revelation

my first phone was about ten years ago, a thing that looked like a giant cicada. i put a faux wood case on it and carried it around for dialing up numbers. that's what it was for. my next phone, the phone i carried until about nine last night, was a waterproof, shockproof monstrosity larger than the landline phone we have. a cross between a submarine and a football helmet, this phone allowed me to figure out texting and the art of small, blurry photography. but the dog chewed off the antenna two years ago and the waterproofness only goes so far when a phone can't get signal inside a building.

the sweetie says it is time. he has been nudging me toward a new phone for a while now and finally he did what he has done the other two times a phone came my way. he got a phone he thought would be nice. now, i have made a great production of not caring about fancy new technology, about loving and being loyal to a phone that hasn't been in production for at least three years. but the sweetie knows me. he knows i will talk plenty about how i don't want bells and whistles and don't understand fancy but he knows i will figure out a new tool quickly and will be smug about it.

the phone arrives and i do not know where the on button is. it is a dark screen. this is the first time i've had a phone with no actual numbers on it. but it is easy enough to figure out. the sweetie shows me how to put music on the phone. i am resistant. the first and last time in my adult life i used headphones was 1991. i was on a bus trip from syracuse, ny to joplin, mo and my sisters let me sing the better part of a cowboy junkies album aloud before letting me in on the joke that my tone deaf croaking was both agony and entertainment for the whole bus.

but when i start putting songs into the phone i feel giddy. i have never done this. no, really. never. this is how my students live. this is how every single person in new york city over the age of ten lives. with a soundtrack. like john travolta walking down 86th street in bensonhurst, below the train, past lenny's pizza. i have had no soundtrack for my life. i put the little sound knobs in my ears and wince. i don't know how they go. this is not part of my experience. but i try again until they feel okay. i am genuinely nervous. i am worried the sound will hurt. maybe this is because of the constant, high-pitched heartbeat hissing tinnitus in my ears. maybe i think the tiny ear things can't possibly match a big wicker faced speaker. maybe it is because i don't know what i am doing. i find willie nelson's the trouble maker album, scroll down to uncloudy day and hit play. i can feel my whole head floating. i can feel willie's voice behind my eyes. i am singing along soundlessly with all those songs i've heard at baptisms, hand clapping celebration songs. the sweetie glances over, smiles and suggests i practice not mouthing the words while i'm on the bus. i tell him people will surely steer clear of me if i do mouth the words but i make a mental to work on it.

i leave the house for work in pale light. i want to try the music again but am afraid i'll fall down if i attempt to work the thing while walking. i am afraid i will drop it. once safely on the bus, i dial up old willie again and hit that uncloudy day. it just me and the bus driver and willie for a few stops. i am swaying back and forth wildly and my feet- both of them- keep time with that tent revival music. i don't sing along, though, so nobody ought to have anything to say about it.

i change buses. i scroll through the list of names on the smooth screen and come to a friend. i touch her name and her clear voice slides through the little wires and into my ears singing a sad song i wish would never end. i settle back into the seat. the woman behind me is screaming into her phone but i push a tiny button on my phone and she dissolves, the screaming woman, no match for the voice coming out of the wires, no match for my own people. i listen to two songs, three, before my stop. this is a voice that has laughed at my jokes when nobody else got them. this is someone i have drawn cartoons about. it is strange to carry her voice around with me in a pocket.

this afternoon i wait for the second bus home. i stand across the street from the corner of the cemetery and find buck owens on the screen. i'm gonna lay around the shack till the mail train comes back then i'll roll in my sweet baby's arms. the banjo hits my left ear first. the fiddles are screaming a square dance only a few seconds in. i wanted to marry buck owens when i was a little girl. i figured nobody could be sad if they could sit on a hay bale with buck owens and roy clark playing and singing. the song is so wild i lose the hissing heartbeat that has been a constant companion to my brain the last five years. i don't notice its absence at first but when i do it is a large thing to hear nothing but that song, to be free, even for those two minutes, of that miserable noise. i see the bus coming a few blocks away and cue the song up again. i step onto the bus and turn the volume up. there is nothing on the bus but me and buck and a whole crazy hillbilly orchestra.

