telephone call

this is supposed to be a story about how the original supernatural nephew took a metal detector to his grandmother and laughed while she beeped like a mine field, but i am selfish and i want it to be about how a nine year old child loves me enough he is smacked in the head by that love while riding in a car, smacked hard enough he has to call and say something to make himself feel better. and i know that i am only part of the deal, that the sweetie, who is tall enough to turn himself into a human amusement park ride, who can send explosives screaming toward a pile of children without getting into trouble, who does all the really good gift shopping in our house, is probably at least 65% of our combined value as an aunt/uncle team. this is fine. i like to think my 35% value is based entirely on the child's connection to strangeness. i suspect i am right. this is also fine.

the phone rings and i hear the sweetie walking around inside the house, talking to the original supernatural nephew. i am sitting on the front porch, watching the day finish up, waiting for the bats. there is discussion of some sort of dog, a new one, who might help ease some of the emptiness sprawling around in the child after a recent dog death. there is talk of the fourth of july and then the sweetie brings me the phone. the nephew tells me he's calling because he wants to answer some questions for my blog, questions about a grandmother of his and a metal detector. but he is like an old man and this is not why he is on the other end of the line. my sister tells me later he said he just wanted to check in.

he hurries through the answers to the metal detecting questions the way children recite the pledge of allegiance and then begins to tell me about the fireworks. he says when things were just starting, he was thinking maybe this would be just like christmas. he was pretty sure it would be like that, where we showed up unexpectedly while people were opening presents. he says he kept thinking it over and over but then we didn't leap out from behind anything and things just weren't the way he'd hoped. it wasn't the same. he says this several times. he mentions how nobody- NOBODY- launched a styrofoam plane on a rocket.he says it was a good fourth. he says he sure does miss us. i tell him we miss him right back.

listening to him has always been fascinating but conversations with him now, at nine, are unlike anything else i know. his voice is heavier than it was. he is shedding the child sound of it. it has the cadence of his great, great grandmother, hillbilly with a prettiness to it that makes him sound wise, trustworthy. his vocabulary rivals those of most adults i know and he can put words all together in a row the way a smart poet wants to but doesn't very often. i don't know if he knows this and i'm not sure whether i should mention it to him so for now i will hold off.

but i can feel how far away his voice is, how much he is in missouri and how much i am here. i see a lightning bug flashing its way up the yard from the street and concentrate on it, think about all the lightning bugs from my own childhood flickering around not a mile from where he is right now. i think about the june bug i saw yesterday, the first i've seen this far north, how it was velvety and brilliant and how he has probably seen a million this month alone. i think of those crazy seventeen year locusts and how, even when he was very small, we had entire phone conversations dedicated to their sound and the skeletons they left behind and the strangeness of living underground so many years only to come up and sing just that short time.

and i miss him all the time, the supernatural nephew. but it is now, when the summer bugs are flashing and singing and shining, when my own homeland and his smells like dry grass and fresh peaches and creek water, that i feel it punch me in the chest, slap me on the side of the head. but what makes it bearable is that he feels that same punch, i guess, that same slap. and he has sense enough to call and tell me so.