December 25, 2021

 Oy, vey!

Another tree. Another wreath on the door. More red ribbons around the coach lights. Boombox carols in the air. Ham and sweets for dinner. Again. Tradition. Latkes were last month. Biscuits and gravy the morning of the 23rd. Fried chicken that night. Challah last night. And now?

Oy, vey!

Mulled wine not Manischewitz?

How?

Fall in love and find out. I married an Irish Catholic. She married a Russian Jew. 44 years in 2022. Believe it or not (I’m joking), it took some compromise to get us here. I never had a tree inside of anywhere I had a roof, not one tree, and certainly not a Christmas tree. She had never sat through a Yom Kippur service let alone no food or drink for 24 hours. She thought no food or drink was only on Fridays. So, here we are.

I’m in my office. Out the door three steps to my right is our living room. Even though this year’s firewood hasn’t been fully cured, a fire roars in the fireplace. It helps to  have this napalm like concoction to squeeze on the logs. My son has Chet Atkins playing Xmas music on his computer. My daughter helps her nephew navigate his myriad of toys. Sweet smells from the kitchen: ham and corn pudding on their way. My family is happy, and, I’m thinking, maybe I am, too. It’s taken me a lifetime but I think I’m beginning to get it, just as I think, at this age, that I have finally learned how to write and what to write about, and why I need to write about it. No coincidence. The place where I wrote from then is not the place I write from now.

(In some other life I once went out with a woman who said, “coinkidink”. One “coinkidink”. That was it.)

Everyone waited until Dorian, aged three, woke up because we wanted to see his face when he saw a brightly lit tree surrounded and stacked with all shapes of things wrapped with ribbons and a kaleidoscope of party paper. He spent a few seconds being stunned by the lights and a crystal that caught them. Unlike the Hanukkah menorah, he could not blow these out. Then, practical little creature that he is, he turned to a colorful mock-up of a kitchen complete with appliances and ware. My daughter and my son’s good friend had spent hours the night before putting it and everything else all together. It made me think of trying to put all that gear together when my kids were small: instructions translated by someone with English as a fifth language, screw holes a hair off, a threaded screw, one too few bolts in the bag. Drove me nuts but gives me pleasure watching my kids do it. It also made me think of it as a sign of the times. When my daughter was Dorian’s age we gave her a toy kitchen set that magnetized her from the time her eyes registered what it was. My son was given a train set. I’m sure you get my point. 

So, I’m sitting there this morning in my father’s chair - the same one I’ve been toting around since his death 60+ years ago - watching this little three ring circus, noting that my grandson was given a kitchen set but nowhere was there one of those small plastic basketball hoop set-ups. To be sure there were building blocks, construction stuff, race car tracks, and a plastic razor kit - Shave With Grandpa. I’m not suggesting these couldn’t or wouldn’t be used by a little girl, simply noting that there was no visible jock paraphernalia, and that mock-up kitchen really got him. Plastic taco, anyone? You would be surprised. I wouldn’t kid ya.

The thing is, they are happy in there. The living room is happy. This house is happy. If it could dance it would, not the kazatzka or a mazurka, not the Lindy or a do-si-do, but a waltz in some soft tempo. If it could sing, well, it seems to be doing just that right now, all the ages and voices and an occasional bark from one of the dogs, silence outside, all one. Joe Cocker sang, “You are so beautiful to me, yes, you are, you are so beautiful to me…” Elvis sang, “Love me tender, love me sweet, never let me go, you have made my days complete, and I love you so.”

Bury me with this shit eating grin on my face.

As much as I have admired Joan Didion, I don’t think she would have admired me. Too sentimental. Perhaps too much chicken shmaltz on Shabbos as a kid or too many junkets to Sammy’s Roumanian Steak House on the Lower East Side. But, I have very smart, very big hearted Jewish friends who have an edge I don’t. An observation not a criticism. For a long time I wished I had that edge, and tried to, only I wasn’t an adept. It had to come as naturally as which hand you use, yet it didn’t, not to me. I’m not usually naive, only at critical moments when it really matters. Of course, this “flaw”  became another good reason to beat myself up. I wouldn’t say I’m a bleeding heart, but I do admit to needing the occasional tourniquet. Fine. Because I don’t care anymore. This “flaw”  has been known to fight for its right of return. A quick, full frontal counterattack drives it back. Dickens was sentimental. I should be so lucky, although I admit not being able to get through more than half of “Oliver Twist”.