we turn a corner and aretha franklin comes on. dr. feelgood. now, i was raised in a house where you play aretha franklin as loud as the machine you've got can go. if you can hear the doorbell over her voice you need to rethink your volume knob. so i push the volume button until i am just this side of pain, until aretha's voice has shoved back everything else and there is nothing but her and a honky tonk piano. i step off the bus just as baby, i love you comes on. i can feel the drums in my right ear and the piano in my left. they call to each other back and forth while aretha sings. i am walking down the street but it is not like every other day. the whole world has taken two or three steps back. by the time she gets to natural woman i realize the heaviness, the sharp edges that keep scraping against me when i am out in the world seem to have gotten lost. or softened. even the air slides more easily into my lungs.

i have spent twenty years afraid of headphones. i'm not kidding. genuinely afraid. and mostly i have been without music. i have spent so much time on trains and buses and in lines just waiting, anxious, unable to get away from the rest of the world. but right now willie nelson is singing in the sweet by and by, singing about a land that is fairer than day. and here i am. right here on the shore.

a dog and his eel

we head outside this first seriously springish day, the small dog, his lizard and i. guthrie focuses immediately on the task at hand and drops his lizard in front of him, close under his chest where he can keep a good eye on it. he cannot pee and carry his lizard at the same time. this is his rule and he does not consider, probably because he is a dog, that the lizard is lying helpless on a slope downhill from his chest and from the part of him that lies back of that. the stream of pee rolls down between his front paws and over the hind feet of the lizard before i can grab it away. because he is an animal who occasionally snacks on his own poo, i figure he will be the one to carry the lizard to the pet store.

we stroll down the street and he does not seem to mind the pee-soaked hindquarters clenched in his jaws. a woman comes up and asks about the lizard. she has folks with two low dogs and thinks they would love lizards of their own. they live in florida, these low dogs, and have been known to snack on real lizards. i tell her where to get them, say we're on our way there. we are a walking advertisement for the lizard making people.

we make our way to the dog toy store and there are no lizards on the lizard rack. the only toy from the lizard's family is is something named neelmo. this is a stupid name. neelmo is an eel. white and orange striped. legless. we are in a desperate place with no time to worry about legs or stupid names. i get the eel and we head out of the store, the low dog with is lizard, me with a ridiculous legless eel. now, guthrie is loyal to his lizard. he loves it like it is family. he is the dog with the lizard in our neighborhood which means if you say those words to anyone around here that person nods and smiles and knows you mean guthrie. but what i know about guthrie is that he will carry around any toy this company makes. he is brand loyal. seriously. i drop the eel on the sidewalk in front of him and take hold of the lizard tail. he relaxes his jaws and as i slide the lizard away, surely touching a peed on part of the thing, he is already clamped down on the eel. i toss the lizard in a plastic bag. without legs the fat-headed eel is a balance trainwreck but the small dog shifts around and quickly finds that gripping the neck allows him to keep the thing level. he looks like a pirate with a sword in his mouth. he looks like my grandpa george with a cigar.

and it starts all over. a cluster of teenagers sitting in a doorway with trumpets and some unidentifiable brass instruments are playing- high school band style playing- and they squeal between notes about guthrie's unbearable cuteness. we wait at an intersection and a woman asks to take a picture, asks his name. she manages (a miracle, really) to get him to look right at her while she snaps the photo and then congratulates him again on catching such an amazing toy. we walk along and a group of teens behind us chatters about how he's always carrying some great toy. people point and wave.

