From the Top (9 page)

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I have to push “pause” here for a moment. I am fully aware that there is nothing more dangerous to one's career than speaking in public on the subject of cats. You can call the president an alien communard, imply that the Statue of Liberty is a man, and recommend that NASCAR go all-electric and race clockwise and you'll collect a few uppity emails and half-star reviews, but say the wrong thing about a cat and you'll find out exactly what it feels like to be chewed up and spit out as a human hairball. So I am proceeding advisedly here. Save your letters; I am a farmboy slow to progress but progressing nonetheless. If you find me a philistine on the feline front, feel free to punish me by sending five swear-dollars to your local humane society, and yes, we neutered.

So the cat became a familiar fixture, rubbing at our ankles on summer evenings when we ate supper on the deck, bringing fresh gophers to the children as they played on the swingset, and infusing the sandbox with a whole new treasure-hunt element. As I am tender of heart, I arranged a large pile of oat straw in one corner of the old granary, where the cat quickly took up residence, his food and water close at hand and the granary mice delivering themselves right to his paws as conveniently as if he had ordered them by phone.

Then it got cold. There were several additional rounds of blue-eyed beseechment. I returned fire with tales of the barn cats of my youth. I spoke of their vigor, I spoke of their thick fur, I spoke of their obvious disdain for the hearth as a place for a cat of any character. On that last point I admit I may have been overspeaking on behalf of the cats. I also omitted the fact that they lived in a barn filled with Holsteins and in fact so loved the warmth of the cows that when a cow stood after lying down, the cats quickly curled up on the toasty spot for a nap. Sadly, when a cow decides to lie back down, she does so with a mighty flop, and it was not unusual to raise a cow for milking only to discover a cat that had been pressed like a daisy in a dictionary. Pancake kitties, we called them.

Oops, there we go, five bucks to the humane association.

Then it got really cold. Okay, fine, I said, but just until it gets back up above zero, and during the day out he goes.

There are times—mostly when I am home alone—that I look in the mirror and assure myself that I am the man of the house. Of course this is true by default, as I am the only male in residence and thus hold the position by chromosome rather than qualification and am perhaps more accurately described as odd man out in the sorority house.

Nonetheless. A guy is a guy. He'll stand there in front of that mirror, right in front of the six square inches of counter space he's allowed, and he'll say,
You sir, you are king of this castle,
and he'll hitch his man-pants and head down the hall, and there he will see a cat, somehow stretched out about three feet long on the rug in front of the woodstove, absorbing heat generated by firewood the man cut, split, stacked, unstacked, hauled to the house, restacked, and got up before dawn to light, and what that man will do is gather up that cat, carry it to the recliner, put it on his lap, and when his wife and daughters return they will find both of the men of the house fast asleep.

We've been shopping for a new car. Well, not a new car, a different car. We want a different car because the transmission in our current car has reached its teen years, and right on schedule it got all moody, then it began to sulk at stoplights, and now it simply grunts and refuses to engage with the rest of the power train, meaning we basically have four options: raise a canvas sail, tell the kids to get out and push, cut a big hole in the floor and hit the road Fred Flintstone style, or get a different car. Of course we could replace the delinquent transmission, but that would frankly triple the value of the vehicle in question, so now we're back to different.

And of course by different I also mean used, a term that doesn't bother me in the least, especially since the alternative euphemisms—including
previously owned
and
previously driven
—are part of an ongoing stealth campaign to camouflage all of reality with two parts spackle and one part sparkle, although neither of that pair comes within a three-thousand-mile oil change of the recently deployed term
reprocessed vehicle,
a real neologismic toe-curler that is the equivalent of sand in in my mental gearbox and sounds as if it was composed by a committee including a cold-hearted prison warden, an expert on industrial food extrusion, and, well, a used car dealer with denial issues.

We don't mind used. It fits our budget and furthermore, based on the way we've treated the one new car we've ever owned, used is exactly what we deserve. You drive off the lot swearing you'll
never ever sully the squeaky-clean seat covers and within a week there is loose change in the defroster, snowboot prints on the ceiling, and the heater smells of yogurt splatter.