I was raised in a violent household where we were taught “happiness is for idiots” aka “only idiots are happy.” My mother damned Portnoy’s Complaint as a batch of lies, especially that scene where his mother threatens him with a knife because he wouldn't

eat his liver. So, I reminded her, “Wait a minute, Mom, you forget, you once hit me with a knife because I wouldn’t eat my eggs.”

“I didn’t forget,” she shrugged, “I had to get you to eat your eggs somehow.”

Happiness is for idiots.

I swear.

Anyway, the point is, this happiness stuff: I could get used to it - that brush of butterflies fluttering happily in my belly, happily, I said, nothing fearful about them, just the trilleto of gossamer wings drawing light.

Just one of those things. 

Gossamer wings. Drawing light.

Just one of those crazy things. 

Water Starts In Wild Places

 My Godson, Reuben Sack, wrote this line: “Water Starts in Wild Places.” It got me thinking.

Is it true that every drop of water on earth has already been everywhere on earth a drop of water could ever be - above and below - every nook, each cranny - every crack and fissure, every undiscovered drip on the entire planet? Everywhere? Even the Gobi? A Cosmic Recycle? Somewhere I learned that.

I keep a sketch on my bulletin board of a whimsical little boy with his elbows on his knees next to a little stream. Its caption: everybody should be quiet near a little stream and listen. Except for the fact that, as a little boy, I always thought I was fat, it could have been me. 

I stand on a small bridge crossing the creek in front of our house, and I begin to listen. The rush of Spring melt charges down the mountains taking no prisoners as it thunders through its channel. Trout get fat. The banks roar no matter where you walk. Summer water is quieter, still deep enough to cushion the sound, strong enough to chop water over rocks. Now, you can walk the banks and, if you listen hard, if you keep the flow in your ears, the water will tell you what’s beneath it. Come Fall the water feels lazier, flowing along, meandering at leisure. There’s less, so you can hear it better. Fresh water flows hoof deep over the flats. The deer will drink here. Come winter with its deepest snowfall under the full moon, come then a great hush. Is it any wonder? Is it any wonder at all? The creek is right underneath me. I fancy I can feel it’s vibrations through the soles of my boots. Its banks are too deep in snow for me to walk, so I stand on the little bridge and listen to the trickle of distant water right there beneath my feet.

This is why I write. I write to hear the water.

Poppa Took My Hand

           I finally wrote “The End” to novel #4 - “Been A Bad Ol’ Booger But He’s Come ‘n’ Gone”.  It’s a grandfather-granddaughter story that still needs work. The following is another excerpt. 

Please stay tuned.

Poppa took my hand and led me through the copse of ancient hemlocks as if I needed his protection. It was early spring. Daffodils had come up but lilacs were still a week away, mountain laurel three weeks from that. Jays were gone. Chickadees back. A blue heron fished the creek. We had to spray the dumpster with ammonia to keep a hungry bear at bay. Coyotes ambushed a raccoon near the chicken coop. All that was left of it were strands of grey and white hair. Coyotes eat everything but a gland in the anus. No sign of that, either. A morsel for something else. 

Poppa normally never hesitated to talk about anything at all, but this morning he stayed silent as we walked, setting his feet as if he were hunting, almost reverent, unwilling to disturb the peace. We stopped at the edge of a clearing where Poppa indicated something out there with his chin. I couldn’t see what he wanted me to see, but I followed him as he walked into the clearing until...There. Unclear to me until I moved closer. I had never seen anything like this before or since. Poppa had, but once. The racks and bones of two massive deer, thick-necked bucks with ten point racks, stout as cudgels, tangled, twisted, ultimately locked together, trapped, having fought until they died, socket to socket, smack against each other’s sight and smell, socket to socket, until they died. Much of the rest of them had been strewn about the clearing, vandalized by varmints, but those two skulls, now blind, remained, for eternity, locked in mortal combat.

A few days later, I found this on an index card that had fallen on the kitchen floor.

Talk to me of death

And I will tell you of a woodland dance

Hemlocks - a thick grove of them

A fitting place

A pas de deux - both dead

Like Romeo and Juliet

Only rivals

Beams eight points and ten

Thick as cudgels

Entangled by their horns

     And not their hearts

Titans locked in deadly battle

Crashing heads

Bucking for the “A” list

Eighteen tines tangled and trapped

Eye socket to eye socket

Call this place 

     Ozymandias

Someone with that name

Ruled over ancient ruins

This inscription left

  On a piece of stone:

“Look on my works and despair.”

