From the Top (10 page)

Shortly after we moved here my elder daughter asked for a tire swing, so on a Sunday afternoon my brother and I selected a limb from the big pine and hung one. It's your classic: a chunk of old rope cinched around an old wore-out truck tire. There's
a scuffed patch in the grass directly beneath it now from all the feet come to climb aboard, and it's a rare visiting youngster who doesn't bail from the mini-van and sprint headlong for that old tire beneath that old tree. Sometimes two or three kids pile on, and yet the limb above barely flexes, anchored as it is to a trunk as solid as a silo. Five years gone already and the girl who first requested that swing is now a teenager, but I still see her out there now and then, swaying back and forth on the four-ply snow-tire pendulum beneath the canopy of all those green needles. It warms my heart to think the chance to swing in the shade of that pine tree still—now and then—trumps texting, makeup, and earbuds.

The day is not far off when we'll have to take that tree down. The last limb it lost hit our house. It took a divot from the shingles and left a rumple in the rain gutters. It struck the roof with a mighty whack and the ground with a mighty thud. We all ran out to see what had happened, which upon reflection is not really the way to behave when giant branches are falling from the sky, but human nature is an inquisitive little gerbil.

The thing is, that pine tree stands right outside my bedroom window. Thoughtful ponderments and reminiscence aside, if we let it become too weakened, some stormy night it could whomp me in my sleep. Still, I'm dragging my feet. We'll hate to see that tree go, even as the more practical me notes that there are thousands of trees within sight of that one, and perhaps out there is some sad little sapling that needs love too. As a backup we have hung a second tire swing in a big old sugar maple across the yard.

Even if that pine goes down tomorrow, my children will remember what it was to take its shade. What it was to look up from the road across the valley and identify our place by that white pine's misshapen silhouette. The morning after the most recent limb came crashing to earth, I fetched the chainsaw and blocked it up. After it was split and dried we burned it in the woodstove. Like all pine it went to flame fast and hot, but even the short-lived heat was more than the old tree owed us.

Whatever the month, we already have our Christmas tree. It's back behind the pole barn. That's where they all are.

I was never a Christmas tree guy. In part this was due to the counterintuitive fact that I was raised in an obscure Christian church so fundamental the December holiday was viewed as dangerously contrived pagan silliness. So when I was growing up we never had a Christmas tree in the house. We did get Christmas, because my grandma was a believer of a different stripe. She always bought a squat Scotch pine, and some years the pile of presents dwarfed the tree.

Later I left the church and was freed up to get a tree, but by then I was a bachelor and never had reason or interest in dressing or decorating my digs holiday-wise. Y'know, you got some deer horns and a concert poster on the wall, why mess with the vibe? Plus based on my housekeeping history, last year's Christmas tree skeleton would still be standing.

Also, once after Grandpa died I helped Grandma put up her annual Scotch pine, and the whole deal kinda cured me of Christmas trees in general. She had one of those plastic stands with the three screws, and every time I got the tree halfway vertical and tightened one of the screws, the tree would tip over. And just the same as smoke from a campfire always seems to swing around and blow your way, no matter which screw I was tightening, no matter from what angle, that tree always seemed to manage to fall my way. The needles on a Scotch pine take the term
needles
very
seriously, and by the time I got that blankety-blank tree to stand upright I felt like I'd been loofahed with an overactive porcupine.

Oh, and the language: profoundly un-Christmassy.

Anyways, for years I didn't have a Christmas tree. Then I got married and my wife brought with her a beautiful young girl named Amy, who's now my daughter. To my eternal shame, when our first Christmas rolled around I still held out. We did decorate the house, but I didn't think we needed a tree. Plus, we were going to visit Grandma. But then we moved to a farm and there were Christmas trees growing right out back. So the second week of December we went ahead and cut one. I was reluctant, but Amy's eyes lit right up. She helped me saw it down, drag it in, and put it up. And now come the day after Thanksgiving I'm the first one lobbying to grab the saw and get out there.

