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.
HERE WE GO AGAIN
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.
RE-DECAFFEINATED
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.
THE BIG THANKFUL
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.”
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.
AVULSION AVERSION
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.
LOGGER CLOGS
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.
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