Seed unspread

Scattered bones

Picked clean

Antlers gnawed by mites

     With yellow teeth

Ozymandias

  “Look on my works and despair”

Scattered bones don’t even get that.

VETERANS DAY 11/11/2021

 

USMC  18 years old

BOXING ??????? 11-12-2021

 

In boxing exists a condition known as “the championship rounds”, the time that comes in a fight when the fighter must dig as deeply as ever to keep fighting with all his heart and soul, must dig in more than he ever imagined he could, than he ever imagined was even possible in this world. The final two rounds of the match are the championship rounds. No matter how hurt, how tired, how exhausted, how much your arms ache to drop by your sides, how unable you are to keep slipping punches, how unable you are to do anything but fight back with a ferocity you worked to acquire – there is no urge to give up, no desire to do anything but keep at it until it is stopped. He does not break (unlike a certain recently appointed supreme court justice) but pushes himself towards his goal with all his heart because that’s where it’s at, the heart, that’s where it comes from, the heart.

The will can give out, but not the heart.

There are three minutes from my life that I value more than most. Freddie Brown, Roberto Duran’s corner man, trained me at Gleason’s Gym in the early 70’s. Freddie was a tough old bird, an ex-fighter himself with a career that left his nose on the wrong side of his face. Freddie was a banger. He stood there and fought it out. I don’t know that Freddie was ever knocked off his feet. I do know that every three minutes he was in there he’d fight as if they were his last, ‘cause that’s what y’do.

When I’d do something he liked, Freddie would dip into the pocket of the ancient cardigan he always wore and hand me a piece of hard candy. “Fighters are like race horses,” he told me, “They do somethin’ good, you give ‘em somethin’ sweet.” “Kill the body, and the head will follow” was another one of his truisms. “Punches in bunches” was a good one, too. But the best? “Don’t think about what he’s gonna do to you. Think about what you’re gonna do to him.”

So, one day Freddie agrees to a match-up between me and a guy 15 years younger than me prepping for a professional fight. I was not a pro, just a gym rat who happened to like being around boxers. In fact, when I first met the woman who would become my wife, we were talking about it – this was not something she could fathom - and I found myself on the defensive stating that I didn’t do it for money. “Why else would you do it?”, she wanted to know. Good question. Forty years later she continues to ask good questions. “Because it’s there,” still seems to be about the best answer I can come up with.

This kid’s face, I swear, displayed all the tenderness of a concentration camp guard. OK. Let’s do this. Bell rings.

Guy rips from his corner, immediately clips me flush on the chin, sending me flying backwards and off-balance. “Don’t fall,” I kept saying to myself. “Just get to those ropes, balance, bounce back.” Do it. An act of will. I stayed on my feet, hit the ropes, balanced myself, sling shot back out there. It was raw survival. Adolph comes at me. This was it. He’s doing his Joe Frazier – hunched low, bobbing, weaving, coming forward, both hands cutting loose. Get killed, or…I began firing jabs at him, jab after jab, jab after jab – bam, bam, bam – Keep him away. Don’t let him get close. Jab. Jab. Jab. Because if he does he’ll kill me. Jab! Jab! Double up on that jab! Bam. Bam. BamBam. What right hand? Just keep jabbing. Bell rings. I’m still standing. He looks disgusted. I walk back to my corner. Tough.

Lesson’s learned?

MARINES=ASSAULT TROOPS

 CORRECTED COPY  -  sorry, folks

One of the sureties of my life on this earth is that I will never be welterweight champion of the world. I wasn't very good at it, but there you go. One of the proudest days of my life is the day I finally "got" the hook off the jab. 

I liked hanging out in gyms where members were there for survival not style. Gleason's. The Wild Card. The Left Hook. Kronk's in Detroit where Tommy Hearns trained, Fifth Street in Miami where Muhammad Ali learned to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.  I didn't know any LA gyms, yet, so my first month in LA I joined the Beverly Hills Health Club. I was new out there so what did I know? Two things I remember: flabby guys sitting in white steam cabinets with their heads sticking out smoking cigars, and Sid Caesar asked me to spot him on a bench press. His own weight. Pretty good. Then I discovered the Left Hook and the Wild Card, where the pros go, and things got serious.

