From the Top (8 page)

Every summer when I was in grade school, my brother John and I would leave the farm to spend a week at Grandma's house in the city. Every morning she fed us Apple Jacks and white toast with grape jelly, then loaded us into her orange Plymouth Duster and drove us out to the animal shelter, where we cleaned cages and changed food bowls and took the dogs for walks. We also hung out with the shelter employees, several of whom were dedicating their lives to helping the animals as a result of the terms of their probation, and by the time work was over my brother and I were conversant in the intricacies of Huber law and work release privileges. One summer we worked with a high-strung smoker named Randy. Too young to understand the power of addiction,
we thought it would be a real hoot to hide his cigarettes. After a two-hour stretch in which he grew more and more agitated and eventually began to tremble like a juiced hummingbird, we snuck the cigs back into the break room where he could find them. He pounced on the pack, lit up immediately, and took a drag so deep he nearly rose out of his socks. Then, on the exhale, he uttered what even to my young ears was the most comically contradictory phrase ever: “Oh … that's just like a breath of fresh air!”

Each week the local newspaper sent a photographer to the shelter to get a mugshot of some cat or dog that would then be featured in that week's edition under the heading “Pet of the Week.” When my brother and I were visiting, Grandma always made us cradle an animal each and be included in the photograph. I'm sure her heart was in the right place, but putting your grandkids in the paper under the heading “Pet of the Week” really sets them up for some introspection over time. I submit for a fact that my brother still ain't right.

These days underage volunteers must be accompanied by an adult, so I'll be taking a few shifts with Amy. I accompanied her on the orientation tour. Naturally there have been a host of changes at the shelter since my brother and I were perambulating the poodles and hanging out with hollow-eyed smokers on parole, but as so often happens, the smells and sounds took me right back to those days decades back. Those cats and dogs need a new generation of caretakers. My daughter has a great capacity for kindness, and I hope this experience will expand that capacity, although based on the look in her eyes as we took our orientation tour, I'd better start budgeting for doghouse lumber. Perhaps this won't turn so much into an exercise in kindness and civic-mindedness as an exercise in me holding the line: last week, after her first day of volunteering, my daughter leapt out of the van and ran toward me. “Ferrets!” she said, joyfully. “They have ferrets!”

The road is long, my friends.

My wife has been pricing dumpsters. The big ones. The ones that arrive on their own flatbed truck.

I'd like to think I'm not a hoarder, but if you ask my wife I'm just a few
National Geographic
stacks short of certifiable. I justify all the boxing up and piling up with the fact that I generate most of my lunch money by writing stories, and you just never know when—for the sake of veritas—you're gonna need the fake parking ticket your buddy used to prank you back in 1988, so you cram it in a banker's box along with all those receipts for the economy size barrels of hair conditioner you were buying in 1988 because you fancied yourself quite the Midwestern Fabio and the pending follicular recession was only a faint gleam in your well-used mirror.

Time passes. Your hair falls out. You get married. Your wife is an eminently reasonable woman, so when she hints maybe you could get rid of some those boxes mouldering in the rafters of the garage you give it fair consideration, but then one day you're working on a book about your old truck and you want to tell the story of the fake parking ticket, and because you are blessed with a Midwestern work ethic and a healthy dose of OCD, you spend the better part of an afternoon sweating and bumping your bald head up there in the rafters, all hunched over and riffling through vintage dentist appointment reminders until—Victory!—three hours later you find the fake parking ticket and the story winds up in the book and that justifies every
last box in the garage, even the one containing flat racquetballs and rusty roller skates.

Then you are hired to compose a video essay based on the state of your garage and you pull out the bag of shoes you've been collecting since you were a freshman in high school and as you describe how fleet of foot this mouse-gnawed New Balance racing flat made you back in the days before you were dragging around all your bad habits, you realize this is not junk, this is a goldmine, a repository of fungible history that can theoretically be converted into health insurance premiums, and so you move the cars out of the garage for good and continue to accumulate accumulations.

