low dog in the big snow

we didn't get the blizzard. we waited. we watched. i stood by the window glaring out at the mountain. sometimes weather gets stuck on that thing, snagged up a while, wearing itself out, finally dragging itself over the tops of the pines and spruce weak and disappointingly light in snow. glaring at the mountain does nothing to undo this problem but it makes me feel better, smug and warm by the fire in my wool sweater and soft socks with a pile of logs on one side and a pile of knitting on the other. it is quite a thing to feel superior to a weather system, especially one the magnitude of blizzard.

eventually, though, no matter the depth of the snow a body must get out of the house. even a low body whose belly might make a trail through even the littlest bit of snow. so the sweetie and i put on big boots and wool hats and mittens and sweaters. the low dog put on nothing but a fierce determination to leap after and catch anything flying across his field of vision. and so he did. this dog who will pee on his own feet rather than go outside in the rain will throw himself face first into a snowdrift he can't see over. like those bundled up children you see standing in the snow, so excited they don't know what to do but shiver, he will stay out in snow as deep as he is until he's carried inside. he will protest the entire trip into the house. then, with a body steaming hot from all his wildness, he will sit in front of the fire and shiver piteously until the snow between his toes melts. then he will curl himself up with the flames flickering over his fur. he will tuck his nose under his back foot and will wrap his tail across his eyes. from time to time his back leg will twitch over his nose, rabbity quick. the snow, the ball, the frigid air- they are no match for him. only his little body has come indoors. the rest of him is still out there running.

museum

i am explaining the finer points of the monkfish to the original supernatural nephew, how it lurks along the bottom of the ocean using a small bit of itself, maybe the end of a dorsal fin, as a fishing rod to lure in tasty prey. he is pleased with this, i can tell, even from half a country away. some of them grow to be five feet long, i tell him. and though the monkfish is a hideous beast capable, i am sure, of producing a shudder even in its own kind, the sweetie and i have been aware of the child's lack of monkfish for quite some time and have finally decided to remedy that situation.

the child agrees that this is good. ugliness isn't a thing to him. his whole world is a science project, and exploration. we will hear later from family how with each gift from us he unpeeled the wrapping and exclaimed, “they sure do have my number!” now, i will certainly have a talk with him at some point down the road, outlining the dangers of spending free afternoons at the senior center playing cards and smoking cigars with near fossils, learning to say things like 23 skidoo. i am only slightly worried that his words, when he says them, tend to spin more toward what i heard my own grandpas say than toward what you’d expect from a ten year old boy. i suppose being able to converse with centenarians may come in handy some day. those were some of our best explorers, some of our wildest scientists, after all.

it is true, though, that he needs a monkfish. not a fishtank monkfish swimming around the bottom of a glass bowl, trying to get flake fish food to snap at its lure. that's the sort of gift you give a child when you want to piss off his parents, the sort of gift you give a child when you're trying to teach him about the circle of life with the flush of a toilet. it's an awful idea and it is not what has happened here. but here’s how what happened with the non-living monkfish came about. the sweetie and i stroll on over to a holiday market in our neighborhood. we are looking at old microscope slides. you know, antenna of moth, bark of tree, petal of violet, each with a loop at the end to make it a pendant necklace. we have just chosen a slide with a bit of fern on it for the child’s aunt (a microscope hound from back in the day) and i am chatting with the woman who made it when the sweetie’s eyes fall on the monkfish, lying quietly on a green velvet cushion inside a small glass box every bit as elegant as the one sleeping beauty spent her hundred years in. all that beauty encased in glass, waiting for just the right moment. you know how it is. the stuff of fairytales. we know right then exactly where it belongs. few choices in life are so clearly marked for us and we are grateful for this one.

so the child is pleased and tells me his plan. last week he found two crystals and now that he has a monkfish as well, a grandpa who knows him suggests he start a museum. something about the way he says it and something in how it crawls down the phone line brings the word into my head written in quill pen, flourishes all around the m at either end of the word. there is dust caked on the word and calliope music playing all around it. there is a bit of a singe mark near where the vowels cluster together. it is as old as a word can get, full of all the things the child intends to put in it. i cannot wait to see his museum and i tell him so, tell him i promise to keep my eyes peeled for specimens. i can hear him nod through the phone. i’ll do it, he says with conviction. i really am going to start a museum.