I cannot imagine any other athlete with the conditioning of a boxer. You see more six packs in a boxing gym than you do at the local bodega. Shadow box with yourself in front of a mirror for three minutes then see how you feel. These guys train for thirty-six, but it's not merely physical conditioning that gets them through. Ring IQ is what does it: the ability to continually assess what you're up against, calculate the opponent's timing, check his foot work and balance, change your angles, exploit openings, stuff your fear - you box; you don't fight.

Jews and fists? The Yiddishe Kopf a thing of the past? Shtetls and Dybbuks were their types of games. Seriously. Shtetls and Dybbuks. That's what they were called in those eastern European villages. But, Jews and Fists? Boxing  may not have been in shtetl DNA, but then there were the likes of Benny Leonard,  Maxie Rosenblum, Battling Levinsky, Abe Goldstein, Max Baer, Jewish guys with noses that looked like California and fists that turned the other cheek. 

When we first began to date Jamie was stunned when she found out I did this thing. ""Why would anybody do this? ", she wondered? "I don't do it for the money,"I said, almost apologetically. "Then why do it at all?" she shot back. I enjoyed being in the ring. I wasn't there to hurt anybody. I simply liked the challenge. refining as many defensive maneuvers as possible to avoid getting hit. Not so different from my revelation in the Marines that I really didn't want to hurt anybody. So why do these things, you ask? You tell me. I still don't know, and it's getting late. Now that I know for certain that the welterweight belt is out of reach, I can sleep.

Some More Book In Progress - 11/7/2021 - Been A Bad Ol' Booger But He's Come 'n' Gone

        Driving is a good time for dreaming. Tires churn things up.  My plane was hours late getting into the airport, stupid stuff, like we had to disembark because they forgot to weigh the plane without passengers. Does anybody out there even know they did that? Dumb as dumb could be. I was bone tired and just wanted my bed.

    Nurses Without Borders had sent me up the Yukon giving measles vaccinations and flu shots to kids in isolated Athapaskan villages, Eagle and Circle being two of them. When we finally landed after an unexpected and unexplained stop somewhere in the boonies of Saskatchewan, I was too worn out to drive the hundred miles home. I picked up my car and spent the night at a friend’s. Next morning I’d do some grocery shopping, stock up on books at the local bookstore, and drive home to my mountains for some R & R.

    RuAnne first called me when I was in the shower, so I couldn’t hear the ring. Next time she called I was toweling down. The phone slipped out of my wet hand and clattered to the floor. It was not easy to get a grip on, but somehow triggered “talk”. 

 “Hey, Teddy, that you? You there? Theodora! Pick the hell up.”

`    “I’m here. I’m here.”

    “Why aren’t you here?”

  “Because I didn’t want to die on the highway last night.”

   “It’s RuAnne”.

“No kidding. I’m on my way. Just got out of the shower.”

”They don’t have showers in igloos?”

    “Stop it, Ru. Cut to the chase.”

    “You won’t believe this one.”

“Try me.”

“State Police - Trooper Colby? - You know him. He's been here before - we get a call come get Gramps. They had him at the station. He’d gone down to the highway, stretched a logging chain across the road. Sat down behind it on a barrel with a shotgun across his lap. Had that old dog of his by his side. Buster Fleabag. Colby was really nice to him, asked him kindly,
                    “Whatcha doin’, Poppa?” 

         “Keepin’ the furriners out,” Poppa said, deadly serious.

             “I believe the country’s grateful for your service, sir, but it’s safe to go now. We got everything under control."

    Poppa asked him if he was sure and Colby assured him he was, then Poppa thanked him and just went along, no problem. They called me to come down to the station house to fetch him. I got there, he and Colby were playing chess.”

     “Where’s Poppa now?”

     “Back here. Workin’ on another bird house.”

    “What’s it this time?”

    “The Taj.”

    “Majal?”

    “You know another Taj?”

Poppa was Michelangelo in wood. At some point, he decided he wanted to create bird houses in the form of classical structures, like the Taj but also St. Peter’s in Rome, Stonehenge outside of London, Ellis Island in New York harbor, the Bastille in Paris, France and such, even a termite mound and an Apache wickiup. Sold them for a fortune. If something struck him, he’d find a way to do it. If something didn’t, he wouldn’t. You never could figure out what Poppa was going to do next, even, they tell me, when he was younger, but what he would do mostly made some sense if you thought about it much which I did.  Poppa had been all over the world, seen so much, took it all in. He didn’t just see what he saw, he thought hard about it: who built it; why; materials used; materials quarried...He saw what was never written, the souls of the folks who thought of these things, the souls of the people who needed these things, the lives of the workers who laid the stones at the tops of tall towers, the thousand year myths that gave rise to it all. He never just visited places, he worked in them - dug wells, taught school, tilled fields, held babies, dug bodies out of mudslides, repaired roofs shredded by monsoons. Poppa was a civil engineer by training, a doer of good deeds by constitution. He dreamed of  building roads where there weren’t any.

