From the Top (3 page)

It's that thank you that's been on my mind. It seems to me the only sort of lasting credit we can establish. Whether you send it up from a church pew or a drum circle or a deer stand or just whisper it toward the plaster ceiling on a winter night, you're hoping the words find a home out there in the unknown. Let the record show, your heart is saying, that I was blessed and said so.

Sometimes I say my cosmic thank yous right out loud, maybe even more than I should. I don't mean I tip my head back and holler “Thank you!” at the post office ceiling, or utter audible gratitudes to the cosmos from the produce aisle. I'm far too genetically saturated with stoic Scandinavianism to engage in that sort of untoward exhibitionism, which furthermore can get you kicked out of the grocery store. But in the company of friends and loved ones, I often find myself compelled to wedge in some reference to the fact that if for some reason tomorrow found me deleted from the mortal map, I have had a better life than I ever might have
hoped, and don't weep for me Argentina—or Chippewa County. I intend these modest outbursts to serve a double purpose. First, I am indeed a fortunate knucklehead in that I've been mostly free to wander as I please through this life, and any life that involves freedom is not to be lived under assumption.

Second, and perhaps this is not the purest motivation and indeed may be more superstitious than soulful, the thank you serves as a preemptive strike against fate: the thank you is in and of itself an acknowledgment of the possible pending runaway train or silently deforming cell cluster. You say thank you for all you have been given so that tomorrow if you are given nothing you can still look death in the eye and say, “I won.”

As in all things, you can overdo the cosmic thank yous, and timing is everything. Just last night at supper my brother and I got to talking on this theme, and I said, “Yah, if I get hit by a truck tomorrow, I can't really complain.” My brother nodded his head and chuckled in agreement. Meanwhile, our wives looked at us like we'd drunk gravy straight from the boat. Then there was the time I left on short notice to climb a decidedly nonmetaphorical mountain that had already that year claimed the life of seven people. After I hugged and held my two daughters—one still an infant—my wife walked me to the car and halfway down the sidewalk I felt compelled to tell her that if “anything happened” I was thankful for all life had given me, including her and our children. I don't know what I was expecting, but the look on her face made me think that while this might be a perfectly lovely thing to say, it's probably better said while watching a sunset but maybe not so much as you toodle out the driveway to do something dangerous you've never done before, being a flat-footed flatlander and all.

And yet only days later I found myself hung up in deteriorating conditions and forced to go off trail and make a traverse between two depthless crevasses. For a deathly brittle half hour I felt with every step like I was crossing the Gorge of Death on a bridge made of saltines. Midway across the most dangerous
stretch one of the crevasses calved off a chunk the size of a city bus, and the faces of my wife and daughters conjured themselves before me, hovering above the snow, and the thing that kept me calm during that whole ordeal was the memory of my clunky sidewalk thank you, which now I knew had been exactly the right thing to do.

I recently removed my wedding ring and hung it on a pin stuck in the corkboard beside the telephone. Throw in teardrops and an empty beer can and you'd have the first verse of a country music song about love gone wrong. But this was unrelated to the state of my marriage, which according to my most recent performance review remains on solid footing—although I never forget that when it comes to the maintenance of matrimony the probationary period is perpetual.

No, I removed the ring in memory of Eric Teanecker's finger, last seen one summer day some twenty-five years ago when several of us employed at the local roller rink (Eric was the manager and DJ, I worked parking lot security and did the hokey-pokey in a Snoopy suit) got together for an afternoon of waterskiing. When it came Eric's turn to ski, he placed his left hand on the gunnel of the ski boat and leapt into the water. Relieved of his weight, the boat rocked up as Eric dropped down. By chance, at that same instant Eric's wedding band caught on the stud of a tarp snap, and when he surfaced he announced that we needed to go to the hospital. I took one look at what was left of his ring finger and agreed. The finger did not survive.