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.

grown

the boy on the bus is struggling with something. "no, no," he would say if asked, "i'm not a boy at all. i'm clearly a man!" he would jut out his chin so the faint hint of beard there might catch your eye. he is dressed for church, for an interview. he is dressed the way boys dress for graduation, in clothes that look awkward, even though they fit. his black wing tip shoes anchor him to the floor of the bus while his black pinstripe pants work together with his diagonally pinstriped shirt to give the effect of an optical illusion collapsing in on itself. he is attempting to tie a tie. this, after all, is something men do.

the tie, too, is black. the pale pinstripes on it move diagonally the opposite direction of those on the shirt. he must be making himself dizzy swimming in all those stripes. now, i know how to tie a tie. i was raised a churchgirl and i sang in a choir that traveled from time to time to other nearby churches. those of you who know me a little know i'm tone deaf and have the vocal stylings of a drunk camel but king david wrote down "make a joyful noise unto the lord" and so nobody could do much but let me, all of them quietly hating king david just a little for not having been more clear about what might be joyful or how the rest of folks might have to listen along, sometimes, with the lord.

churchgirls know how to tie ties because churchboys do not. or maybe churchboys pretend they cannot. so a churchgirl can take an untied tie gently from around a churchboy's neck and can drape it around her own, tie it quickly with a four-in-hand knot, then loosen it just enough to slip it over her head and onto the boy. a churchgirl can do this the way everyone in the world can tie shoes. easily, without any thought and completely unable to explain the steps. so i know how to tie a tie but cannot really help this boy.

he continues to struggle. a sound like sportscasters buzzes behind me, my grandpa's transistor calling a royals game. the boy has his phone balanced precariously on his lap and is watching a video on how to tie a tie. it is seven am. his hands shake a bit. he watches the video again then he stands up, leaving the phone muttering to itself on the seat. he walks to the back of the bus and faces the huge round rearview mirror buses have by their back doors. he stares intently into the fisheye image of himself and tries again. the churchgirl in me considers crying. he is hopeless. he collapses back into his seat and returns to the video. it is only a few steps. around once. around twice. up. over. down through the loop. he does not give up. he tries five, six, seven times. at his stop he stands up, tie hanging in two flat ribbons from his neck.

visit

he has been talking about visiting for a while, telling anyone who will listen that he will be traveling to brooklyn. he has been whispering it into phones, giggling about it with other children, telling strangers when the opportunity arises. i am foolish enough to think he wants to see me, to see the giant uncle. he tells us on the phone he can't wait and i believe him.

but when i open the door and he steps inside he does not see me standing right there in front of him. he does not see the uncle who is, to him, as tall as any tree. he sees only the low brown dog and the dog sees him. they run down the long hall toward each other and swirl into a cloud of barking and childshriek and scrunched up rugs. the newer supernatural nephew says the dog's name about seven hundred times and the dog, absolutely beside himself with so much attention at such a completely reachable level, leaps and barks and is beyond overjoyed.

now, i know the child has been trying out sidekicks. this has been going on a while. i know he is looking for the sort of things all supernatural folk look for- bravery, loyalty, cuddliness. and surely it is not difficult to find two of those characteristics in the same person. good folks tend to be good all around. but it is near to impossible to find all three anywhere at all unless you're looking at a dog.

over the course of the week the dog follows the child around and the child follows the dog. they are close enough in size and similar enough in squirminess and energy that they do not seem to tire of each other. they like the same soft, fluffy toys, the same throwable things. their tiny bodies make the same unimaginably heavy clomping sounds on the wide wood stairs up to the bedrooms. they stand at the railing on the second floor and stare down onto the tops of the people who usually loom over them. they like the second floor heat register, flat and heavy iron, lifting their hair and tickling their bellies with warm air from time to time. and if the child could curl up with his tail over his nose at bedtime, he would.

i am not sure the supernatural nephew has chosen a new sidekick. there is the great distance between where he is and where the small dog is. there is the planning and the meetings and potential costumes and all that. but after his second full day back at home the supernatural child calls and asks to speak to the dog. his older cousin used to call and talk to both dogs when there were two and he was younger. whispers and barks and giggles and growls. i have never been able to understand the conversations, two wobbly languages, the same with each child. but i hear the same tone, the quiet closeness between small child and small animal, all that distance between their real selves gone.

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.