and like when he first carried the lizard, parents nearly rip their children's heads right off their fragile necks trying to get them to look at this eel and dog spectacle. they point and say, "look! that doggy has a.... a..... well, it's a thing!" all the articulateness of these well-educated, thousand-dollar-stroller-pushing grown folks crumbles into nothing. words fail. because nobody is going to tell a kid from brooklyn that a dachshund is prancing around with a striped eel. nobody who wants to keep any credibility as a parent.

moon

helpful info: the first two photos are mine. accidental flash and tiny, tiny moon. the last photo is the sweetie's. blow it up. see a crater or five.

the full worm moon is out there. the almanac says so. it is the moon that keeps time with the earthworms and it promises spring. i head out with the camera around ten because it is not just the worm moon. this moon has edged up close to us, closer than it will be for a long while again, showing a face like a flashlight beam.

the night is cool, not quite thirty. the down the street goat is yelling, maybe in answer to that auction on the corner at casey joe's. the goat's voice punctuates the call of the auctioneer from time to time like he is bidding and not being heard. the air smells like woodsmoke and melted snow and dark. there is nothing in the sky but the moon and all those stars. no clouds. i forget them sometimes in winter, the stars, but they don't go far, just dance around in a big circle overhead. like a square dance i'm in the middle of.

there are new constellations and i do not like this at all. triangle. giraffe. i cannot see a giraffe in any of those stars but i do see folks i know. orion is standing on top of the giant pine tree across the street. and over to the south, up above pakatakan, i think is one of those planets. mercury or jupiter maybe. not venus. it is so bright i think it must be yelling from where it is. not a planet, then, not the way it winks and yells. dogstar. loud like that goat, explosive.

but the moon is back over in the east, just above the roof of the old factory. it shoves light through the fat spruce when i stand in the driveway. i take picture after picture but it is so far away in the camera screen. little kids do not ever get how far away the moon is. farther away than kansas city, certainly. farther away than california. but even grown up we still don't know. our brains can calculate the numbers but can make nothing of the space. i hand the camera over to the sweetie and he and the little machine confer a bit under the porchlight. he looks at the moon with the camera and brings it down. as big as it looks in the sky. bigger. i can hold it in my hands. the closest it will be for years.

lemonade

the seventh day of march last year i found three fat buds on the lemon tree i have nearly killed four times. a week later there were six. they bloomed and hissed out a tiny scent that is the way i want everything to smell. my house. my clothes. my hair. my eyes. the next week each white flower dropped into the dirt. all except one. that one formed a tiny green globe that grew so slowly sometimes i worried time might be stopping for it, starting again abruptly and then sputtering out for long, lazy stretches.

in retrospect, leaving a lemon tree alone in a house where the weekday temperature is 40 degrees probably isn't the best idea i've had. but it lives even now in a sunny room looking south out toward the mountain. and because i see it only on weekends, it is relatively safe from the overwatering and excessive fussing that have been hallmarks of my past lemon tending.

i did nothing in terms of cultivation. folks encouraged fertilizer, offered suggestions on pruning, discussed the merits of root stimulator and explained the varied theories on styles of watering. everything i read and heard contradicted something else i'd read or heard.

so i ignored all that and i watered my tree once a week. i made sure the sun got all over it and figured the weekday coolness would be fine. it was except that the weekend spikes up into the sixties addled the poor thing. two days of frantic growth. five days of a very long nap. this is probably why the tree took more than a year to fully ripen the single lemon drooping from the end of a long branch. i was willing to wait. i have been waiting.

until today. i wake up early today and decide that more than a year has been more than enough time. the sweetie agrees and i take my pruning scissors to the stem. the lemon drops off, heavy in my hand. the overwhelmed branch it had spent the last year on snaps back through the air and stands up nearly straight, breathing easier now, waving a little like there's wind. the skin on the lemon is waxy and thick. i dig a nail into it and that smell explodes out of the waxiness. when i slice into it i am surprised to see insides the color of egg yolk. the rind tastes candied and breaks apart when i squeeze it. there is enough juice for one glass of lemonade. i add sugar and water. i stir and pick out three seeds spinning around the bottom of the glass. it is not fancy but it took a year to get here. i sip it slowly and it is very good.