Later, as an EMT and a nurse, I would learn that this type of injury happens frequently enough that it has a name: ring avulsion. Truckers suffer them when a ring snags as they jump down from the cab, and mechanics have been known to get them while withdrawing a hand from the engine compartment to reach for
a wrench. This is also why athletes either tape or remove their rings. In particular you must always remove your wedding ring before you dunk a basketball lest it become hung on the hoop or entangled in the net. At a flat-footed five-foot-eight with the vertical leap of a stomped Dixie Cup, I have never needed to take that particular precaution.

However, shortly after we moved to our farm I was yanking hog panels from the weeds when I hooked my ring on one of the protruding galvanized steel rods. I managed to get away with just an uncomfortable pinch and bruise, but I thought immediately of Eric Teanecker. I pulled off my ring and dropped it in my pants pocket. Now whenever I have to move hog panels or drive fence posts or climb on and off machinery or perform work where my hands are moving around anything other than a coffee cup and a keyboard, I remove my ring and hang it on that pin by the phone.

I'm realizing now that perhaps you haven't heard a thing I've said since back there when I mentioned the term
ring avulsion,
at which point I left the light-rail line of humorous reflection and plowed locomotivelike into the genre of graphic public service announcement. This really is a departure from the usual introspective chuckle. And yet now that we're here, and as I think of how I care for you all, and how many of you out there work with your hands, I believe I'm glad we're having this one-sided talk. Y'know, all artists have their causes. Maybe I'll be the guy to crusade against ring avulsions, although I'm not sure the issue will sustain a telethon. I could look up Eric Teanecker. He used to do the local news, so he's comfortable on TV. Maybe we could throw a little something together. Get some good slogans going. Let's see: “Take Your Ring Off Your Finger, Not Your Finger Off With Your Ring.” “Don't Be An Idjit, Save Yer Digit.” “Give Ring Avulsions the Finger.”

Folks, I apologize. I've turned a perfectly lovely discussion into the aesthetic equivalent of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, finger puppet version. I didn't see it coming either. But I'll stand tall and tell you what: I believe we saved some fingers today.

I finally threw out my old plastic clogs the other day. They were cheapo knockoffs meant to emulate a certain recently very popular foam-rubbery clog made by a company for which I am not a financially remunerated spokesperson, so I won't utter the brand name aloud but let's just say it's short for “very much like an alligator but not an alligator.” I can wait a second if you need me to. Also, times being tough and me being a free market sorta guy, let it be known I'll happily say the name right out loud if the company in question wishes to submit an offer. Baby needs new shoes, as it were.

It took me years to get my first pair of clogs because as a roughneck farmboy I still associated them with insidious counter-culture, mysterious Dutch folk (the noble Hans Brinker excepted), and oddly cosmopolitan emergency room physicians imported from the East Coast. But then one day I went to visit my brother Jed—a farmer, a logger, and a
real
roughneck who once singlehandedly dragged himself from the woods after having his skull split by the butt-end of a flailing tree—and found him in his shop sharpening a man-sized chainsaw while wearing a pair of those rhymes-with-the-last-name-of-the-guy-who-founded-McDonald's clogs.

I found this freeing. Although I did not actually say to my brother, “I find this freeing!” as he was within easy reach of a cant hook and two crowbars. Furthermore, although he has made a remarkable recovery in the wake of the logging accident, he
did after all crack his cranium like a discount macadamia nut, and whether or not this has made him at all unstable it has left him with the perfect
excuse
for unstable behavior. Also, way back when he was toddling in soggy training pants he rapped our flu-ridden brother John right in the head with a hammer, as if disgusted by his weakness. I guess what I'm saying is, we love our brother Jed, but it doesn't hurt to keep one eye on the nearest exit.

Having seen my lumberjack brother thus shod, I was now prepared to hurdle my longstanding footwear prejudices—until I went to town and found out how much these things cost. Not crazy expensive, I guess, but just enough to give my hand pause en route to my wallet, during which pause I spotted a bin of what I shall call alterna-clogs. They lacked the trademark ventilation ports and heel strap, were the color of a dehiscent peach, and looked as if they had been molded from a vat of discarded putty, but they also looked like they would get a guy to the chicken coop and back, and what's more, they were four dollars.

