noon

we have ourselves a very nice noon siren here in arkville. as far as we can tell, it wails for a minute right at noon on saturdays and weekdays, resting on sundays. there are plenty of forms of speculation as to why small towns have noon whistles or sirens but because ours sits right on top of the volunteer fire station i can see from the living room window, i'm going to toss out the idea that it's the same siren that calls the firemen to a fire and that its noon howling is some sort of practice, keeping the town sure always that the siren is working and keeping folks aware of what it sounds like when there's something wrong.

we also have a small dachshund who, much to the chagrin of the sweetie, has never paid much attention to the noon siren. you see, when the sweetie was a child he had a longsuffering dachshund named sammy, a dog who survived falls downstairs, a rattlesnake bite and the dangerous childhoods of two boys some might have called a bit wild. and this dog sammy was a howler. hounds in general are howlers, bayers, animals with keen ears and a strong desire to communicate over great lonely distances, to say, "i can hear you and i am here." so the sweetie and the small brown dog have been practicing because evidently this dog's interest in communication has lately been limited to barking. barking is not the same as howling at all. it is short, sharp, not so sustained. the sound doesn't carry as far as a howl because there's no need. it is more "i can bite you because i am right here." not the same at all.

the sweetie has faith that all hounds howl and so when the noon siren begins the sweetie begins. howling. pitched high to match the siren and the likely sound of a low dog with a small chest cavity. and the small dog begins. he is unsure at first, barks a bit, then flings his head back and lets loose the most pitiful, most plaintive cry in the world. the siren howls. the sweetie howls. the dog howls. for a full minute those three voices declare the most important thing. i am here. i am here. i am here.

veterans scooter show

he is asleep when i get on the bus. it is not terribly crowded but i am still standing by him awhile before i notice him. well, at first i do not notice him at all. i notice the palm trees. and the soldiers. small men in camouflage posed variously with weapons. there is an olive drab helicopter hovering above them, secured there with a slender stick. there is an american flag waving over the whole scene. this is world war two. i know because i recognize world war two when i see it but also because the platform is labeled. world war two. the platform the soldiers stand and crouch on is open in the center and the trunk of a very large elephant pokes up though it, the tip of the trunk resting near a small metal bell. the elephant itself is below the platform, painted black. it is wearing a blanket of some sort, the kind of thing folks in circuses drape over elephants before they put those seats on them. the blanket says "veterans scooter show is the greatest show on earth". indeed.

now would be a good time to explain this whole contraption, the elephant with world war two hovering above and around its trunk, is in front of and between the handlebars of a scooter, the sort folks use when they have a tough time getting around but feel that wheelchairs might cramp their style. a scooter is, well, sassy to some. this scooter is maroon and sits across from the back door of the bus against the folded up seats hinged for just this sort of thing. there are seatbelts on the floor of the bus to lash wheelchairs into something like stability during the ride but this scooter is not fastened down. it would probably be foolish to try to contain the thing in that manner anyway.

it is plastered with important information. a black and white photo of fdr, photocopied over a few times to graininess, when he was younger, handsomish, firm-jawed and waiting, with the look of a man who can lead people into or out of anything. next to him on the same sheet of paper are the words "we fear no one. the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". the whole thing together has some sort of plastic coating, not quite shrinkwrap but not lamination, either. under roosevelt is a red, white and blue poster with a muscular ship plowing through waves, proclaiming "the u.s. navy is looking for you". a hand points out of the image at me just in case i'm not sure who it's talking to. i worry about the navy if this is true.

"i have a dream" spreads across the right curve of the back bumper. the center of the bumper thanks patton for his courage and bravery. the back of the seat has, among other things, a photo of nimitz. the admiral, not the ship. he is labeled. everything is labeled. there is a navy man bumper sticker nearby. hanging from the right front handle bar is a large image of jesus with light coming from inside him, from his heart. he is glowing in the middle of the words "in god we trust". near jesus, attached to the black wicker-plastic basket resting under the elephant, is obama proclaiming "i am the 44th president of the u.s."

the man on the scooter sleeps with his face down, a hood over his head. he wakes up when the bus lurches to a stop under the f train, looks around, then drops his head back down. i see his face in that quick moment when he opens his eyes. he is not a veteran of world war two. he is plenty old enough to claim most any other exploit but he simply isn't old enough for this. there is no way to know why this man, sleeping on his scooter in the back of an early morning bus, is so chaotically captivated by a time he can't possibly remember. but it is easy to tell that veterans scooter show is the greatest show on earth.

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.