Big Dog, Who Art In Heaven

It starts with four words on a stone-coloured dad cap: big dog, who art in heaven. You know the rest of the sentence before you have finished reading it, and that is the entire engine. The cadence is untouched, the grammar is untouched, the reverence is arguably untouched. One noun has been swapped for what a guy in a parking lot actually calls him. So this collection just keeps going. Hallowed be thy name, big dog. Thy kingdom come, big dog. Deliver us, big dog. Amen, big dog. And where the prayer runs out, the rest of the language does the same work: in big dog we trust, what would big dog do, big dog is my shepherd, only big dog can judge me, let go and let big dog. Every one of them is a phrase you have known your whole life with exactly one word moved. All of it set the way the original was set — lowercase, bold serif, two short lines. Not shouted in block capitals, because nobody shouts this. It is said quietly, on the way out of the house, by someone who means it a little more than he would admit. Embroidered on a classic unstructured dad cap, one size fits most.