That was around seven years ago. I figure those discount kicks amortized out to around fifty-seven cents a year. 'Course, the tread all wore off in the first few months, meaning during the winter I was a walking slip-and-fall and they are likely to blame for my one trick hip, and the liners rotted out years ago, and here lately if I fed the chickens after it rained, the chicken yard mud seeped up through the cracks in the soles, but all-in-all a pretty good run.

I'd probably still be running those old pasty heelless clod-hoppers except that my brother and sister-in-law recently gave me a pair of the real deals—the ones that are homophonic with the ceramic receptacle you store the butter in after you churn it. Having used the fake ones to get over my inhibitions, I just jumped right into the new ones. They're terrific.

So I'm going to visit my brother Jed again and tell him I'm just like him now. Except I've never gotten hit in the head by a tree.

A few weeks back I somehow got to graphically rambling about injuries caused by wedding rings. I don't know how these things happen. I start out trying to be poetical about the nature of love and the beauty of human commitment and next thing I know I'm talking about degloving injuries and reconstructive hand surgery. One searches for the poetry only to be confronted with maceration and traumatic orthopedics. These are the sort of digressions that can be described as … well, if not career-ending, certainly career-deforming.

I wandered off into that whole tangent because I mentioned removing my wedding ring. What I meant to talk about was how although I'm a sentimentalist at heart, and very much in grownup love, I don't think it hurts to take your wedding ring off now and then. Some people are very superstitious on this point, and maybe I should be, but I'm not. I've been married almost nine years now, and when I pull the ring off and see the groove running the circumference of my finger, I like the idea that we got something going here that goes beyond jewelry. In the summer, when the absent gold reveals a slender band of white skin, I'm pleased that removing the ring fails to remove the evidence of the ring.

Not only am I not superstitious about pulling off the ring, I'm not even that picky about the ring itself. I've got two rings right now. The one I wear most often belonged to my wife's grandfather or great-uncle, we're not sure which. It was in a drawer
in the farmhouse when we moved in. It's a little skinnier than I'd like, but then I've never operated at the cutting edge of taste or fashion. Plus, it gets the point across.

My other ring—my backup ring, the one I keep in the car in case I forget to take the main ring down off the pin before I hit the road—came from a head shop and cost nine dollars. It's one of those where if you don't like how it fits you can just squeeze it real hard and reshape it. Handy, eh? I bought the head shop ring to replace my original wedding ring, which was my step-father-in-law's wedding ring from his first marriage, proving among other things that I don't believe in bad karma when it comes to getting a wedding ring for free. I lost that original ring while delivering a breech lamb, and it is not outside the realm of possibility that it actually came off inside the sheep and resides there still. As an aside I can tell you that if you loudly declare that you lost your first wedding ring inside a sheep, you can get everyone in the bar to stop their beer halfway to their face, and you will have to leave before closing time.

Once I even had an earth mother friend give me a henna wedding ring. That was handy while it lasted.

The upshot is, I'm not particularly choosy about what sort of ring I wear—which is good, considering how fast I was going through them for a while there. In fact, as I tell you this story now I'm reminded that I lost yet another wedding ring in a fire truck. I removed it on my way to a fire so as to avoid hooking it on a hose rack and suffering the dreaded ring avulsion (the injury that got me off track the last time, and I promise not to go there again) and forgot to put it back on. Perhaps it rattles around the defroster still.

Ring on, ring off, it doesn't matter much to me, as long as the one who stood beside me the first day I wore it is still willing to stand beside me, no matter what sort of distractible meandering knucklehead I might be. You see, when I look at that ring, or the untanned indentation where the ring oughta be, I think,
lucky me, lucky me.

The other morning I got up and walked to work, and just kept walking. Now mind you, unless I'm out on the road peddling my charms and wares, I walk to work every day. It's a pretty straightforward commute: out the front door, down the sidewalk, across the driveway, up a little rise around to the back of the garage, let myself in through the second-story door, and there y'are. (I won't count the trip out to the chicken coop and back because I'm trying to be modest.)