We cut last year's tree out on the ridge, Amy taking her turn on the bucksaw while Jane, our youngest, played in the snow with our black cat. We hauled the tree and the little one back home in a sled. Halfway down the trail I took a picture of Anneliese and the girls and the tree. In the photo all three of them are looking at me with blue eyes and smiles, the tree settled on the sled between them.

We brought the tree inside and spent the evening stringing popcorn beside the fire and letting the girls take turns hanging ornaments. Later, when Anneliese was putting Jane to bed, I was in the kitchen doing dishes when I noticed the living room lights go out. I looked, and there was Amy sitting sideways in the old overstuffed chair, legs dangling, staring at the lit tree in the dark. You want, in moments like these, to just shut the world down and call it a day. And when I pulled that dishwater drain, that's exactly what I did: went in and sat with her.

That tree was a spruce, short and a tad gappy, although nowhere near Charlie Brown status. But it looked perfectly beautiful glowing in the corner that evening. I got to thinking about how long I'd held out against getting a Christmas tree, and how the kids coming along changed things, and what lesson I might take
from that. And I believe those first Christmas trees taught me that sometimes you need to stop being the man you think you are, and start being the man you oughta be.

Merry Christmas.

The older I grow, the less I'm interested in celebrating Official New Year's. Oh, I don't mind a get-together if it's with good friends and convenient, but by and large I prefer celebrating any given Tuesday.

For a few years in my early teens we spent New Year's Eve at Grandma Perry's house. Grandma was overgenerous, and by the time New Year's rolled around, we kids were saturated with store-bought gifts, store-bought peanut brittle, store-bought angel food candy, and store-bought stuff in general. Being raised on homemade and hand-me-downs, my brothers and sisters and I had an uncritical appetite for all things store-bought and didn't feel slighted in the least that our grandma was not a homebaked-sugar-cookies kind of grandma. Besides, when she did do her once-a-year Christmas baking—mainly those red and green spritz cookies manufactured by a process of cold extrusion using a device similar to a caulking gun—they always tasted of Carlton 100 smoke, which had of course been kneaded into the dough with love. With Grandma you didn't just breathe her secondhand smoke, you ate it too.

So New Year's Eve would arrive, and by a quarter of midnight the rest of the family would be gone abed and it was just me in Grandma's living room, and I'd be coming down off a sustained sugar high, modulating ever so preciously into the spun sugar haze of teen angst as I sat there in my feathered hair and new velour shirt gazing out Grandma's picture window at the red light of a radio tower blinking softly atop a hill just up the road.

Grandma had a bookshelf clock that chimed on the hour and half-hour, and it seemed to me the tick-tock of that clock was carefully timed to the backbeat of the pulsing red light on the hill, and as the seconds ticked their way toward midnight I found my entire being suffused with an impossible nostalgia as—at fourteen, or whatever—I sensed the implacable passage of time and the looming finality of life, or at least this year's peanut brittle.

When the clock rang midnight, I felt as if I were floating out above the reverberant chasm of an unknown future.

As you can see, I was a very poetic sort of youth. On the inside, anyway.

Probably my favorite New Year's ever was the one I spent with the New Auburn Area Fire Department on the evening of December 31, 1999—eve of the much dreaded Y2K. We were all ready down there at the hall, although we weren't clear on how we might prevent the collapse of civilized society with two pike poles, five yellow fire trucks, and several sheets of Stop, Drop, and Roll stickers. In the end we just watched
Tommy Boy
and ate a tankerload of Lil' Smokies. By half past midnight the lights were still on and no one had come to take away our deer rifles, so we unplugged the Crock Pots and went home.

But these days I take a New Year whenever I can get it. Sometimes you need a New Year when you see the electric bill. Sometimes you need a New Year when the health insurance premium comes due, or when your pet goat dies, or when the hail defenestrates your greenhouse. Sometimes you need the one you love to grant you a New Year after you inadvertently mow off her flower garden.

And New Year's resolutions? I make them every night. I resolve to be more patient, I resolve to be more frugal, I resolve not to gorge myself on jalapeño cheddar corn curlies right before bedtime. I resolve to resolve to demonstrate greater resolve.