Also, I keep saying used car, when in truth we're shopping for a used mini-v … mini-v … y'know, I swore a long time ago you'd never catch me in one of those, so let's just call it the fambulance.

Car shopping is tough for me, because I am just not a car guy. I could give two rips what I'm driving, the sole exception being certain old pickup trucks that are not so much vehicles as loyal companions. Therefore, as with most grownup decisions in our family, my wife is taking the lead, calling dealers, setting up test drives, and consulting a multitude of online car-buying guides. When I started the fire on a recent cool morning, the weekly shopper was laden with circles and underlines and lists of pros and cons. I have done my part by accompanying her on follow-up test drives with salesmen, reconnoitering with Craigslist strangers in Walmart parking lots, kicking tires, looking for oil leaks, and talking the kids down when they realize there's a pretty good shot that not only will our vehicle not include a DVD player, it may have rolled off the line before DVDs were even invented. Shoot, the first used fambulance we bought had been rewired so you had to run the wipers using a standard electrical wall switch.

Nearly a month has passed since we started looking. My wife and I are great at talking everything through and weighing all our options. We are not so great at pulling the trigger. We've had to borrow a car from a friend to get us through this patch. He has no children, so after he gets the car back he'll probably roll a few miles before he stops wondering where we put the off-brand air freshener and realizes that's just what raspberry yogurt smells like after two weeks in the heater.

I got a bunch of wood split the other day, which is good because we were down to nothin' but bark last “spring” when we got one final blast of the white stuff and I had to beg some wood off my buddy Mills. I didn't actually have to beg, I just mentioned to him that we were caught short, and the next time I came home there was a quarter cord stacked right there in the garage. That's the kind of friend Mills is.

Mills and I met about twenty-five years ago back when we were both green EMTs. My first recollection is of him and me down in a ditch in the dark, struggling to extricate some drunk guy wearing a split lip and a bloody yellow tie. Sometime after that we were standing around an ambulance bay at 3 a.m. and he got to talking about how he'd been bowfishing—or, to put it less artfully, shooting carp with a bow and arrow. To a knucklehead of my extraction, the idea of combining archery and fishing seemed about as good as it gets, so I convinced Mills to take me, and before long we were sneaking off to shoot carp the way some guys sneak off to shoot pool. Mills even took me to his favorite spot, a fallen tree he called the Widowmaker that lay parallel to a channel filled with foraging carp.

You don't take someone to your favorite carp-shooting spot unless you're ready to make a long-term commitment. Soon Mills and I were doing all the things real friends do. I helped him move, then he helped me move. I smashed my knuckles helping him put a refrigerator down the right-angle stairs to his basement; he
smashed his helping me wrassle a vintage stove the size of a Hereford through two porch doors and into my kitchen. We enabled each other's hoarding tendencies by trading eBay links, buying things out from underneath each other on Craigslist, and dumpster diving together for the bricks left over from the construction of a convenience store because you never know when yer gonna need bricks. We walked each other through long-slog-stretches when one of our hearts was busted and shared in the happiness when we found the light again.

When Mills needed a eulogy for a man he admired, he asked for my help and I gave it; when my wife decided to have our daughter at home, I called Mills because I knew he had delivered six babies in emergency situations. He waited in the garage until our baby was safely arrived. After offering congratulations, he said, “Need anything?” and I said, “Nope,” and off he went, and now I say that among the bedrock gifts of time are friendships expressible in five syllables or less.

I don't care for the term
best friend.
It's too brittle. Friendships shift and adjust along with the rest of your life. I think of my friend Frank, who knows my every dark secret and who introduced me to the poetry that changed my life; or my friend Gene, who bore to me the ring with which I married my wife. Or my wife, who is every bit the friend these men are to me and so much more.

Rivers rise and fall, and one day we went to the Widowmaker and it wasn't there, having been swept away by a spring flood. We never really found a spot that good again. And truth be told, Mills and I don't do much carp shooting anymore. But a quarter-century gone, we're still making ambulance calls together. These days he's a veteran professional paramedic and I'm a veteran volunteer first responder. When people need help, they call us. And when I need help—or a quarter cord of split oak—I call Mills.