But then you move to a farm, and instead of one garage, you now have one garage and two pole barns. Two BIG honkin' pole barns. Those pole barns are nothing fancy, but they are vastly capacious, and now with all that extra room not only do I expand my—ahem—archives, I also find it perfectly natural to spend the afternoon dumpster diving for bricks at a construction site, or trucking home a giant stack of vintage insulation, or adding to my collection of distressed windowpanes, or taking delivery of thirty-seven plastic pails that smell like pickles.

This week there was a family meeting. My wife. Me. And a calendar. Upon which five days in June are now highlighted and labeled DUMPSTER WEEK.

At our house, my wife is in charge of reality, so I'm going along with the plan. I did broach the idea of “fungible history,” but the look I received in return implied that if I kept it up one day I would step through the pole barn door and find myself greeted by fifteen concerned family members and a television crew.

In a preemptive move designed to steel myself against the arrival of the dread dumpster, I have been polishing up a few of my most precious possessions and offering them for sale on Craigslist and eBay, which leads me to ask: how many gallons of Febreze are required to obscure the scent of mouse pee permeating four pickup loads of used insulation?

Last week I wound up sleeping in our brand new chicken coop, which at first might sound as if it's going to be a tale of marital woe, but thankfully this is not the case. No, this is a story about being a dad, or trying to be a dad.

I got a late start in that department, meeting my elder daughter—my given daughter, as I call her—when she was three and I was in my late thirties. Amy has proceeded to light up my life in ways I did not anticipate. Of course she has also thrown me into the bottomless pits of uncertainty, as that is what children do to grownups who think they have it all figured out. You just never know if you're doing the right thing or not. Shortly after we met I taught her to perform pantomime dog tricks. That is, I would tell her to sit and she would sit. I would tell her to roll over and she would roll over. I would throw her an imaginary dog treat and she would catch it. In between she would pant happily, her tongue out and waggling. The show really got to be pretty popular with the relatives and, frankly, pretty much anyone who would stand still for it, and we even worked up this bit where I would veeerrry carefully place an imaginary dog treat on her nose, then say, “Staayyy … staayy,” and then I'd snap my fingers and she would flip the imaginary treat into the air and catch it on the way down. We were doing this in the living room one day and folks were applauding and Amy was wagging her pretend tail and suddenly it hit me that the day she finally dials up social
services, this little bit right here will be number one on the list of submitted indignities.

Amy stopped doing the dog tricks a few years ago. She's already nearly as tall as me and on the verge of becoming a young lady. And this is the other thing about children: at some point after they stop howling all night and toothlessly gnawing on your chin, they learn to walk, and once they learn to walk they find their way to the clock of time and attach a rocket to the minute hand. I find myself breathless sometimes when I look at my children and want desperately to slow things down. When my younger daughter, Jane, became potty-trained, the only drawback was that she couldn't reach the bathroom light switch, so Dad still had to lever his lard out of the chair whenever she went in there. Then our friend Lori made her a flat stick with a scallop and a hole in one end. By using the scallop to push the switch up and the hole to pull the switch off, Jane could run the light herself, and Dad could remain a lump. Then one day Jane called out to let me know she needed some assistance in the bathroom—or, as she put it, “I have a
surpriiiise
for you!”—and when I got done with that job (the less said the better, really, although as a longtime volunteer firefighter let me say you just never know when that hazmat training is gonna come in handy) we washed up and headed for the door. As I reached for the switch, Jane jumped in front of me and said, “No, Daddy, I can do it.” And without that stick she reached up and up and then got on her tippy-tippy toes and—
click
—off went the light. And
crack
went my heart. Because I was happy for her, sure, and real proud, but I also felt like I had stepped off into a black hole and was trying to grab armfuls of time.

