From the Top (2 page)

The lights keep coming closer, and I suppose unless the Mayans were bad at math they'll keep coming. There's no sense in me getting too snippy about it, since I'm part of that parade. Our house began as a log cabin built in the 1880s, and you know for a fact the first time an Ojibwe or a trapper looked up the hill and saw a lantern in the window they figured there goes the dang neighborhood, and in truth whenever we say that we're generally right. In a small gesture of nocturnal regard, when our mercury vapor yard light burned out I left it that way, but that was less
about me taking a stand against light pollution than me taking a stand against climbing ladders anywhere near power lines.

The other reason I don't get too snippy is because when we get snippy we tend to snip ourselves right in our own behinds. I still get letters and emails from readers who tell me how much they enjoyed the essay I wrote back in 1996 taking to task people who live in houses built atop hills, and as I read those emails and letters now in our
house atop a hill,
I pause to consider the view and reflect on my own inconsistencies. I didn't build this house up here, and you can hardly call an old mismatched, slant-floored, crooked-windowed farmhouse ostentatious, but nonetheless the paradox is sufficient to tap my self-regard on the shoulder and give me that look that says,
Umm, take 'er down a notch.

So I stand out there behind the coop, and I look at the stars, and I pick out the constellations, going through them one by one: Orion … the Big Dipper … the North Star … aaand that's it, 'cause I don't know any more unless I fire up the iPad app. But even staring up and out at the stars in ignorance is worth my while because we can all use some cosmic recalibration now and then. And nothing calibrates your snippy, nothing tempers your self-regard, nothing tamps down your own ego like thirty seconds spent staring into a depthless universe of countless howling gas balls. In a darker form of comfort, when I lower my gaze and reencounter the encroaching lights of creeping humankind, I am re-reminded that we could pave and streetlight this entire blue ball and still not be so much as a blink against what's out there and furthermore the universe is capable of shutting us down in an instant, in the manner of someone triggering a Cosmic Clapper. But then my heart becomes cozier as I look back over my shoulder to the glow of the mall and realize that despite all the black holes in the universe, I have managed somehow in this instant to place myself in perfect equidistance between timeless infinity and Victoria's Secret.

I have never had a beer. Or a shot. Or a glass of wine. I did chug some high-octane cough syrup when I was a tot (Mom kept a bottle of stuff that tasted like crushed pine needles). And once in my youth after digging the last spoonful of chocolate syrup out of an ice cream cup at a wedding reception, I was surprised to find it tasted bitter. I sat there with my head tilted quizzically for a second only to realize as it slid down my gullet that I had just ingested demon rum. So perhaps I can't claim to be a total teetotal, but those few teaspoons represent the lifelong sum of my recreational boozing.

Whenever someone offers me a drink and I decline, they invariably react in one of two ways. Some back away with eyes wide and hands spread in a “no harm, no foul” stance, saying, “Okay, that's cool, no worries,” clearly thinking they're about to receive a temperance lecture. More commonly, the person pauses, then—as the false realization dawns—says “Ohhh” and surreptitiously slides his own drink out of sight while giving me a meaningful nod to acknowledge my struggle for sobriety.

Truth is, I just don't drink.

Once after a romantic shipwreck that had me all mopey, I accompanied my friend Al—a connoisseur of small-town bars, cigars, and cold beer—to a local tavern. As I spilled out my troubles and toyed with my water glass, Al listened patiently. I confessed that I was finally tempted to begin drinking.

“Oh, Mikey …” said Al, in the tenderest of tones. “There
would never be a better time to start!” Raising his beer and displaying it on the open palm of his other hand in the manner of a game show hostess presenting a prize, he said, “Happiness in a can, my friend, happiness in a can.”