telephone

the original supernatural nephew is on the phone and he is none too pleased with us. it is the newer nephew's birthday and the whole family is together, halfway across the country, eating cake and being wild. but the original supernatural nephew detaches himself from the wildness and talks to the sweetie in a soft but accusing tone. i know it was you, he says, a fourth grade teacher trying to get a child to confess to scribbling on a bathroom wall. i know it was you pretending to be guthrie when i was little. the sweetie feigns confusion, says he doesn't know where the child would get such a ridiculous idea, doesn't know why he thinks we would be dishonest with him. parents dread eventual discussions about santa and the easter bunny. grandparents worry about the time a child feels too old to cuddle up on a lap. aunts and uncles, generally speaking, fear nothing. we have nothing, laughs the uncle, to hide.

but the child is not deterred. he has overheard his grandmother, my own treacherous mother, telling someone about the newer nephew's most recent conversation with guthrie, about how guthrie told the kid we were planning to get him a robot. the child's grandmother, in a rare but spectacular lapse of judgment, discusses how she thinks these conversations go, how she thinks the child and dog understand each other. and the child overhears. it is one thing to overhear the ugly truth and suffer. it is entirely another to overhear wicked speculation. the child thinks the sweetie and i pretended to be guthrie all those times when he'd call to visit. how could we? we barely speak the dog's language.

this story his grandmother has concocted, i tell him when it is my turn to suffer his calm but persistent accusations, is completely untrue. he tells me i better stop being coy about the whole thing, says he knows, says his grandmother told him everything. i tell him exactly what the sweetie told him, that his grandmother is a lunatic and clearly a lying one at that. i point out that she has never once talked to guthrie on any sort of phone and she wouldn't understand a thing he said even if she did. i end, like the sweetie, with the thing that always gets a scientific mind like the one driving this child. your grandmother, i tell him, has absolutely no evidence to support her claim. she has no proof.

he wants to know why she would say such things if they're not true. i come closer than i expect to accusing my own mother of being a drunk or possibly a meth head. it is her own fault and i am unapologetic about it. i consider a variety of scenarios and dismiss "pure evil" and "monstrously cruel", finally settling for "uninformed and confused". i do not tell the child that all grandmothers, especially in his family, are prone to telling the sort of tall tales that would make twain tip his hat in deference. i do not tell him his grandmother is lucky i cannot reach through the phone and shake her. i do consider explaining that not everyone really understands his supernatural abilities and sometimes folks are jealous or scared or just plain confused when they hear how a boy is talking to a dog on the phone and how the dog talks back and the two can understand each other just fine because that's simply how they are. but he is ten and this is an awkward enough time for a child that age without pointing out another thing that sets him apart.

i can hear in his voice that he's unsure, that he wants to believe what i'm telling him but he also wants to believe in the flawlessness of his grandmother. i decide to be honest with him, to come clean so he can have both. he knows it wasn't always guthrie on the other end of the line when he called. he knows. what hurts him is thinking we lied to him for meanness, thinking that we pretended to be someone we were not. i explain that sometimes, when guthrie was small and max was still around, guthrie would get too excited on the phone, too distracted and overwhelmed. those times, i explain to him, max would get on the phone and pretend to be guthrie because max was always a talker.

guthrie is curled up on my lap, eyes mostly closed, pretending to sleep. he hears everything, even what is on the other end of the line so far away. he is a dog and this is how dogs are. i do not know how he told the smaller child about the robot. i doubt dogs even have a word for robot. why would they? but he said something and the child understood it and now there is a robot. and the original nephew knows enough about superpowers, his own and those of the small child, to know sometimes there's no explaining something with just words.