Soul Tar Feather

I hear Henry crying in the other room.

That's basically like me saying, 'I smell bacon when I'm frying bacon," because, like, no shit. Of course Henry's crying in the other room.

It's not that he's a cry-baby or anything, but he's almost two now, that age when there is a fire born down inside of a child which can only best be explained as the actual birth of their very soul, you know? See, by two years old the little body has been around a bit/seen some things/ got a few nicks in the enamel to show for all that living the kid's been doing.

But it's the soul, THE SOUL!, ya'll, that pecks its way out of the great speckled egg down in that nest of nitty-grittiness known as your heart and cheep-cheeps its way out onto the big bad boulevard of broken dreams called your fucking life. There, it takes one look at that squooshy lump of baby fat you had become and immediately starts rearranging house with game-changer moves.

Babies get born.

They slobber and stare at you clueless, as if you were a fifty foot high pile of neon sheep shit.

Toddlers get Soul Born.

They hurl themselves down staircases and use streaming tears of manipulation to break your heart so they can get you to get the fuck out of their way while they are trying to get a running start across the room so they can take a flying leap and land with their miniature wangs into a low socket. (Bic pens for girls).

Babies shoot out a moist tunnel and into your hearts.

Toddlers shoot out of a Soul Cannon into your face.

So, at this point, hearing Henry crying in the other room is normal. It's when you aren't hearing him in there making a racket that you have to worry about what's up.

"Hen-REE!" I call out his name that way. I do that for a change sometimes.

No response.

I can hear him fussing around with his stool in the bathroom, so I figure he's probably in there trying to get up on the counter to eat some toothpaste, something I am a bit hesitant to call his 'first hobby,' but I'm not really one to mince the truth. Anyway, the last I saw him, a few minutes ago, maybe five, he had a lollipop in his hand and he was tearing through my room with blue lollipop glue all over his cheeks and lips looking like a small candy-coated squirrel on the make.

I hadn't expected tears. His sister is downstairs, she has an alibi. Something isn't adding up.

I wait but he keeps crying, a little harder now and I want to ignore it, let him tough it out,  but whenever the crying pitch increases, say from a 'there's-a-thumbtack-in-the-soft-sole-of-my-foot' to something like 'help-there's-a-piece-of-my-own-poo-lodged-in-my-left-nosehole', I get a little worried, a little jittery. I think back to the time when I went to investigate his increasingly fevered cries to find him stuck sitting inside the sink with the hot water running full blast and maybe ten seconds away from getting seriously hot.

There are times when you know something is really the matter. It's a gut instinct; or a chip floated into you head by insurance companies. Either way, as a parent: you know.

This might be one of those times, I start thinking.

He's crying harder now and he's not running to my calls, which is unusual given that the very nature of his damn sobs are generally meant to curry influence and favoritism. I get up from my work and head into the bathroom.

I turn the corner through the door.

Whoa.

Holy shit!

Henry has long gorgeously sliced ribbons of toilet paper trailing from each of his fingers and his thumbs. It seems ethereal; at first I think he is playing some kind of a boy wonder trick on me, crying to get me to run to see his fairly astonishing toilet paper art.

But then, no, I notice that some of the paper is still attached to the roll and the poor guy isn't trying to create anything cool on purpose here. He's literally tarred and feathered himself with toilet paper and lollipop gunk.

My heart aches a tiny bit for the kid as I laugh out loud, which makes him start bawling even harder with frustration.

What a guy, I think to myself. What a spectacular friggin' kid moving in spectacular circles of magical soul.

In his 'big boy' effort to pull off some tissue and wipe his own snotty nose, like I've been teaching him lately, his lollipop fingers were basically candy corn nubs dipped in SuperGlue. The more he touched the toilet paper, the more it stuck to him! Now, here he is and he's sad to the point of fury.

He bites his own arm as I stare down at him. That's how he handles his anger, a chip off the old block.

I try to hold my laughs in, but it's hard and I want him to know what a genius I think he is.

I lean over and whisper into his ear that it's okay, we'll fix him up. I help him over to the sink and I can also start to make out, just by osmosis, that a good part of his upset is also because he was really enjoying the hell out of that lollipop and all of this dumbass paper came out of nowhere to screw it all up.

We turn on the water and I show him how easy all this stuff comes off with just a few splashes and some gentle rubs.