Rut - 2021

Yesterday, our trees were still bright with color, even some red appeared, rare this year, mostly on the sumacs and not the maples. A brisk wind caromed through the valley - east to west, west to east, south to north, north to south. Came morning the trees were bare. Mostly, the maples stayed yellow this year instead of turning red as they do normally. Too much rain, no frost is what the weather pundits up here say. The bare trees, I must admit, fascinate me more than the others. Certainly, the autumn colors are exquisite, and, come summer, full grown trees proudly puff out their great, green chests and take in the sun. So, there is beauty, and there is pride, but is there mystery? To gaze on a winter forest with an endless array of bare trees and twisted limbs - on and on they go on forever -  and they may well be there forever. Eternity? Got a better example?

Winter has been stalking us for weeks. I am insulating windows and caulking cracks. Generators are charged, more wood is on the way, a tank filled with oil, lanterns in every room. Get out the Under Armor, fleece, flannel, and cleats. At least, the tics will hibernate, and there won't be any tiny pests dive bombing your inner ear. 

Right now, nearing November, it seems quiet out there, but we are ready - as if any of us are truly ready for the next six months of snow and cold. And yet. Have you ever seen the full moon over a bed of fresh snow? The quiet beauty lowers one's blood pressure to the point where one can put one's feet up on one's desk and simply stare out the window. No guilt. No worries. No fear. No nothin'. As the great Jackie Gleason would say, "How sweet it is!"

There is a rub. This time of year things are unpredictable. A two hundred pound stag with a ten point rack can suddenly stampede out of the brush and total your car. It happened to me on Rte. 28 at night driving home. All I remember seeing were antlers aligned with the hood ornament. That's all. Antlers. Big, thick beams. Whump! Babe Ruth smacking a mattress with his Louisville Slugger. Bumper to solid flesh. A direct hit. A jolt from nowhere that totaled my car and luckily didn't kill me. The power and placement of that hit sent that deer flying back over the roof. I never saw it alive. Normally, things look smaller in death, but not this bruiser. He was a monster (trophi di tutti trophi) one rarely seen and deeply desired, but he simply could not keep it in his pants, and it killed him.

It's the rut. Testosterone takes over rendering male deer stupid silly, not unlike fraternity brothers with a keg. Normally, this most cautious of animals is alert to every nuance of its environment. Not now. The only thing they want in life is a quick hook-up - names don't matter - and they will die to do it. Literally. Really, really die. There is no #MeToo movement in the local whitetail population. Does simply stand by while the bucks make fools of themselves until the biggest fool wins.

This means there is a great deal of death around here now. I don't mean hunting season where, agree with the activity or not, what is taken by locals is not wasted. The local hunters enter woods they've known since childhood with a great deal of knowledge, respect, and common sense. I'm talking about roadkill, an ugly word, loaded with disrespect and disdain for what was once a living, breathing creature of grace and beauty, too many of them beside roads that only a few years ago saw blissfully little traffic and now see too much, thanks to our valley being labelled "a destination place" in expensive magazines. More often you don't see the torn flesh, just the body lying there.You are not close enough and you are not likely to stop long enough to see the glazed eyes, the limp tongue. It could be asleep. These are the ones I wonder about.

My friend, Josh, who lives in the mountains of France, recently sent me this quote from Jeremy Bentham: "The question is not can they reason, or can they think, but can they suffer?"

I wonder about those that lie by the side of the road not yet dead but dying. Do they know they are dying? We do. We who walk upright. Do they? They can anticipate danger where we cannot, but can they anticipate death? Do they know regret? What do they know? What do they feel? Physically, it is difficult to say since animals have astonishing reserves of strength, an ability to cope with injuries that would level an eighteen wheeler. Rarely, do they even express pain, and then not for long. I know deer have consciousness, but what is that for them? They can't think the way I do. I don't have their consciousness, and they don't have mine. What is waiting to die like for an animal? What do they sense lying there? Do they experience being alone? White tail are not generally herd animals like elk and impala. Are they aware of familiar smells: the scent of an off-spring or mate, the gum smacking aroma of freshly planted roses, the scent of gun oil in the woods that heralds the start of hunting season? If it rains does the rain give comfort? If they land in the shade is there any relief? Is there any relief at all? Are they waiting to die, or do they just die?

