return of dog candy

our good dog guthrie has spent most of the last three years dogless.

he has not complained about this one bit.

still, we've wanted him to have a brother to love and play with.

instead, we ended up with scout, as willful and nosy as her namesake. 

she is part vampire, part crocodile and part pogo stick.

guthrie waits patiently for us to send her back.

but she follows him around.

she bites him when he ignores her.

and so he tries to teach her a little about how to be a good dog,

how to catch a ball in midair,

how to be a clown.

but when they wear themselves out she scoots up next to him.

guthrie is not at all sure this is acceptable.

but i think she is beginning to grow on him.

fish on

because the original nephew's new home is just down the street from a creek and a pond, there is nothing to do but take the worms out of the fridge, coat ourselves in bug spray and take the whole family down to the water.

the sweetie, the original nephew's father and i have scouted out the area for fishability already, finding a shallow creek full of little fingernail fish and a drought-stricken pond the locals insist is full of catfish no matter what it looks like and it looks for the most part like mud. while the sweetie wisely stays on clearly marked park territory, the brother-in-law and i roam into uncharted territory and find the trail neighbors have promised goes right from the creek on up to the house. we manage to wade ourselves into a pile of chiggers somewhere on the trail and pay dearly for our recklessness. if you don't know what these beasts are, consider invisible frankenstein creatures cobbled together from ticks, fleas and mosquitoes with a little chicken pox sprinkled in. they are larval parasites. they live in colonies. if you find one, you've found hundreds. but this is a story for another day.

it is at least 95 degrees when we head out, an hour or so before dark, the parents, all three sisters, all three husbands, two little boys. the women in my family are, none of us, fisherfolk, but we are willing to sit ourselves at the edges of water and smell the evening air and watch the bats and lightning bugs while other folks try to trick fish.

there are varying levels of success in terms of the fishing, including two fat catfish caught one after the other late in the evening, the first by the sweetie and the second a minute later by the original nephew's father.  the sky gets deeper and deeper but the heat does not give in to darkness. nobody says much that late in the evening. i have been fishing many times and have come to believe that above all else, this is what fishing is.  the sound of the cicadas and the bullfrogs. the smell of the water and what's left of the day's heat. the quietness of standing there with people you know are yours and the promise of fish.

ice cream

this is the first of several adventures in the homeland.  it is not the first one that happened, just the first one i got pinned down.

if you are not from the homeland, anderson's ice cream means nothing to you, but i will tell you now that mr. john f. kennedy, among many fancy folks, thought it was good ice cream. i spent a fine part of my ice-creamy childhood summers sitting under a photo showing dennis weaver, cone in hand, laughing with a scoop-wielding ray anderson. you can't argue with john kennedy and dennis weaver.

until well after i left the homeland, anderson's lived out on main just past the giant bass at southtown and while they offered cones of soft-serve ice cream in vanilla, chocolate or swirl, you could also find just about an fancy flavor hard-packed ice cream you could want and the folks at anderson's had the ability to pack more ice cream into a cone than anywhere else. dense, dense stuff, that ice cream.

as children, we went there most with the grandparents, people whose job it was to spoil us, people who would say yes to any hot fudge sundae request. ray himself, son of the original owners, would hand over a cone, smiling, paper hatted. he always seemed thrilled to be offering up something that made people happy.

in college, we went there in clusters of ten or so when we were feeling unmoored, lost in our attempts at adult life. we'd wrap ourselves in the familiar- the huge glass windows under carnival neon lights, ray's white hat and apron, tubs of ice cream that never wavered- the same chocolatey chocolate and pistochioey pistachio my senior year of college as they were the last summer days before i went to kindergarten.

when anderson's closed more than ten years ago, i felt a tug, a little emptiness, even though i hadn't had that ice cream in a very long time. many of the anchors of my memory disappeared while i was gone away and i did not always notice at first. we are like that, all of us. raring to grow up and get out of a place, but expecting what we leave behind to stay still for us, waiting, like a photograph. we are indignant when our old world moves on, grows up, too.

so when the sisters begin sending photos of their children with ice cream and they put the word anderson's there with the photo, i am suspicious. when they say someone has taken ray's recipes and his old soda fountain and machines and has started making ice cream out at the candy house, i nearly faint. because when i say candy house the image in your head of a gingerbready little place out past town where you know elves are living and working is exactly what i mean. the place has been full of chocolate in all forms forever and huge jars of hard candy- rootbeer sticks and cherry sticks and wax tubes full of sugary colored liquid. imagine the source of all your childhood chocolate and the source of all your childhood ice cream moving in together. that's right. the sisters promise we will all go.

we walk in through the front door of the candy house in evening, when the cicadas are at their best, and the smell inside, indescribable but immediately familiar, covers everything. there are smells of chocolate and caramel and nuts and raisins and sassafras and smells i have always known but still cannot name. the smell is of candy you can't buy at a grocery store or at the mall. we walk through a side door and i am standing in a place i would have given anything to get to in my childhood. the ice cream lives in the room that used to be part of the chocolate making, glassed in for viewing. the glass, once smudged with the noseprints of thousands of children, is gone, and an ice cream counter stands where the chocolate making apparatus once waited for us. and i stand there, too, with my sisters and their husbands and the sweetie. we are right there in the chocolate factory. there, behind the low glass case, sit neat rows of ice cream tubs, chocolate, coconut, a glowing blueberry lemon, butter pecan, bubble gum.