After a minute or so, his tears dissolve into misty whimpers, the kind where he's kind of caught out there on a hiccup between old sadness and happy again.

And just as I catch a fleeting glimpe of us in the mirror, his brown eyes twinkling above his blue shellacked nose, half his noodle barely peering up over the vanity top, I am aware that I am watching him being born for the second time.

Nature Walk/ Crazy Talk/ A Lovely Afternoon

"It could be a buck deer with a whole hippo on his back and a, and a, and a, and a PIZZA!"

I'm not sure what to do with that, but she's pushing four and you don't nudge back at 'pushing four' with too much setting the record straight or whatever because, frankly, they don't really give a shit and that's how it should be.

Violet looks down at the tracks in the snow and does a little happy jig around them in the snow. I think they are dog, the tracks. But they could be a coyote for all I know. Or a fat raccoon or a muskrat. There's a bunch of dogs that people bring down through here though, to sniff around at stuff in the snow. Dogs love to head out in the cold weather and do giants rails of deer piss; sometimes I wonder if their is a human equivalent to the happiness that it brings them, if there is something that could get me and you off as much as dogs get off on sniffing deer piss, or squirrel piss or other dog piss or bum piss, but I've yet to come up with anything.

Random sex with strangers in the Old Navy changing rooms, maybe?

I dunno.

I try and move up the trail a little bit because this nature hike is taking forever. We've barely come even forty feet down this side trail along the trout stream and it's looking as if we might not ever make it back to the big trail where men jog by us in their man-leotards and old ladies with golden retrievers with strange bumps the size of Dunkin' jelly Donuts growing out the sides of their necks politely say hello. It's the afternoon weekday crowd, I figure. They don't bother with the animal tracks.

"Dad, LOOK!" Violet's voice brings me back.

I look around and she is pointing at another track in the grey snow.

"What is it?" I ask her, interested.

I'm hoping she tells me it's a rabbit. I just taught her what rabbit tracks look like and yeah, I know, it isn't important at all at this stage in the game whether she remembers that or not, but c'mon. Secretly, I want her to remember. Down behind my lungs,where I keep my dreams dude, I want her to be the best animal tracker in the goddamn world since Jeremiah Johnson, you know?

She stares at the four long marks in the crust and mumbles something to herself, her voice switching over to steam at her chapped lips.

I wait. (It is a rabbit, by the way; I can see that from here.)

"It's a rabbit!" she hollers at me.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!I slow motion that shit with that deep-drawn out voice of tape being slowed waaaaaaay down.

I pump my fist into the air and she smiles, working her way through the awkwardness of her father as best she can. She is proud that I'm proud, I sense that. But my reactions are hard to gauge sometimes, almost as if they're totally wrong for the occassion and she is young and processing embarrasment and  joy and confidence all at the same time are hard for a kid. Hell, it's hard for me too.

Whatever though.

My daughter is a wildlife tracker, ya'll. And that's not a sentence of words that I ever thought I would write down in this lifetime, you know?

"Good eye, kid," I tell her. "You sure know your rabbit tracks. That's a really good thing to know, too..." my voice tails off at the end there because, in all honesty, I don't have any ifdea how valuable tracking rabbits is anymore. Not much, is my guess. There was a time when a young woman that could track a rabbit through a snowy wood could easily have found herself being courted by upstanding men because of it; men who could blacksmith and men who could dive off of steep ledges into rocky streams for summer fun and men who knew how to call squirrels with a blade of grass.

But there was a time when people knew what fucking color rhubarb was too and that time is gone.

"Hey Dad," she says, and I know what's coming.

See, the other interesting part about this nature walk, I'm finding out, is that my little girl spots a track/ names it/yells at me if I tell her she's wrong/ and then comes up with an alternative fantastical possibility of what it might have been waltzing along here through the snow a few days ago that both amazes me and reminds me that she is indeed my kid and that each of these tracks is something I wish I could stick in the pocket of my old Woolrich coat that I wear for sepcial outside days like today and keep in there to remind me of right now for the rest of my life.

How cool would it be, every time I went for a hike by myself or whatever, Violet away at college, to my hand down in the warm darkness and wrap my fingers around that same exact rabbit track from all those years go?

"Daddy! Look! This could have been a rabbit with a string of candy canes around his neck and a wild turkey for a good friend in the morning together, right?"

I'm stunned. Unintentional poetry bazookas me into the next world.