Been A Bad Ol' Booger, But He's Come 'n' Gone - Prologue - 10-10-2021

 I'm working on a new novel. #4. I never thought I would. Obviously, I was wrong. Since it's Autumn, I think this prologue is apropos. It's a few pages, but only a few. I might publish short excerpts from time to time. See whatcha think.

        “Been A Bad Ol’ Booger, But He’s Come 'n' Gone”

Fall and Poppa were both born by the same breath. Fall was our favorite season. We braved the freeze of winter, the muck of spring, and the sweat of summer until we got to Fall. It was Fall when Poppa was most alive, and, because he was, I was, too.  Poppa was really grandpop, my grandfather, but not any more. I called him Poppa early on and have done so ever since. When I was little I rode Poppa’s back through a blueberry jungle in August. It seemed I was always riding Poppa’s back somewhere, through something, around something, the world from Poppa’s back. 

I never have been a big fan of Summer. Born and raised in a cleft in the Catskill Mountains when they were still home and hearth to dogged farmers tilling fields whose main crop was rocks.  This was way before so-called hipsters from Brooklyn donned their L.L. Bean backpacks crammed with gorp and discovered we lived here. I don’t dispute that summer in the mountains is lovely – fulsome creeks fished by blue herons and eagles, thickets shielding deer, partridge, and bear, Golden Rod and Purple Astor, so many shades of green I couldn’t count, but, still, for me, mercifully short. It’s a season that can’t be avoided and therefore posits the obligation to hungrily suck it dry of all its pleasures right down to the last hot dog on the grill and that August mountain thunderstorm right above your head. I do, but I cannot tell a lie: that first chill wind and the changing colors soon after – that’s what I wait for. Maple syrup, pumpkins, and the palette a hardwood forest offers in the Fall – maple, ash, beech, oak, black cherry, walnut, chestnut – an opera of shades – basso profundo – coloratura - bronze, orange, red, yellow…I know from firsthand experience that  Alaskan hardwoods are small and stunted. There are no beauty queens on the tundra. It’s so cold that leaves and roots become necessities. Wood, the stuff of trunks and branches, is a luxury. I look at the mountains across my valley and it’s like looking at a bouquet. “Here y’go, young lady. This one’s for you.” 

Every year of my life back then, and even now sometimes when I’m back, me and Poppa kicked through the cover of dry leaves that had fallen to the ground when we walked through the woods along Hunter Creek one October morning. I remember a young spruce, maybe three feet, sparsely but gracefully branched, decorated by wind and gravity, with brightly colored leaves that had fallen from other trees. It was not the burning bush, but it dazzled. Our mountains are part of the range that goes south into West Virginia and Kentucky, all the Appalachians. Oh, my, the aroma of fresh, rich mud – better than morning coffee – that came from those kicks. Life was in those kicks. Even the sound – that crispness – that snap, crackle and pop - of leaves so casually scuffed aside! To walk through that woods in the Fall was to experience transcendence.  I’m not talking religion here, but I know the feeling when it’s there. It envelops me and whispers to me, though I never quite catch the words. What was that, that something I can almost remember, a sad thing and a happy thing, not birthday party happy - astonished happy - and not terrible sad but longing? Feels both at peace and a piece of the puzzle, tranquil and untroubled, and yet something I urgently needed to know, just out of reach. How could it be that with every breath I was both aroused and at rest? How could that be? I remember leaving the woods of that childhood at dusk, and above me the moon was full and bright, serene, imposing: Buddha. How could that be?

It was Fall, first day of school, but we had plans. Poppa knocked on my door when it was still more than an hour from daybreak. 

“Bacon, sunny sides, hash browns, hot chocolate. Hit the deck,” Poppa hawked from the other side of the door. “Dress warm.” 

I had my warmest clothes all laid out, layers of ‘em. I felt like the Michelin tire man, but it was gonna be cold out there. I love being out in the cold but I don’t like being cold, you know?

In the Spring you smell fresh flowers. In the Fall you smell dead ones, crisp and sharp. The season has a tang to it. Poppa showed me a wild apple tree. A macoun. His secret. Nobody else knew where it was, and how it got where it got even Poppa couldn't say.   