After reading several reports by experts touting the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption, I finally turned to the one person who is an expert on me: my wife. Anneliese is a moderate drinker and nutrition fanatic. “Do you think I should start drinking?” I asked, to which she replied, “Not if you handle your drinking anything like you handle your sugar.” Recently she has been forced to hide her baking supplies (specifically, the chocolate chip bag) in the freezer beneath a fortress of pork chops. I know because that's where I found them last Tuesday at 3 a.m. Those were harsh words from the one I love, but having weighed the available research against the limits of my willpower and all other options, I'm going to stay on the wagon. After all these years it'd be a shame to find out I'm the guy who can't hold his booze. Nothing sadder than a fellow my age woo-hooing in a sports bar.

Besides, the abstemious life has its upside. First time I was ever called to jury duty, it was for a guy fighting a drunk-driving case. Having responded as an EMT to alcohol-related crashes for years, and having worked at least one accident scene with the arresting deputy, I figured I'd be rejected right away. But I made it into the final group and was seated. Just as the judge swiveled to begin the trial, he paused and swiveled back to look at us in the jury box. “Just out of curiosity,” he said, “is there anyone of you who doesn't drink?”

I raised my hand. I was the only one. “Do you believe if someone drinks alcohol they are a bad person?” asked the judge.

“If I did,” I replied, “I wouldn't have any friends.”

That got a pretty good laugh, but then the judge one-upped me.

“Not in this county you wouldn't.”

That got an even bigger laugh.

And then he bounced me off the jury.

I considered stopping at a tavern on the way home, but crying in your near-beer just doesn't cut it.

Not long ago I was regaling my wife with a gripping anecdote when her eyes glazed over even more quickly than usual. I tapered off and then said, “Umm … did I tell you that one before?” And she said, “Yes, honey,” which if you've been married for any length of time at all you know is longsuffering wifespeak for “seven times, minimum.”

Recently I had an apparently deep thought. At least I thought it was deep. In other words, I was in up to my ankles. Anyways, I scribbled it down quick before it could escape through the air holes in my head. Then I took to polishing it like the precious gem it was. I caressed it and I furbished it and I thesaurused it and I turned it this way and that way and I built it up and I shaved it down and rounded off the edges and then I threw a little sparkle on it, and when I was done I congratulated myself on what was clearly a rare nugget of original profundity. About a week later I was pawing through some old papers and found I had written the exact same thing, pretty much word for word, in an essay seven years earlier.

Point is, whether I'm writing, telling a story, or just shooting the breeze, I'm afraid I've hit that stage in my life where every time I open my mouth I'm either repeating myself or contradicting myself.

We all develop these little tics over time. For instance, I'm forever using the word
little.
I wish you wouldn't pay attention, but if you do, you'll see that the word
little
pops up like Whac-A-Mole
in my conversations and in my first drafts. These days as soon as I finish a rough draft I perform a search-and-replace maneuver whereby I replace every
little
with nothing.

I have the same problem with another phrase. As a matter of fact, I use this phrase so often that even though I'm a teetotal, I've come up with what I call the Michael Perry So Anyways Drinking game. How it works is, anytime you're talking to me—or more specifically, I'm talking to, through, or past you—every time I go, “So, anyways … ,” why, you take a slug. I don't care if your liver is made of steel wool and Teflon, you'll be flat on your back before I get to the point.

Some of you know I've been privileged to serve as an emergency medical technician and first responder for the previous few decades. Once when I was on call with my brother, we picked up an elderly lady from the Alzheimer's wing of the nursing home. She had become agitated and attacked another patient and was being transferred to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation. She was very nervous and worked up, asking me the same questions over and over. “Where are you taking me?” “Don't you hurt me!” “I want to see my doctor!” “Who is my doctor?” I answered her gently, over and over, the same answers every time. “We're going to the hospital.” “No, Betty, no one will hurt you.” “We'll see your doctor as soon as we get to the hospital.” “Your doctor is Dr. Jackson.”

She repeated the cycle of identical questions about fifteen times. Each time, I answered exactly the same, always maintaining eye contact. It seemed to reassure her. She became calmer. About ten minutes into the ride, she started the cycle again. “Where are you taking me?”

“We're going to the hospital.”

Something changed in her eyes. A little slyness, a little exasperation.