the sisters have been telling me this ice cream is the same as they remember. they remind me one of the new owners worked at the original anderson's, that he uses the old equipment and the same ingredients the andersons fed to our grandparents, but i know how people are. they showboat. they can't help it. they will take something simple and lovely and will add to it to make it sassier. they will diminish it. so i walk the length of the counter. i look at every flavor and take my time but i know, even though i look twice, then a third time, slowly, at every tub, what i will get.

and when the man behind the counter asks me, smiling like ray, what i would like, i say i would like a coke float with vanilla ice cream. because there is little else in the world so plain in construction that is also so perfect. he hands me the tall cup heavy with ice cream and the coke foam at the top continues growing in a sparkling column after i take it so that i have to slurp the foam and slurp it again to keep it from overflowing. this is how things should be.

i scoop up some of the vanilla ice cream and the coke has already begun to turn it to crystals. we walk out into the hundred degree evening, three sisters, three husbands, and we sit at a round table filling ourselves with ice cream. and the sisters are right. it is the same ice cream. and maybe i am in college sitting on the curb at the south end of town with a pistachio cone and a skinny bunch of longhaired boys and black fingernailed girls on our way to a pool hall. mabye i am ten, holding the hand of my grandpa while he says the precious words hot fudge sundae and ray nods. maybe i am small enough to be sitting on my dad's shoulders wearing seersucker pajamas my grandma made, the only clothes wearable on such a hot night. it is all the same. i know where i am. i am home.

scout

the original nephew decides to come with us the second time we go to the shelter. he is a lover of dogs, surely, but there are also only so many days we are in the same town. he is excited to have us all to himself and so we take him with us to walk through the crates of dogs of all sizes. most are in cages alone but some are two or three to a cage, whole families of animals waiting. the place is suffocating and the nephew is uncomfortable, asking why the cages are so small, why the smell is so overwhelming. he knows his own great grandmother helped start this place along with a friend, two women in heels and fancy hats who were not above stealing a dog staked out in a yard without food or water. he knows very little about my own grandmother except that she stole dogs. and picked up wounded owls from the side of the road. that is enough for him. he knows where he comes from and why we are here right now.

the dogs whimper and bark and leap at the bars of the cages. i want them all. the sweetie points out several and the nephew points out most but when we go to a room of dogs off to the side, i see the dog i saw the first time we went to the shelter. she is small and white with black ears. she is alone and silent but her eyes are everywhere. the barking of all the other dogs spreads out into her cage and she sits. this is the one, i say. she is not the one i really wanted the first time we visited, but that dog, a black hound with a wing and claw where a front paw should be, is already spoken for. she is a second choice. but just like the sullen brown dog waiting at home, a runt and a leftover, i know she is mine before i even pick her up.

someone from the shelter hands me the dog and takes us all- me, the sweetie, the nephew and the dog, to a small room with a chair and a table and a tennis ball. the dog curls up into me and when i put her on the floor she is so unsteady on her legs she looks like a newborn cow. the sweetie is already worried. maybe she is sick. it looks like she is broken. there is something not quite right. she is just too small. but he can tell already there is nothing we can do but take her home so he goes to the front desk to put our names on papers and make her ours.

the nephew and i stay with the dog. she gets her bearings and begins to understand her legs. she picks up the tennis ball, nearly the same size as her head, and brings it right to me. she wants to be held. she wants to play. she goes so fast her back end legs go past her front end legs several times. she rolls over herself. she slides. the nephew says to me, several times, this is the right dog. he knows things like this. you made the right choice, he tells me and then, holding the dog close, he promises her that she's part of our family, that we're taking her home. he is reassuring all three of us. she believes him and so do i.

the sweetie is gone a long time and the nephew starts to get restless, to get worried. he heads out of the small room and to the front desk to find out what's holding things up. he wants to be out of this place. he wants this dog to start her new life right now. he comes back and holds the dog. he gets very quiet, scratches her ears, then asks me what will happen when we go to new york. i do not understand the question the way he means it and i say something about the car ride back or about house training, but that is not what he means. he knows these are her first moments as part of a family and he wants to know how she will feel when he stays where he is and we go home. i tell him she will miss him, but that it won't be like where she is now. i tell him we will all visit, that she will know who he is.

when the sweetie comes back and motions us to the front desk, the nephew is relieved. we sit on chairs by the window out front and a man takes the tiny dog to put a chip in her. in case she's without us ever again she can be scanned like a can of corn and people will know where she belongs.

it seems to take forever and the nephew wanders around the front of the shelter, looking at plaques and photos. he is still worried and cannot stop fidgeting until we walk through the door. but then she is ours, all ribs and sharpsharp teeth and shining eyes. we take her to the nephew's vet who scans her for us to see, then weighs all five pounds of her. and that is it. she will meet the small brown curmudgeonly dog. she will ride in a car all the way to brooklyn. she will listen to honky-tonk music like the rest of us.