanied the Fourth Doctor.\nThe Doctor claims to be able to "speak \'baby\'", as he did in "A Good Man Goes to War".\nThe Doctor expresses his dislike for Craig\'s "redecorated" house by using a line from the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) in The Three Doctors (1973) and The Five Doctors (1983).\nThe Doctor recites the mini-poem "Not a rat, a cybermat" from the novelization of Revenge of the Cybermen.\nAmy has become a minor celebrity, appearing in an ad for Petrichor perfume, with the tagline, "For the girl who\'s tired of waiting".\nThe concept of petrichor was used as a psychic password in "The Doctor\'s Wife" and means "the smell of dust after rain".\nThe Doctor frequently refers to Amy as "the girl who waited".\nThe perfume and tagline imply that the episode takes place after "The God Complex".\nThis conflicts with the date on Craig\'s newspaper, 19 April 2011, which is three days before the Doctor\'s death at Lake Silencio.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about \nCraig, Doctor, having, used.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Closing Time (Doctor Who): Nearly two hundred years have passed for the Doctor since he left Amy and Rory in "The God Complex" and he is on a farewell tour of his friends as he knows he has only one day to go before his death (depicted in "The Impossible Astronaut"). \nHe stops by Craig ("The Lodger"), who is living with his girlfriend Sophie in a new home and is raising their baby, Alfie. \nCraig, struggling to care for Alfie alone while Sophie is away for the weekend, suspects the Doctor is investigating something alien. \nThe Doctor prepares to leave, but he notices a strange electrical disturbance in the area and decides to investigate. \nCraig, while at a new department store with Alfie, discovers the Doctor working in the toy area. \nThe Doctor reveals that he has traced the electrical disturbances to the store and is using the job to allow him to investigate further, hearing rumours of the disappearance of several shop assistants and the sightings of a "silver rat". \nThe Doctor and Craig enter a lift and find themselves teleported to a Cyberman spacecraft. \nA Cyberman emerges from the darkness and comes towards them but the Doctor manages to reverse the teleporter and disable it. \nAs Craig returns home, the Doctor sees Amy and Rory shopping but stays out of their sight. \nWith Craig\'s help, the Doctor enters the store after hours and catches a Cybermat, which has been siphoning small amounts of energy to the spacecraft. \nThe Doctor also encounters a malfunctioning Cyberman in the building\'s basement, and is curious how it arrived in the store. \nAt Craig\'s house, while the two are distracted, the cybermat reactivates, but they are able to stop it, and the Doctor reprograms the unit to track down the Cybermen signal. \nThe Doctor leaves on his own to locate the Cybermen at the store but Craig shortly follows, bringing Alfie along. \nThe Doctor finds the spaceship actually sits below the store, underground, accessed by a tunnel from a changing room. \nThe ship has been slowly siphoning energy from the store\'s power lines, reactivating its crew. \nThe Doctor is captured by the Cybermen, who tell him that their ship crashed long ago but, with this new energy, will soon have enough power to convert the human race. \nCraig, leaving Alfie with a store clerk, follows the Doctor into the tunnel, and is also captured and placed into a conversion machine. \nThe Doctor reveals his own impending death and urges Craig to fight, but the conversion appears to be complete. \nAlfie\'s cries over the closed-circuit television echo in the ship. \nCraig, encouraged by the Doctor telling him that this is his chance to be a father, fights and reverses the conversion. \nThe rest of the Cybermen painfully experience the emotions they have repressed from Craig\'s struggle, and their circuits start to overload. \nThe Doctor and Craig escape via the teleporter as the ship explodes, the blast contained by the cavern. \nCraig reunites with Alfie, while the Doctor slips away unseen. \nCraig returns home to find the Doctor already there, having used time travel to clean the house. \nThe Doctor tells Craig that Alfie now has a much higher opinion of his dad. \nThe Doctor leaves just before Sophie returns. \nNearby, the Doctor tells the TARDIS he knows this is his last trip in her and offers some parting words to a small group of children. \nIn the far future, River Song, recently made a Doctor of Archaeology, reviews eyewitness accounts made by those children when they were adults, and also notes the date and location of the Doctor\'s death. \nShe is interrupted by Madame Kovarian and agents of the Silence. \nKovarian tells River that she is still theirs, and will be the one to kill the Doctor. \nAgainst River\'s will, they place her in an augmented astronaut\'s suit and submerge her in Lake Silencio to await the Doctor. \nTwo hundred years have passed for the Doctor since the events of "The God Complex", taking him to the age his older self was in "The