From the Top (6 page)

If I did hire a life coach, I would request specific guidance in the area of edification. I have tried the self-edification route, but I never quite seem to get through it without finding a wad of figurative spinach stuck in my all-too-literal teeth. One time I read a
New Yorker
article about the Ring Cycle and got all fired up about the potential operatic acculturation and ordered a Wagner CD, only to find out when it arrived that I'd picked the one with the helicopters from
Apocalypse Now
on the cover. Another time I resolved to comprehend jazz. I read a book about John Coltrane and then put on one of his albums while I worked. I admit I was probably a little distracted and probably had been eating too
many Little Debbie Zebra Cakes, but at some point my attention swung back to the music and I heard, “… a love supreme … a love supreme … a love supreme …”

“A-ha!” I thought. “I am beginning to understand! He is building on a repetitive theme!” I felt a surge of pride. I understood jazz! Another forty-five minutes would pass before I realized I had the CD player on single-song repeat and had listened to the same track thirty-seven times straight.

Once—mostly, I admit, in the service of love—I tried to learn French. I mastered two phrases. The first was
Est-que les vaches sont dans l'étable?
“Are the cows in the barn?” I cannot begin to explain the situation that precipitated that particular interrogatory. Naturally, the second phrase I learned was
Je nes palpa français,
which as far as I know is French for “I don't understand French.” If that's not what it means, please don't tell me.

My wife is fluent in Spanish. I have one brother-in-law from Ecuador and another from Panama. Most of the family (children included) is bilingual on a sliding scale from fluent to … me. Thus, at our get-togethers I have the opportunity to polish my Spanish. Mainly what I've learned is that when it comes to raising children, you really need only two words in Spanish. The first is
cuidado,
which basically means “be careful.” The second is
despacio,
which very loosely translated means “for the love of Pete, take it down a notch!” So when you find yourself in charge of a backyard full of screaming bilingual kids, you just stand there hollering, “Cuidado! Despacio! Cuidado! Despacio! DESPACIO!”

When you blend a family of native Central and South Americans plus Scandinavian cheeseheads, you get what I call your Scandihoovian Spanglish. Just the other day my toddler was doing something mildly dangerous and I found myself saying, “Cuidado, 'dere!”

She knew exactly what I meant.

Bottom line is, I'm the kind of guy who's happy to attend the opera, but I should like to be allowed to wear steel-toed boots with my evening suit. I like to read
Harper's
with a chaser of
Varmint
Hunter Magazine.
Maybe that's why I enjoy a good show under canvas. Here we sit, brain-deep in arts and culture, but we're also just people hanging out in a tent, some of us wearing boots, a few of us wearing Birkenstocks, and best of all we're breathing free fresh air filled with music.

One of my favorite things about the tent shows is the sound of guests at intermission. It's a gentle sound. It's a warmhearted sound. It's the sound of old friends reuniting and strangers getting along. It's the sound of people visiting.

You know what? It's the sound of happiness.

And why not? Here we are, feet planted right on the earth. It really is a tent, you know. No floorboards. You come to the Big Top, your feet remain in contact with the planet. You'll catch the light scent of gently trampled grass (yah, you can trample something gently, it just takes time and civilized persistence), you'll hear the crunch of gravel underfoot, a whisper of canvas on canvas, and now and then when the wind is right you'll catch a whiff of bratwurst sizzling under the food tent across the way. And you can eat a brat when you're up here with no worries because the rest of the experience is so very heart-healthy.

Me, I'm backstage picking around what's left over on the deli tray. It starts out as a nice little spread, as well it should be: hungry musicians are cranky musicians, and cranky musicians tend to slide off key or transpose everything into the key of D-minor, the saddest of all keys.

But now there's not a lot left of that deli tray—just three pieces of sweaty cheese. No surprise, really. I spent some of my formative years in the company of country music roadies, and they taught me the two most important rules of the road (and life). Number One, if you get ten minutes, sleep. Number Two, if you see food, eat it.