You can't slow it down, though. And you can't wallow in the past. Can't spend your life—as I wrote recently—in a hesternal funk. (
Hesternal
means yesterday, basically.) So the night our new chicken coop was finished, and the floor was still clean, and inside it smelled of fresh wood, Amy and I—Amy, the little girl who is now nearly as tall as me—unrolled our sleeping bags on the
floor and camped there overnight. We giggled and spoke in the voices of imaginary chickens. In the dark after Amy was asleep, I smelled cool night air and kiln-dried pine and I listened to her breathe and I ignored the vanishing past and speeding future and instead fell gratefully asleep in the wholehearted present.

Recently my wife went away from Sunday to Sunday to help one of her sisters with a new baby, so I was nominally in charge, which meant supper sometimes happened in a rush and with ingredients not normally associated with each other, although I will take it as a point of personal pride that we made it clear to Friday before the old man bolted into the supermarket for a frozen pizza. And even then I made it my own by adding barbecue sauce and sliced dill pickles. Why I do not have my own cooking show I do not know.

At one point during our week, Jane, the younger of my daughters, had a bad dream and got a case of the missing-mommy weepies, so I wound up sleeping by her side. In the morning I awoke to see her sweet face three inches from mine, at which point she laid a cough on me like a two-pack-a-day coal miner. I don't know what she caught, but by midmorning we decided only one word really described it, and that word was
phlegm-tastic.

And now I've got it. I don't get sick often, which is much more a testament to my genetics than to nutrition and lifestyle. But the last two times I've caught something, I've caught it from my blue-eyed younger daughter. Last winter it was strep. She brought it home from preschool. Gave it to her sister. Then her mom. Finally, me. And naturally, by the time I got it, she was all better. So there we were, the grownups, slumping and hacking and lump-throating around trying to get the kids off to bed, and there's the one who started it all, now healthy and happy as you please and
hippety-skipping around the house yodeling joy-joy songs at the top of her lungs, and I thought, “Why, you … you …”

Oh, but you are so happy to see them well again. Iowa singer-songwriter Greg Brown has a song called “Say a Little Prayer,” and if you've ever walked the floor with a fevered child in your arms, just yearning for that child to be well again, you will understand that whatever else Greg Brown might have been or be, he knows what it is to be a worried dad in the dark hours.

This latest affliction is blessedly free of fever or anything more serious than a chest-wracking cough and stuffy head and itchy ears, but I will say that at this moment my eyeballs feel as if they have been rolled in sand and someone has overinflated my brain. Naturally, as I cradle my box of Kleenex and wonder when I'll recover the ability to taste anything milder than Triple-X horseradish sauce, the little one who started all this is well on the road to hale and hearty and wondering why Dad is dragging. Last night when I put her to bed we read two books, and then I told her a funny story using my comical stuffy-nose voice, and then I placed my hand on her fever-free brow and leaned down and gave her a kiss and whispered in her ear, “I love you, little Typhoid Mary …”

Back home on the farm I have been contemplating my status in the realm. The trigger for this introspection is a black cat, probably even now this very dang second lying snoozily belly up in the recliner by the window, deep in the dreams of the mice he's not catching, or the frankly fishy treats I'm financing in order to supplement any nutrients he might have missed in the process of being professionally languorous. Cats are the grand mavens of languor. At least when a dog dreams about hunting, its feet twitch. This reflects a certain goofball dedication to the cause, even if it is only in doggie dreamworld. The only cause that cat is dedicated to is: that cat.

That cat first appeared in my life riding a wave of blue-eyed beseechment, which is to say the first time I saw him he was framed in my elder daughter's arms, as she and her sister looked up at me with the sort of sad cotton-candy gaze normally reserved for cheap velvet paintings and suspect charity infomercials.

I held the line for upwards of twenty seconds. Then I said yes, trying my best to sound grumpy. There were ground rules, of course, regarding the feeding and the watering and the outer limits of kitty's health insurance.

Above all—and I believe I even raised one finger and said, “Above all”—I stated in unequivocal terms that we live on a farm, and this would be a barn cat, and barn cats do not live in the house because then we would call them house cats.