Impossible Astronaut". \nHe spent this time "waving through time" at Amy and Rory, which is seen at the beginning of "The Impossible Astronaut". \nThe Doctor takes the blue envelopes he uses to summon his companions from Craig\'s flat and Craig gives him the Stetson he wears at the start of "The Impossible Astronaut". \nFrom River Song\'s perspective, the final scene takes place immediately before the picnic in "The Impossible Astronaut", and she is confirmed to have been that episode\'s eponymous astronaut. \nCybermats are shown for the first time in the revived series. \nIn the classic series, they appeared in The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967), The Wheel in Space (1968), and Revenge of the Cybermen (1975). \nThe Doctor examines a toy and remarks, "Robot dog; not as much fun as I remember," alluding to K-9, a robot dog who accompanied the Fourth Doctor. \nThe Doctor claims to be able to "speak \'baby\'", as he did in "A Good Man Goes to War". \nThe Doctor expresses his dislike for Craig\'s "redecorated" house by using a line from the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) in The Three Doctors (1973) and The Five Doctors (1983). \nThe Doctor recites the mini-poem "Not a rat, a cybermat" from the novelization of Revenge of the Cybermen. \nAmy has become a minor celebrity, appearing in an ad for Petrichor perfume, with the tagline, "For the girl who\'s tired of waiting". \nThe concept of petrichor was used as a psychic password in "The Doctor\'s Wife" and means "the smell of dust after rain". \nThe Doctor frequently refers to Amy as "the girl who waited". \nThe perfume and tagline imply that the episode takes place after "The God Complex". \nThis conflicts with the date on Craig\'s newspaper, 19 April 2011, which is three days before the Doctor\'s death at Lake Silencio.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Closing Time
  When a father dies, it is customary to forage through stored memories to conjure up an image that bathes him in the most heroic light. A single memory from my childhood eclipses all others. One Thursday night when I was thirteen years old, my father was standing alone in the kitchen of our Philadelphia row home, downing one of the ghastly local brews he'd long fancied. He was talking to himself, delivering some variation on his stock "O tempora, O mores" peroration, deploring the latest indignities that vested interests had imposed on the working man. The engulfing darkness of the civil rights movement, the demise of the Big Bands, and the collapse of Holy Mother Church as a viable institution were his other standard themes. We never knew whether he thought that the rest of us were listening attentively or were merely indulging him. Though the truth is, he never really required much in the way of an audience; often, when he entered the Ciceronian mode, he was content to declaim to an empty room.
  That night, something unexpected interrupted his jeremiad. Hearing tiny steps approaching, he looked up and realized that the swinging door connecting the dining room to the kitchen was about to smash my five-year-old sister in the face. The bottom of the door was solid wood—thick but innocuous—but the pane above it was a taut sheet of rippled glass. This was the section that would have struck my sister right around eye level.
  Mary Ann, his third daughter and fourth child, was chubby and angelic, the only member of the family everyone liked. She was, the rest of us contended, though she furiously denied it, a beneficiary of the Final Child Syndrome: Even parents who cannot stomach their firstborn children, deeming them conspirators in the massacre of their dreams, are reasonably indulgent toward, or at least oblivious to, the last one. This forbearance may derive from a sense of mutual relief that the procreative ordeal has finally run its course, or perhaps the capacity for rage has simply exhausted itself. But Mary Ann had another ace up her sleeve: She was fabulously cute. This being the case, the idea of seeing her face scarred forever was unthinkable.
  Reaching out to shield his daughter from injury, my father grasped the edge of the door just as it was closing. In doing so, he trapped two of his fingers in the space between the jamb and the frame. The door swung shut; we heard him scream. His fingers were horribly mangled; it seemed at first that he might lose one. Suffering greatly, and making no secret of it, he was taken to the emergency room at nearby Germantown Hospital. We did not own a car at the time, as we were going through one of our fallow economic periods, and in any case my mother had never learned to drive. Next door to us lived a man my father always called Tex because he was tall, fat, blustery, and not terribly quick on the draw, though he was not actually from Texas. I suppose it was Tex who provided transport. My father's mutilated fingers got patched up; he was given some painkillers; he returned home in great pain. He had been drinking heavily before he caught his fingers in the door, and he was certainly drinking heavily afterward.