I always kinda operated that way anyway, at least on the food front. I was raised in a big farm family. When we had company for dinner, before passing the first bowl of food Dad used to tell the guests, “Take what you want the first time, because it ain't comin' around again.” Mom fed us mostly on oatmeal out of a twenty-five-pound bag. One fall she got a garbage pail full of wheat from the neighbor's gravity box grain wagon, and for a pretty long stretch there we had boiled wheat for breakfast. The only time we got box cereal (which we called
boughten
cereal because, well, because it
didn't come from the neighbors' gravity box
) was on Sunday mornings, because Mom had to get six or eight kids ready for church and she didn't have time to boil all that wheat. And even then she bought all the box cereal at some big ol' scratch-and-dent warehouse up a back alley somewheres.
*
We used to say we never ate a box of cereal that hadn't been backed over by the truck that brought it. I guess you could have called it injured cereal. But compared to a vat of oatmeal, that injured cereal was pretty good stuff. I remember one time my brother and I were watching TV at my grandma's and that Total cereal ad came on, the one where they stack up twelve bowls of Froot Loops next to one bowl of Total and the announcer says, “You'd have to eat twelve bowls of Froot Loops to equal the nutrition in one bowl of Total.” My brother looked at me and said, “I'll take the twelve bowls of Froot Loops.”

Anyways. I have no complaints about the deli tray, although I do have to say that seeing this is Wisconsin, next time would it kill 'em to throw in a little lefse? I'm gonna have my people talk to their people.

*
Yep, I know: “somewheres.” Was gonna change it for the book, but that's how we say it where I'm from. Especially when we're feeling comfortable. See also: “Youse guys” and “Anyways …”

When I was a little boy, maybe four or five years old, Grandma got us a tent. We pitched it in the front yard, and I still carry a vivid memory of the separate world that tent created. A world that smelled of tromped grass and stale sunlight. A world that made my little liver quiver as I imagined myself an explorer lost somewhere in the land of Tarzan even though Mom and pancakes were just forty feet away. Maybe that was the best part about a tent: it created a world away.

I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian sect. I like to say that because it makes people pull up short—they think I was raised inside a walled compound where we hoarded diesel fuel and fertilizer. (We actually did hoard diesel fuel and fertilizer, but we used them to raise corn.) Part of being in this church was that we didn't actually have churches; we met for Sunday morning meeting in regular houses except for the time once a year when we met for what we called convention. For convention we came from all over the state and convened on a farm, where we parked our cars in the hayfield and held services in an old barn. Our hymns rose through the rafters of the haymow. When it was time to eat we'd head across the grounds to a big old army surplus tent. We gathered outside the flap and waited. When everyone was ready, the dinner bell rang and someone pulled back the flap. We filed in quietly and found our place in long rows of tables and benches. The silverware was wrapped in a napkin and all of the cups and dishes were upside down, I
suppose for sanitary reasons. We sat in silence. Part of the reason we were quiet is because we were churchly, but there is also something in the nature of a tent that is conducive to quietness and reflection—it's the scent of the earth and the grass but it's also the enveloping canvas that shelters you and dampens and tempers any noise that does arise. So we'd sit there quietly and then a sister minister would lead us in singing grace. When we hit the final note there was a grand clatter of cutlery and porcelain and coffee mugs being flipped over and the tent would soon fill with the aroma of what we called convention stew, which was your basic hearty beef-and-vegetable stew made in a tureen the size of a washing machine.

Not all of my tent memories are so heart-warming. When I was still a tot, Mom took me to the circus. About halfway through the production a clown began soliciting audience volunteers for his act. I scrunched down next to Mom but he homed right in on me. Plucking me out of the crowd, he stood me in the center ring. I could feel the heat of the lights as he spoke into his microphone.

“What's your name, little boy?”

“Mike,” I whispered.

“Oh, you're going to have to talk louder than that,” said the clown. “What's your name?”

“Mike,” I squeaked. All this time the clown was keeping the microphone to himself.