"Oh yeah, you bet, kiddo," I manage to mutter to her.

After a few minutes, I coax her into moving ahead down to the water's edge with me and I know that isn't easy either because in order to end up there she has to walk over like 455 more tracks cutting across the land beneath her.

I get the feeling that if I let her, we'd both perish there eventually. They'd find us curled up, fast asleep together right there on the tracks of this crazy switching yard for dogs and deer and mice. I point her at the stream.

"Look out there, see that broken tree," I ask her. "If I was a great white shark living here in this little stream that's where I would hide right there," I say pointing at the dark green pool of cold beneath the trunk.

She stares at the spot intently, the tender gears grinding above her think-frown.

"If you were a trout," I ask her, "would you be a nice trout or do you think you would be grumpy?"

That is the level of conversation at which I seem to operate.

She stares at the hole. It looks so fishy. I can tell she maybe feels that way too and that makes me giddy like I can't even explain; maybe she'll fish with me one of these days. I want that so bad.

"Grumpy!" she blurts out and turns to me, her face maybe three inches from mine. I can feel the warmth from down in her belly escaping her.

"Ha!" my voice bounces of the rock ledge across the stream. "You'd be a grumpy trout! Perfect! I like a grumpy trout, they're so cool!"

"A fisherman!" Violet shouts it out.

To my left I catch a bit of movement out of my ninja eye and I look and it's a fisherman alright: a fly fisherman watching his pea-sized orange indicator float slow across a shallow ripple on this cold cold afternoon.

I wonder what he heard us saying. I ask that on my inner PA system.

We turn away from the water before we start chucking rocks or something like that. This fisherman and us, our peaces collided but in the best kind of way, really. We eased into each other's paradise chasing down our own. Nothing wrong with that. But somebody's got to back off a bit and so we do.

Me and Violet turn back to the snow behind us/ Me and Violet turn back to the world before us.

July Is My Jam/ Ode To Summertime

Oh July.

Sweet hot July in your chartreuse bikini that pings and pops like 4pm hail on the hood; you there sipping your medium cherry Slushie/throwing back your chlorinated hair /laughing with your friends/your bare feet shining like fresh clean snakes down in the grass/

YOU: stepping in melted ice cream sandwich over beneath the Yum-Yum Tree;

you really think you can hide from me?

From me?

My t-shirts are over there in the closet, marinating in the mothball dark. They keep me up at night with their damn crying. I left the final shirt of mid-September unwashed

on it's plastic hanger

so I could sniff around your vinegary edges during these

long

dark

days.

July, you are my jam.

I wish you were available for download.

I wish that the kids and I could go down in the cupboard underneath the sink and that we could walk back in there beneath the white plastic pipes and roll the big coffee can full of grease and old peanut oil out of the way and that you would come walking out of a hidden cave, yawning, smiling, stretching, flipping off the cobwebs and saying,"You found me!" 

Why can't you just light up our sour house with your 50,000,000,000 gazzillawatts of sunshine and hot dry Vitamin C rain?

What's wrong?

What's wrong with you?

Do you miss me at all?

Where are you anyway...Australia?

I put the beach stuff up in the rafters of the garage. Should I get it down now?

Remember at the beach when you blew small Tasmanian devil clouds of baked sand into my earholes while my daughter happily ate a hotdog coated with specks of crunchy zillion year-old seashell as the seagulls dangled off of your hot fat thigh on those thin puppet strings of humidity?

Jesus.

Those were the days.

I love you/ should I drag the air conditioners down from the attic this afternoon?

Should I dump some gas in the mower?

Send me a sign, okay?

I'm gonna count to ten and look out this window and on ten you fly up with a baby kangaroo in your beak and then I'll know you are back, okay?

Okay, here we go.

One....The kids are turning pale in their overheated rooms.

Two....The dead are asleep in the cold hard dirt, one assumes.

Three...The deer are on the mountain where the winds are howling blue.

Four...The pale lame sun is in the cottony sky but it really isn't true.

Five...The snowbanks in the mall parking lots refuse to melt away.

Six...The crows out in the cornfields can't tell night from day.

Seven...The moon is frozen butter in a cold pan flipped upside down.

Eight...The soles of our shoes crunch against the rock salt on the ground.

Nine...The snowflakes pass the street lamps like August moths at night.

Ten...The train in the tunnel is but a distant whistle and but a pin prick of far away light.