brown dog conversation

the brown dog is snuffling around on the corner. he's a small lab, old enough he's beginning to thicken in the middle and walk a little stiffly. he sees us, sees guthrie at least, as we walk toward him. he eyes the lizard in guthrie's teeth and his eyes brighten. his ears slide up and back.

guthrie prances past without a glance but the brown dog watches intently. we cross the street and guthrie is nosing through a pile of leaves when we hear what sounds like a herd of children running up behind us. we turn and see the brown dog coming up at a fairly impressive gallop, ears and tongue flopping, tail wagging. he gets up next to us and guthrie turns his lizarded head away, lowers his body some. the dog leaps around, puppyish, trying to play. guthrie gets smaller and smaller until he is a speckled brown ball of hostility with a big red lizard sticking out either side. the dog's owner gives up and walks on ahead but the brown dog looks back over his shoulder at guthrie and his lizard a few times, waits, then walks on down the street at the urging of the woman on the other end of the leash.

but the dog is undaunted. he stares into piles of leaves, sniffs an iron railing, considers nearby steps. pretty soon we are walking right up next to him. he turns his nose toward guthrie and they both keep walking. the brown dog is taller than guthrie but he is walking with his head low, so his nose is inches away from the tail of the giant red lizard sticking out of guthrie's mouth. he leans toward guthrie just a bit, touches his nose to the very tip of the lizard tail. his mouth opens so slowly guthrie doesn't even see it. they keep walking. the brown dog scoots himself just an inch closer to guthrie, mouth open, so he's walking with his teeth hovering all above and below that red lizard tail.

the brown dog's jaws close just enough that guthrie knows he's there and then guthrie does what is completely unexpected to most folks, to those who don't know him, don't know that his ancestral job involved catching something and bringing it back to someone. he does something that so entirely baffles the brown dog that the poor dog doesn't know what to do. as the brown dog's teeth sink gently into the tip of the lizard's tail guthrie's jaws relax and the lizard slides out of his mouth. the brown dog is waiting for guthrie to pull, for them to play, to struggle over the magnificent red lizard. the dog's owner apologizes for her dog but i know he is trying to play. guthrie stands there, looking away from the dog and his lizard, then back again, confused as to why the dog is not tossing the lizard in the air. the dog makes an attempt to get guthrie's attention, leaps around a little, dragging the lizard across the sidewalk. guthrie waits.

the brown dog drops the lizard, still bewildered, and i pick it up. when i toss is up in the air a bit guthrie leaps like a shark and his jaws snap down on the soft middle of the lizard. the brown dog trots on home with a laughing woman on the other end of his leash.

bird

in the thunderstormy part of spring the baby birds fall out of nests like soft hailstones. they are just out of their eggs, all skin and closed eyes and pointy ends and there is so much nothing to them it's hard to imagine the wind moving them at all. tiny bags of pinkish gray huddled down into nests in threes and fours. but the wind does catch them. and i don't know how it figures out how to toss only one from the nest, leaving a handful of quietly sleeping others behind. i have seen three or four during a single walk and wish i could move them off the sidewalks and stoops, put them on the newly breathing ground and let them go back to what little of nature we have here in brooklyn.

then midway through summer i am weeding in the mint and lemon balm and am not surprised to find one of those thunderstormy birds splayed out next to the basement door. i pull back a mint plant and see webby wings. a needle beak sticks into the dirt. and here i do not feel that urge to move the poor thing off the sidewalk. he is resting there in good dirt, dirt full of fragrant mint that shades the small body. i finish my weeding and leave the beak and the wings and the small, small claw feet.

today the air is fall woodsmoke cool and the sky is thunderstormy again and i stand over the basement door pulling up mint and lemon balm. the roots are not so deep but they are all connected, plants clutching at each other underground, refusing to go. i pull so hard on one clump i nearly land in the already cold-flattened irises and i see a white pebble fly through the air. it lands in loose dirt where i've already pulled mint. i reach for it and see beak, eye sockets pressed like thumbprints into the smooth curve of the forehead. the top of the skull is so thin i can see clumps of dirt inside.

i think about the deer skull i didn’t take home this summer because it wasn’t ready yet. this skull sits in the palm of my gardening gloves and rocks back and forth when i breathe. it is so much smaller than i remember the bird being, so delicate i can’t think clearly about what to do but i know i will take it in the house. i know i will keep it. the invisible things in the ground have cleaned it so there is nothing but boniness. and maybe the most beautiful thing i have seen in a very long time is the nostril on the beak of this skull, a watermelon seed of nothing in all that white of beak. or even the tiny strand of bone along the bottom of the eye socket. a strand of my own hair is thicker. the eye sockets are so large you can almost see those fat, babybird eyes bulging out of them. it is perfect. i put it in a cup of warm water and soap. it rests upside down on the surface a while, lighter than the soap bubbles.

rush hour

this morning is one of those good, cool mornings full of jackets and sweaters and small girls in new wool tights. we are walking, the low dog and i, in the morning rush to work and school. people step out of little cafes with steaming coffees and their shoes clatter on the iron treads of the steps down into the subway. some of them still have real live folded paper copies of the times wedged under their arms.

the low dog strolls through the brightness with his lizard, charming the distracted and the sleepy and the grumpy, all. people shake off their subway personalities to coo and squeal and giggle. small children wave at him. adults wave at him. even at this hour people want to say how much they think he is too much. he ignores them, does not care.

we stop at an intersection a few blocks from home and stand next to a man and his little girl. the light is long and the girl is singing in her littlegirl voice. bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens. now, if you know me you know i've considered scraping together all the couch change i can find to buy the rights to that song and then lock the thing away somewhere so i'll never have to hear its smarmy, pollyannaish carousel of treacle again. but her voice is so soft and so clear the song sheds most of its ugliness there for a second. she stares straight ahead, into the wide intersection. she is very serious about this song. she does not even see the low dog inches away from her left hand, staring, just like her, straight ahead.