“Oh, no, you gotta be a
lot
louder than that,” he said again. “Just yell your name right out so people can hear you!” And right when I yelled “Mike!” he jammed the microphone into my face and I was shocked to hear my little voice reverberating throughout the gigantic tent.

The clown then proceeded to conduct a number of humiliating bits that culminated in him tipping me over his knee with my butt pointed toward the bleachers. He dusted my little hinder with a gigantic pink feather duster, then reached into the waist-band of my pants and through some sleight of hand pulled out a huge pair of baggy women's underwear. The audience roared.

Finally he carried me back and released me to Mom. “You're a good little sport,” he said. “I want to give you something to remember this day by.” (As if I would have problems remembering this day, I'm thinking, still freaking out forty years later.) He pulled out a balloon and blew it up until it was longer than I was tall. With the spotlight still on us, he handed it to me.” Here y'go, little feller,” he said, and as I reached for it he let go and it went farting off into the air, corkscrewing into flaccidity and nothingness while once again the audience roared.

So you'll understand that among the many reasons I enjoy coming up to Big Top Chautauqua is because it's always a world away, and with each visit I'm pretty much guaranteed a few new canvas-scented memories.

But best of all? Zero sociopathic clowns.

The guest for this show was Paul LaRoche, performing with Brulé and AIRO. LaRoche honors his heritage by singing of the people, land, and history of the Lower Brule Sioux Reservation of South Dakota, and the performance I refer to here included dancers in traditional regalia. That said, LaRoche will be the first to tell you that his music draws on more than one world and in fact draws on the seven directions.

Earlier tonight during the show, when the drums were pounding and the dancers were spinning and the flute was swirling, I took myself out of the tent and imagined myself high in the sky above Mount Ashwabay—perhaps on manmade wings of silver, perhaps on feathers alone—and as the final few minutes of sunlight hit the sloped face of the earth, there far below I saw the still, blue dot of this tent, surrounded by thousands of acres of quiet twilit forest, and thinking of the power and color and life pulsing at the center of that blue dot I marveled again at the idea of what transpires as a result of the simple act of creating a space. A space aside: aside from the hustle, aside from the grind, aside from the things we have grown used to. Aside from the well-worn grooves. A place where, even if the music is thunderous, we are allowed the gift—so rare in our pandemonious world—of reflection. The gift of time and place aplenty to turn yourself over to the sound and spirit and see
where you are flown. Tonight, after only a few heartbeats of music, I felt thunder storms approaching across a broad plain, I felt a western river valley open before me, I felt the call of a people through time. I heard ghosts marching.

Day-to-day, I'm pretty much boots and blue jeans. Pork chops and pickup trucks. Can't dance a lick, and don't care to. Not inclined to carry on. But I learned a long time ago there is value now and then in turning yourself over to the moment. To letting your soul wander out there unprotected. Oddly enough—or not oddly at all, if you give it proper consideration—much of my openness to this idea comes as a result of my being raised in a fundamentalist faith. I learned at an early age what it is to turn yourself over to a greater mysterious power and sign off on the idea that things are bigger than you and that there is more to life than just puttin' on a big pair of boots and stompin' around. I wandered other paths in the years that followed, and generally prefer pondering to preaching, but I have never lost the thread of the idea that it is in those moments when we let our hearts fly right out of our chests that we are closest to understanding the mystery of our clunky lives on this earth. Or if not understanding the mystery, understanding each other. We are all related, says Paul LaRoche.

Whether they emanate from the Bible on my lap at a gospel meeting in a bank basement or from a Native American flute, those things in the air that we cannot touch, that we cannot grasp, are nonetheless the things that can lift us above every earthbound worry. At times tonight I can feel the flow of long-gone buffalo, and I yearn for the idea of prairies before man—any man—and in that yearning is something even a lapsed, post-Calvinist Scandihoovian knucklehead can recognize as transcendent and universal, something between this time and time past, and I wonder as I hear the flute whipping like a prehistoric wind if perhaps that is the most universal human longing of all—the longing for the beginning of everything, for a clean slate and a
fresh soul, for a fresh humanity. What is the sound of a flute, after all, but human breath dancing?