From the Top

by Michael Perry

  “I love a rainy night,” sang Eddie Rabbitt back in the ’80s, and the people agreed, sending the song to number one on both the pop and country charts. Rabbitt understood the power of precipitation. In another of his number ones, he sang about driving on a rainy night with “those windshield wipers/slappin’ out a tempo/keepin’ perfect rhythm/with the song on the radio …” Above all, rain is rhythm. A perfect match for music.

  Hear that? Rain stopped. It’s good, I suppose. The last few folks are making their way back from the concession tent for the second act, and they won’t have to hike their windbreakers up over their heads or run, on the theory that fewer raindrops strike a moving target. But I’ll miss the rhythm a little bit, the sound of those tiny leprechaun hands clapping. Into each life some rain must fall and then stop falling.

  THE INNER CIRCLE

  The one thing cozier than a tent? Home—and those who make it so.

  SONG FOR MY DAUGHTERS

  The first time Brandi Carlile came to the Big Top tent, she was playing solo and opening for the Indigo Girls. For the show surrounding this monologue, she was headlining with her own band and the place was packed from canvas wall to canvas wall with fans she earned song by song, going way back to the days when she was recording music on her own time and her own dime. Brandi Carlile’s music is built first of all on lyrics that read like true American poetry … poetry of the road, poetry of universal human connection, and, once she’s got you well in for the ride, poetry for stomping yer boots. Above all, though, it is Brandi Carlile’s voice you’ll take with you. Her voice, and how she inhabits it. Rarely have power and vulnerability so naturally melded. It is as if the heart of a sparrow has been wrapped in brass. When Brandi Carlile sings, she can belt it or she can break it, but above all she can bring it.

  I have two daughters. So including my wife, at my house it’s three-to-one girls against boys. A fellow I met recently on the road told me, “You don’t have a family, you have a sorority.”

  I think before I was a dad I would have appreciated Brandi Carlile simply for her music. For her art. But as a father of two girls, I appreciate Brandi Carlile far beyond her lyrics and melodies. When I hear her sing out strong, even when her voice breaks, I think of my girls growing older, and I’m glad they live in a time when there are Brandi Carliles from whom they may seek some guidance.

  I mean, Dad will do his best, and Mom (the woman I used to refer to as my wife, until the time my actual mom became Grandma and my wife became Mom—those of you out there with tots of your own will understand) is a woman of strength and virtue and qualified discretion (I say qualified discretion because despite strong evidence of her own good character she married me, which seems a bit of a theoretical chink in the ol’ armor), so we’ll do what we can, but no matter how parents try there are those gaps and unforeseen developments in which outside influence—for better or worse—will fill the empty space. Good to know Brandi Carlile is an option.

  I was thinking about my daughters during a song Miss Carlile sings with the lyrics that go:

  There are miles of hay like I have never seen

  Just when you think you’ve had enough and

  Your dreams come true

  I just want to be closer to you …

  I spend eighty to a hundred days a year on the road telling stories or singing songs or sometimes both. It’s a blessing, this life. Better than I might have hoped or deserved. And the road is not a hardship. I was raised by and around truckers gone every week. And many of our neighbors and relatives are in the military. When I speak with my daughters about my absences, for purposes of calibration we always refer to cousin Steve, currently scheduled for his fourth deployment, and him with a wife and toddlers.

  So one never wants to get too dramatic. Especially in my case, in which more often than not this thing I call “The Road” is within a half-day’s drive of my chicken coop. But of course you think of your children and wonder what is learned in your absence. Or by your absence. I think sometimes, while I’m driving through the night alone, of what or whom I want my daughters to know, or believe … what I would tell them if they were in the passenger seat.

  First thing: Your dad was in over his head. Constantly, and in all respects. My learning curve often lagged behind my balding curve.

  I would tell them to beware youthful boys and dissolute men, who are knuckleheaded and inept in every respect except for the ability to worm their way into a young girl’s heart.

  I would tell them to run close to the ground because eventually we all fall.

  I would tell them to get a good pair of boots. Today’s woman should own a good pair of boots. (Ones that lace up and last, and steel toes are never a bad idea.)

  I would tell them to leave affectionate notes for their mother as I do, but with greater frequency than I have. I would tell them that once a week they should offer their mother a blanket apology for everything in general. That one I’m pretty regular with.

  I would tell them to strive for charity, and I’m not just talking about dropping a nickel in the can or boxing up your old socks.

  I would tell them to doubt anyone who speaks with absolute authority. Rather, I would tell them to go to the ridge at midnight and stare into the stars for five minutes. Accept infinity, and humility follows.

  I would tell them, never smoke cigarettes, but if a pleasing puff of pipe smoke drifts your way, take a whiff. This guards against prudery and furthermore there are times in the face of pleasure when we should do the obvious.

  And, after what I’ve heard tonight, I would tell them, daughters, when the time is right and you’re on your own, take to the open road yourself, and whether that road is in your soul or out your windshield, drop the hammer and run it with open heart, open eyes, and open ears. Check the mirror for your old dad now and then. He’ll do his best, but he knows the time is coming when you will chase the sunrise on your own.

  PET OF THE WEEK

  My elder daughter sat down at the supper table the other night and announced that for her school service project this semester she has decided to volunteer at the local humane association. Naturally I am pleased that she has chosen to combine scholarship and civic-mindedness. I am also pleased because my dear departed grandmother was instrumental in establishing the local humane association and even got my grandfather to serve on the board for a time, although he always skipped the November meeting to go deer hunting, an absence that caused some consternation among the elderly female bridge-playing members of the board, but Grandpa was a salesman by nature and trade, and by the time the money was counted from the gigantic raffle he orchestrated each January, all was forgiven.

  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.

  DUMPSTER DATE

  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?

  CHICKEN COOP CAMPOUT

  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 overni
ght. 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.

  TYPHOID MARY

  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 …”