present

the sweetie is sitting cross-legged on the floor of our apartment. the overhead light is blaring as is the sunlamp we dragged home from a flea market several years ago. he rewired the thing, pulled miles of cord from inside the heavy pedestal, and now i sit under it to knit. he hunches over the coffee table which was, when i first saw it, a monstrous slab of wood floor plank sprawled out on a curb on seventh avenue.

but these are small things. parlor tricks. building a table. rewiring a lamp. these are things he does with almost no effort, the way most folks change a light bulb. the more impressive conjuring is what he sits down to now. he can make something out of nothing. there are pages on the table, schematics and maps with legends beyond indecipherable. there are bits of ceramic wrapped wire everywhere. there is a small metal box. there is a soldering iron, its fiery tip resting in a springy coil of metal. there is a stamp pad.

the sweetie is colorblind. he is sitting at this other coffee table, here in the mountains on this second day of secret construction with the wires and the solder and the papers. it is the weekend and the snow is trying outside to be picturesque while the fire in the woodstove is enticing the dog toward some norman rockwellish hearth snoozing. i sit across from the sweetie with a pile of ceramic wrapped wires, striped in five colored bands, a secret code unraveled on the sheet of paper he holds. the sweetie calls out a string of colors and i push my glasses up on top of my head, pick through the pile, holding the striped bits inches from my eyes. i hand them over in sets of twos and threes and the sweetie leans over a small metal plate with the soldering iron and the wires, putting each where it belongs, making some sort of order out of all this tiny chaos.

the brightness of the lights, the smell of solder, the small dachshund milling around drags from my brain images of my dad at the dining room table under the brightest light in our old house, the soldering iron at his elbow, peering into the guts of someone else's television or radio. he knows what to do, just from looking at all those wires and shiny tubes. that man can fix anything folks can break. the solder smells like incense, spicy and powdery, like rosin for a violin bow.

the sweetie knows exactly what he is doing, what he is making. it is a gift, a christmas gift. he is taking these wires and this metal box and is putting them together and it is not at all like the knitting i do. i take yarn that is soft and turn it into a hat or a sweater, clearly still yarn, the same softness, the same color. but he is an alchemist, changing lead into gold. he will change the sounds of the world. he will turn a guitar into a thunderstorm.

when i was a child and rolled my eyes at nearly everything my dad did, my mother would laugh and insist i'd end up with someone just like him. plenty of mothers have done this but i saw it as a particularly deliberate and cruel wish on her part, an attempt to doom me to her own suffering, to life with a weirdo. but i get it now. all superheros, all magicians have this other life to balance things out, to offset the constant intensity of the life they lead trying to make the world new every day. so today i sit in this overlit room weaving a basket and smelling the melting metal and listening to car talk on a podcast. what an incredible gift, my mother's wish for me. how lucky i am to have never had a minute of my life without all this magic.