“Well, I know,” she said. “You said that fifteen times now!” My wife knows exactly how she feels.

The thing is, storytellers—and I include singers and writers in the group, as well as that lady at the café and Burt down there
to the feed mill—storytellers like to think of themselves as bards and troubadours and raconteurs entrusted with the preservation of our precious oral traditions. Y'know, I like the idea of that myself. But then I'll be a few minutes into a story and I'll see my wife's eyes go, and I'll realize I'm not engaged in the preservation of precious oral traditions, I'm engaged in recycling.

I've been quitting coffee again.

I don't really remember where I got started on coffee. I grew up with Scandihoovians who always shook their heads and marveled at the strength of their brew, which they made in stovetop—and later plug-in—percolators. These were dear, honest, and hardworking folk, but truth is, time has shown me that the stuff they were drinking was mud puddle cream compared to your standard Venti-Schmenti Grandioso currently available at even your most average strip mall beanery.

I have no idea how I got started on coffee, only that by the time I was in nursing school (that's right, citizens, I remain a fully licensed registered nurse in the state of Wisconsin, a matter of concern for the populace in general and the Board of Health in particular) I would slink into the back row of the clinical pharmacology lecture hall with a full thermos and have it gone by lunch break, then have another carafe or two later at home. Surely I must have been constantly thrumming.

I was living with my grandparents at the time and was using what Grandma had in the cupboard, which was your garbage-pail-sized Folgers tin with the plastic lid and the yellow teardrop scooper. This being prior to the age of the personal European cappuccino blaster, I brewed up in Grandma's Mister Coffee purchased on sale at Sears.

Sometime in the early '90s I wound up hanging around poets, and as a direct side effect wound up pensively moping in a coffee
shop. There it was I had my first cafe mocha and my first double Americano and my first cappuccino (and learned that “expresso” is actually “espresso”), but more than that, I had my first real good coffee.

And man, I have been ruined ever since. I don't drink, I don't smoke, I'm not snobbish about high-tone culture nor couture, but sitting here in my logger boots I do have to admit that when it comes to coffee I am doubly guilty: on the first hand that I have a caffeine addiction; on the second that I am addicted to the good stuff. If it wasn't a whole bean two minutes ago I don't want it in my cup now—that kind of snobbery. Should that coffee touch plastic or cheap steel en route to my lips, my nose curls up like a debutante who found a stinkbug in her wrist corsage. And the cup? If it's not ceramic—or, oddly enough, paper, which seems to somehow preserve and enhance the bouquet—it's all I can do to choke it down my gullet like some poncey prince forced to snort the commoner's grog. That said, the addiction does win out in the end—if I'm truly jonesing, I'll down any old slop.

Shamed by coffee breath and trembling, now and then I go on these purification binges. Two years ago I went cold turkey, took three consecutive aspirins to ward off the eyeball headache, and then stayed clean and calm for ninety days. But the craving never stopped. When I ground that first batch of relapse beans I wasn't even apologetic, and when I popped the lid on the grinder and sniffed, I coulda just flopped over and kicked my hind leg like a dog.

I've been on the juice mostly ever since. But now and then I notice I'm upping the beans to where they're in danger of overflowing the grinder, and even worse, I notice that the hit just isn't what it was, and then I realize it's time to re-titrate, and I grind that last batch and then don't replace it, and oh, come the morning it is desperate times, the chewing of the stray bean found behind the water boiler, the sniffing of the empty Fair Trade bag, the dream of the next cup. Usually I can stick with it a week or three and then I go swooning straight back to the warm, redolent arms of my steamy mistress, and man, it's always so good to see her.

I've lately been feeling mortal, which sounds like a grim thing but is actually a good thing, and above all a true thing. A simple fact thing.

I'm at that stage in life where I can still be—and ought to be—grateful for my health. But I'm also accumulating a fair collection of hitches and hangups and occasional physiological hiccups of the sort that every now and again tap me on the shoulder as if to say, “Breathe deep, pal. And breathe well. And on the exhale, send up a thank you.”