Guests for this Big Top show included the group Different Drums of Ireland. My Grandma Perry cherished her Irish heritage, so it seemed natural to build the monologue around her memory.

My Grandma Perry was quite a grandma. Not exactly the bake-you-a-batch-of-brownies type of grandma, that's for sure. More like a heat-up-the-store-bought-pineapple-ham-loaf-while-I-work-my-way-through-a-second-pack-of-Carlton-100s grandma. I can still see her doing the ironing, one of those sandbag ashtrays at the pointy end of the ironing board, that Carlton dangling from her lips, and every one of Grandpa's shirts pressed straight and sharp, with here and there an ashy little skid mark. She chewed Clark's Teaberry gum, wadding it up and sticking it to the cellophane of her cigarette pack when it was time to light up. And every one of her grandkids—me included—remembers the day we told Grandma smoking was bad for her health, at which point we found out that telling Grandma smoking was bad for her health was bad for our health. Sawed off and short tempered, she was fond of saying things like “well, hell-up-a-tree” and “that cheapskate is tighter than a gnat's hinder around a rain barrel.” To say Grandma was outspoken was to say that whenever someone asked me if I was related to Wanda Perry I always said, “Well, who's asking, and why?”

She loved to drink iced tea and play Yahtzee even when we were so young we messed up the scorecards. She was always ready to go fishing in her lucky fishing cap, and when she reeled in those sunfish she held the handle of her fishing reel between her thumb and third finger so as to free up the index and middle finger for the ever-present heater. She'd pack us into her Plymouth Duster and take us to walk dogs at the humane association—a humane association she herself helped found, because for all her roughness, Grandma's credo and favorite phrase was that we should be a voice for those who cannot speak. She backed it up with her care for thousands of strays over the years, more than a few humans included. She knew her way to the bail window of the county jail, and I was present more than once when someone showed up with a wrinkled check to make good on their bail money.

And when one of her roughneck grandsons showed an interest in poetry, Grandma not only encouraged him, she collected everything he wrote, even framing a few chosen poems and keeping them on the wall years beyond the time he realized they weren't very good—by which time her encouragement had seen him well down the road to a life of putting words in a line in one fashion or another.

Grandma was well into her eighties before time caught up with her. She had a few years in the nursing home, where she used to get me to sneak her cigarettes against the rules, and if you have a problem with that, well, you talk to Grandma. Right before she died—quite literally hours—I had the chance to thank her for hanging up those poems and encouraging the knuckleheaded boy who wrote them, because she changed his life, and he is forever grateful.

Grandma's been gone a handful of years now. At her funeral we sang “My Wild Irish Rose” as she had requested we do since way back when we were tots. It was a sweet promise to keep. And so now as we return to the Big Top stage and as Different Drums
of Ireland is joined by the Ojibwe Singers, I will close my eyes, let myself float off to the land of my grandmother's ancestors, and—you and the surgeon general will just have to bear with me, here—fire up an imaginary Carlton 100.

We've got a gigantic old pine tree in the front yard. Takes an adult and two tots to reach around it. Some of the limbs alone are so thick you could saw 'em off, stand 'em on end, and they'd make a tree in their own right. Aesthetically speaking, the tree is a tad on the gnarly side, as over the years some of those larger limbs have succumbed to wet snow, high winds, and gentle hints from the house insurance underwriter. The trunk is festered up with a lot of sappy nubs and gaps where the severed limbs used to be.

Way up high you can see an old chunk of rope some kid slung over a limb decades ago. I say decades ago because the limb has swallowed the rope and only a frayed stub of it is visible, the rest enclosed in bark. The rope seems way too high up to have been used for a swing, so I imagine the kid up there fixing some sort of secret hideout pulley system, his or her pants and palms all sticky with pitch, the summer breeze soft in the green needles, the long-ago country day unfolding lazily and expansively, the way childhood days do. 'Course, too, it could have been some farmer rigging an engine hoist when the tree was younger and the limb was closer to earth. Or maybe someone hung a buck deer there once and skinned it under the yard light in the cold and just never undid the rope.