  At the time, my father was employed as a truck driver for a company called Bachman Pretzels. His job was to deliver boxes of potato chips, pretzels, and other savory snacks to supermarkets and grocery stores all over the Delaware Valley. The job didn't pay well and wasn't leading anywhere, but it was better than the ones he had held recently, and much better than the ones he would have later. His salary, which amounted to slightly more than the minimum wage, was not enough to support a family of six, which is why my mother, after a sixteen-year hiatus, would soon return to the workforce, corralling a job as a credit manager at the hospital where my father had been treated. This was the hospital where I had been born thirteen years earlier, the year the Reds invaded South Korea.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I am not sure how a boy of thirteen who, save for that one trip to upstate New York, had never been anywhere except Philadelphia and the Jersey shore could instantaneously discern how awful Scranton was, but I could. Clearly, nothing exciting had happened there in decades; it was like walking into an Edward Hopper painting, where you got the feeling that all the wild, fun-loving people had already blown town, leaving behind only the brooding buildings and desolate streets. The Mafia had been active in Scranton during the Prohibition Era, but even the Black Hand had long since pulled up stakes, taking their bootlegging brio with them. I was old enough to know that Philadelphia had a reputation for being parochial, conservative, working-class, short on hoopla, and I knew that this reputation was well deserved, as people in the Delaware Valley worked hard at being uninspiring. But Philadelphia was a real city, with subways and trolleys and crooked politicians and a downtown and buildings that rose higher than four stories and two rivers and a zoo and ghettoes and organized crime and millions of inhabitants and department stores with names like Strawbridge & Clothier and local lore and graft and a nickname. By comparison with sarcophagal Scranton, Philadelphia was Byzantium. And I wasn't even in Scranton. I was eight miles outside it.
  Neither of my parents could accompany me to the seminary that first day, as my mother was recuperating from having her gallbladder removed, and my father had to work. So I trekked north to Scranton with my aunt Cassie on a banged-up old Trailways bus, then caught a local bus to Clark's Summit. My aunt was not especially devout, but she did like an outing. She was very impressed by the facility that greeted us in Clark's Summit, particularly the quaint monastic touches. As we entered the grounds we spied, just off to the right, a little pond ringed by pine trees; in the back of the main building stood a well-maintained baseball field and a functional basketball court. Off to the left were a barn and a nondescript building where some of the priests and all of the brothers lived. The main unit, which housed the dormitories, the classrooms, the refectory, and the administrative offices, was a conventional ecclesiastical structure, vaguely Mediterranean in style, with a bell tower at its apex. It was a nice spread the Maryknolls had, a haven from the world of Mammon, but I was already beginning to realize that the world of Mammon was in my blood, that rustic charm made me queasy.
  Aunt Cassie stayed most of the afternoon. I'd never been anywhere near as close to her as I was to her husband, Jerry, who, like most nattily dressed men, was much more likely to spread his money around. But I made sure to kiss her goodbye when she left, because a fixture of family mythology was the time my father—her brother—refused to kiss her at the 30th Street train station the day he shipped out for the South Pacific in 1943. He'd given her the high hat, or so he later claimed, because he hadn't wanted to be embarrassed in front of his friends. Aunt Cassie never forgave him for that slight, and he himself never stopped ruing his caddishness that day, for if he had been killed in action, this icy adieu at 30th Street Station would have been her very last memory of him. It was odd that my father so often mentioned this incident, because he was not an especially affectionate person, nor was she.
  It was priests against babes in the woods that afternoon—again, Morgan's suggestion. I did not know how to play basketball at the time, having spent my entire childhood working in retail, and had never gotten any pointers from my father, whose attitude toward the sport was one of unalloyed revulsion. Father Vittengl was an ursine, territorial type, and he and his fellow servants of the Lord pounded the stuffing out of us. They boxed us out with their massive buttocks, smacked and tripped us as we dashed downcourt, smashed our pansy jump shots back into our faces, and fouled us at will. I was not sure at the time if any of these missionaries had ever had their fingernails torn out by the godless Red Chinese, or had their eyes kept pried wide open with bamboo splints for ninety-six hours straight by bloodthirsty Mau Maus, or had their guts spilled onto the sands of Corregidor by bayonet-toting minions of the Empire of the Sun rehearsing for the Bataan Death March. But there was clearly something about fresh-faced young boys with full sets of appendages that stuck in their manly craws, because they were certainly in a cantankerous mood that day. They must have beaten us pale, slack-jawed neophytes about 87-13. That really improved things on the homesickness front.
  By the time I entered the seminary, my family had escaped from the housing project. Because both my parents were now working—at least for a while—we felt that we were moving up in the world as a family unit. But occasionally I would be reminded that the trajectory of our ascent was not uniformly vertical; on two separate occasions I was taken aside after dinner and told by the bursar that the checks my parents had sent me had bounced. Apprising me of this in hush-hush, conspiratorial tones, he conveyed the impression that Mom and Dad had just purloined the emerald-encrusted scepter from the tomb of Sargon II. The checks were for $5 apiece. My parents would never send cash through the mail, because they viewed all postal workers as confederates of Ali Baba. By sending a check, they were perhaps also expressing a desperate hope that by the time I cashed it, there might be enough money in the bank to cover it. More often than not, there wasn't. This left me out of pocket for the next ten days or so, until another check arrived. Obviously, we were not yet out of the woods.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last three paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: My son asked if we could stop for pizza. My father, never fond of what he anachronistically referred to as "tomato pies," ordered a meat-ball sandwich and a cup of coffee. I did the same. The spry young Mexican behind the counter explained that the establishment did not sell coffee but that he would be more than happy to run across the street and get some. We said this was not necessary, but the man insisted, so off he went. I never ceased to marvel at these occurrences, at my poorly dressed, poorly shod father's ability to induce complete strangers to run errands for him, as if he were the last surviving member of the Fujimoro Shogunate on an overnight trip to South Philly. It was a trick I wished he had taught me.