These resolutions rarely take. But hallelujah, because you know what? Tomorrow is New Year's Day. Again.

Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, the Indigo Girls, Brandi Carlile, Bill Monroe, Rickie Lee Jones, John Hiatt, Trampled by Turtles, Joan Osborne, Lyle Lovett, Emmylou Harris, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Bela Fleck, Nickel Creek … Right down to its own Blue Canvas Orchestra and singers, the Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua tent has gift-wrapped and presented hundreds of musical acts to its visitors over the years. It's only natural, then, that the scent of canvas often leads me to consider the power of music and those who make it.

Some of the music played in the Big Top Chautauqua tent is new, some is vintage. I wrote this monologue for a show featuring the Temptations.

Welcome back to
Tent Show Radio,
folks, from the backstage dressing room with the one lonely little lightbulb burnin' …

I'm back here reflecting on the hits of the Temptations and how music has the power to evoke long-gone days. A few weeks back the tent hosted the group Great Big Sea, and when they did a cover of Slade's “Run, Runaway,” it caught me completely off guard and whipped me back in a trice to a weed patch behind a machine shop on a ranch in Wyoming, where the air smelled of sage and turpentine and I was listening to the song on a Walkman while I stripped poles for a corral. Even more than the power of evocation, however, I'm fascinated by how we
use
that power. Back in my feckless bachelor days, there was this pop song called “Drops of Jupiter.” It was a beautifully overproduced musical tidbit. In my teens I would have wallowed in it. In my late twenties I would have sneered at it. In my mid-thirties—having been told by a friend that there are no guilty pleasures, only pleasures—I simply enjoyed it. The first time I heard it I grinned and turned it up. There were strings and longing and a sweeping chorus, and just as I thought,
The only thing missing here is some na-nas,
the
na-nas
kicked in.

Right about the time this song hit, I got a new girlfriend. Wherever I was when I heard the song, I'd think of her. Then, when things eventually went unignorably south, I really couldn't bear to hear “Drops of Jupiter” anymore. I'd punch the radio button desperately hoping for some George Jones. There was a stretch of the usual pale-hearted navel-gazing. But then one day a year or so on down the line, I was running errands and “Drops of Jupiter” came on the radio, and I liked it again. I listened to the whole thing straight through with nary a liver-twinge, and when it ended I remember thinking,
Put me in again, coach.

Shortly after my second daughter was born, I lost my dear friend Tim. We were the same age, and the news was a shock. When we first met I used to listen to his vinyl Pink Floyd collection while I wrote, and over the years he had taken me to live shows in England that completely redirected my musical life. I in turn introduced him to Marty Stuart, Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam, and Waylon Jennings. You really haven't lived until you've seen a pint-sized drunken Englishman whoopin' it up at a Confederate Railroad show.

Tim—I called him Swifty—was from the Midlands of England, an ocean away, and there would be no funeral. A day after I got the news I went down to the pole barn and started digging through boxes of old CDs, pulling everything that reminded me of the music Swifty and I listened to on our English rambles: the Waterboys, Marillion, Simple Minds, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, Bronski Beat, Roxy Music, Status Quo … Back in my writing room I played them over and over, every song cutting loose new-old memories, and sure, some tears.

It's a fine line that separates wallowing from remembrance, but as I listened to those songs late into the night, I didn't care. Track by track I was back with Tim, riding shotgun in the left-hand passenger seat of his Mini, strap-hanging on the Tube in London, or simply shuffling home from the local pub. By the time the sun came up I had sorted some things out and stored some things away. And now when I'm running down some Wisconsin
backroad with Status Quo in the deck and the three-chord stomp of “Rollin' Home” comes thumping from the speakers, I grin and cast my eyes to the right, where I can see Swifty, with his hand-rolled cigarette and easy grin, and I'm thankful right down to my boots for the time-bending power of music.

Rickie Lee Jones was the guest for this show. She is cool in the coolest sense. That got me to thinking about what it is to be cool.