i look up at her dad and am surprised to see him running his thumb across the face of his phone, checking a message, reading the news, ignoring his child. it seems to me if i can manage to find this moment charming then that man, her very own father, ought to be able to put his stupid phone away for now and focus his stupid self on his softly singing child. she falters with a word or two and he stares hard at the phone, then sings quietly cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudel. he asks if this is right and when she nods they sing it together. because i have been sick i hear three-color ponies. he trails off and she continues with bells and schnitzel and then pauses. he is squinting against the glare on his phone to read the next line of the song and then he sings, low but loud enough for her to hear, wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings. and now i feel bad for considering punching him earlier. his voice is like hers, quiet but clear and the few words drag all the geese i have ever seen up into the sky.

the light changes and we cross. the man, the little girl, the low dog and me. two boys climbing on a coin operated dinosaur call to the girl. guthrie turns his lizard-stuffed face to a man who begins to laugh and nudges a friend. maybe there are some geese flying overhead.

ten

this is something i suppose we've been expecting for a while. i mean, really, this is something we've seen coming on down the road since he was born. but it's one of those things like waiting for your child to hit puberty. some part of you secretly hopes the whole thing will never happen, but you know it will so the rest of you wishes you could just squeeze shut your eyes and hope that when you open them the child will be 23 or so. but transformation does not wait for us to be ready and so now we are seeing it firsthand.

the original supernatural nephew is ten. and ten is a milestone for everyone. however, it is far more important, far more dangerous and significant, if you are supernatural. this is the year any previously unknown powers settle in, make themselves known. for you the ability to see through walls might be pretty entertaining but for a ten year old boy it can be a little uncomfortable. and who wouldn't like having the ability to heal with just a touch? but you slap something like that on a ten year old and you've got an accidental infestation of reanimated mice or earthworms or mosquitoes. tell him to take out the trash and a chicken breast leaps from the bag, flapping the wing still attached to it. upsetting. potentially very messy.

for many children in the original supernatural's shoes, this is the year they become entirely human, give up the supernatural lifestyle. school gets harder. relationships get more complex. parents, who have never been particularly understandable before, become completely incomprehensible. and you would think that the ability to fly might be helpful somehow in managing these things but it is not. you would think being able to communicate with animals would help. but no. dogs know some math, certainly, but they're notoriously awful at long division and anything after that requiring such skills is beyond them. besides this, they do not seem to care. and while birds understand the scientific method just fine, their ability to explain it is extremely limited. i mean, it's a set of six steps easily represented in a flow chart but they just get so caught up in if-then statements they are worthless. squawking and flapping and screaming, "analyze the results. is the hypothesis true or false?" over and over. there is no help for a supernatural ten year old.

and all this sounds awful. why would any supernatural folks ever make it to adulthood with this misery? but ten is a magnificent year for those who can stand all the shifting. ten is the year of identity. we weren't thinking about it, really. we are so far away here in brooklyn. his parents have been busy with the beginning of school. the local aunt and uncle are still settling into a new home with their own supernatural child. and the grandparents didn't say a word. not a word. but they knew. i will try to explain.

the patriarch of the family, grandfather to both supernaturals, is a garage sale/flea market fiend. the original supernatural nephew, unable to escape this trait any more than he can escape the ability to fly, goes with his grandpa when he can and surveys piles of musty, rusted, broken things, looking for what is beautiful. there is no one in his family who doesn't love a flea market. this, too, is a special power. these two stand together, nearly sixty years apart, but with the same sharp eyes and chatty charm. you can't get something for nothing but these two come close more often than the rest of us.

and while the grandpa is looking at something, a watch, a pipe, some sort of sword, the child's eyes fall on something that catches his heart. i know what his face looks like, eyes wide and soft, mouth open a bit until he realizes it and snaps it shut. his head whips around to his grandpa. maybe he holds the briefcase up for his grandpa to see. maybe he just points at it, still so smitten he cant' pick it up. and the grandpa knows right away. he pretends he doesn't, tells the child no ten year old needs such a thing. then he waits. the supernatural nephew makes it very clear that he might die without this briefcase, that he has his own money. he will take the thing to school instead of his backpack. the grandpa waits. unlike the rest of us he has not forgotten the child will be ten soon. he has not forgotten this is the year of identity. the way the child expresses need for the old briefcase is what he's looking for. the child holds the briefcase to his chest, looks up at his grandpa, smiles. the woman selling things wasn't expecting this particular item to go home with a large eyed, serious ten year old boy and she smiles, too. the child's grandpa sighs and nods. the supernatural child slides coins over to the woman and takes what is now his.

i call him a few days later to ask him about the briefcase but we get distracted in our conversation (the rock postcard i sent him arrived with pieces broken off and he is furious with the irresponsibility of postal employees. we make plans for a possible thanksgiving in the catskills.) and i forget to ask. he does not mention it. i think it is because he knows. we have never spoken about it but he is, even as a ten year old, supernatural. he has to know. we have been sending him things over the years, strange musical instruments, ancient helmets and shields, survival backpacks, things he might need for his future life. there is no way to predict how he will rescue, how he will protect, what he will do. there is only knowing that's what's out there for him.

what is best about this is we don't know where that briefcase belongs. will it be part of his mild mannered alter ego or will it be part of his heroic self? all we can tell right now is what he told his local aunt while running a hand over the worn leather outside of the case with a flourish. "you can't," he said, opening the case to reveal a luxurious blue silken pocketed interior, "judge a book by its cover."