  We sat there, talking about beloved old ballplayers, about long-dead singers, about legendarily crooked local politicians. All the while, we munched on our sandwiches. My father mentioned the latest travails of a man who presently headed the City Council and would soon be mayor, whose brother owed thousands of dollars in parking tickets written up for a hot dog stand that had been illegally parked outside Temple University for decades. The scofflaw brother, to the surprise of no one in the Delaware Valley, was a state senator. It was vintage Quaker City lore; the clowns might change, but the clownishness didn't. We were happy, I recall; we were happy like the times we would go out on his pretzel truck and range across the south Jersey countryside and he would buy me a hamburger with French fries and a vanilla milkshake and proudly introduce me to all his customers as the brightest student in my class, the apple of his eye, the well-beloved son in whom he was well pleased. Once again, we were a team, and today we had my own little boy riding shotgun.
  Now that my father is gone and I think back to that afternoon, I regret that there were not more days like that, joyful interludes when a wise old grandfather shuffled around the harbor with his grandson, regaling him with improbable tales of high adventure in the South Pacific. But this was not to be. I once heard a violinist make the seemingly indefensible assertion that there were passages in Schoenberg's music that were as beautiful as anything in Brahms or Mozart but that you had to listen carefully, because there weren't many and they wouldn't last. So it was here. I had taken my son to Philadelphia on a school holiday, and we had spent four hours with my father. It was the only day the three of us would ever spend in one another's company, the only time the three generations of men would be alone together. It was a nippy afternoon, if memory serves correctly, but the sun was shining, the food was delightful, the rancor had subsided, and there was hope in the offing. I was in my forty-sixth year, my father in his seventy-first. It was the second Monday in November. It was Armistice Day.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: My father, never fond of what he anachronistically referred to as "tomato pies," ordered a meat-ball sandwich and a cup of coffee. I did the same. The spry young Mexican behind the counter explained that the establishment did not sell coffee but that he would be more than happy to run across the street and get some. We said this was not necessary, but the man insisted, so off he went. I never ceased to marvel at these occurrences, at my poorly dressed, poorly shod father's ability to induce complete strangers to run errands for him, as if he were the last surviving member of the Fujimoro Shogunate on an overnight trip to South Philly. It was a trick I wished he had taught me.
  We sat there, talking about beloved old ballplayers, about long-dead singers, about legendarily crooked local politicians. All the while, we munched on our sandwiches. My father mentioned the latest travails of a man who presently headed the City Council and would soon be mayor, whose brother owed thousands of dollars in parking tickets written up for a hot dog stand that had been illegally parked outside Temple University for decades. The scofflaw brother, to the surprise of no one in the Delaware Valley, was a state senator. It was vintage Quaker City lore; the clowns might change, but the clownishness didn't. We were happy, I recall; we were happy like the times we would go out on his pretzel truck and range across the south Jersey countryside and he would buy me a hamburger with French fries and a vanilla milkshake and proudly introduce me to all his customers as the brightest student in my class, the apple of his eye, the well-beloved son in whom he was well pleased. Once again, we were a team, and today we had my own little boy riding shotgun.
  Now that my father is gone and I think back to that afternoon, I regret that there were not more days like that, joyful interludes when a wise old grandfather shuffled around the harbor with his grandson, regaling him with improbable tales of high adventure in the South Pacific. But this was not to be. I once heard a violinist make the seemingly indefensible assertion that there were passages in Schoenberg's music that were as beautiful as anything in Brahms or Mozart but that you had to listen carefully, because there weren't many and they wouldn't last. So it was here. I had taken my son to Philadelphia on a school holiday, and we had spent four hours with my father. It was the only day the three of us would ever spend in one another's company, the only time the three generations of men would be alone together. It was a nippy afternoon, if memory serves correctly, but the sun was shining, the food was delightful, the rancor had subsided, and there was hope in the offing. I was in my forty-sixth year, my father in his seventy-first. It was the second Monday in November. It was Armistice Day.