         

“They talk to each other, y’know, not like we do, but think of all those tangled roots mingling underground, connecting like telephone cables. Information gets passed on through. All these oaks? They weren’t here when you were born. Logged out. But all this time they’ve been migrating down the mountain, and look at them now. Maybe they send out pilgrims to scout new territory? Like anybody would.  ‘Course, I’m no botanist, so wha’ do I know?” he said. Poppa said that after a lot of things - “Wha’ do I know?” But he knew just about everything, and, if there was a speck of something he didn’t know, he’d find somebody who did or look it up or just go and figure it out for himself. He’d pick up a bronze leaf and tell me oak, a red leaf, maple, a yellow leaf, birch, a different red, sumac. Wild berries had been gone for a month, but pears and apples were in, and a pumpkin patch he planted just for me, tiny pumpkins and really big ones, hundred pounders, a patch the size of a swimming pool. That patch made my Halloweens even more magical. Every Halloween we’d choose the second biggest and carve a monster mug, scary being the operative word. The first biggest, the biggest biggest of all, we saved for when I was Cinderella and needed my coach.

With a bellyful of breakfast, RuAnn stuffed egg salad sandwiches into the pockets of our red and black wool hunting jackets.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” she asked.

“She is in school,” said Poppa.

“I am in school,” I said.

“I didn’t ask you,” said RuAnn

“Yes, you did,” I said.

RuAnn shut the door behind us, called the dogs to join her, and dove back under her quilts. 

We set off over the back field towards the tree line and a special spot Poppa had picked out a few weeks earlier. all by the light of a slender sickle moon. He had his ancient shotgun with him, turn of the century, Remington Model 1889 12 gauge double barrel. Worth a fortune to a collector. It had been his father’s and his father’s.  He could’ve afforded a new one, but why? This old thing could damn near shoot itself. He might admire the craftsmanship of British shotguns, fine metal married to finely grained wood, delicate engraving, light and whippy. But, still, Poppa wanted one good reason, “Why?” He could be cantankerous. Once he was quoted in an interview as saying, “If you don’t own a gun and you don’t own a book, what good are you?” He actually said that. It was the caption under a picture of him grinning like he’d won $5,000 a month from Publisher’s Clearing House. I think he was joking.

No matter how hard I tried not to make any noise, withered grass sheathed in ice crackled underfoot. Poppa had taught me how the Mohawks walked while hunting, slowly, setting the whole foot down gently, one single gradual movement instead of heel-toe-heel. My feet still went crunch crunch. Poppa wore moccasins and made no sound at all.

Up in the blackest sky I’d yet ever seen, the moon had shrunk to a slice. The stars looked as if the popcorn machine exploded. Tingles of light cluttered the sky. I got thinking about the wandering bands of early humans.  How much of their lives were spent staring up at the stars? It was the best quiz show in their universe. Stories flowed. Ideas flourished. Mathematics was born. Directions were set. 

I don’t know how he did it but when we crossed the tree line into the woods it was so black I thought I went blind only Poppa didn’t seem bothered one bit. I knew Superman could see in the dark but I didn’t know Poppa could, too. Off to the side somewhere over the hogs were already on the move nuzzling for chinkapins. Might be some wild ones with ‘em. Poppa beckoned me keep quiet. We didn’t want to set them off and spoil the whole thing. Pass on by. Shhh. Poppa veered off a bit. I could just see an old maple tree, thick like a pillar on an ancient temple.  You couldn’t miss it, trunk warped and twisted all the way up with large boles like warts. Something so sweet once came from that tree. Poppa pointed to the ground. I sat down, my back against that scratchy bark. Poppa cut brush and fashioned a blind, then sat down next to me. He put his finger to his lips, took three long, slim bones from a leather pouch hanging from  his belt. Call bones. Thin, graceful, harp-like. Call bones he’d had since he was a kid. Cup them to your lips and talk turkey. 

With the shotgun in the crook of his arm, Poppa arranged the bones in the palm of his hand, cupped them to his mouth, and what came out was a puk puk puk, a sweet chirp almost impossible to hear. Puk puk puk. I listened hard but all I could hear was quiet. Puk. Puk. Kinda like,  tickle tickle. I think Poppa mighta winked at me. Not sure. The next one just fluttered out, some sweet puk puks, lilting chirps, and tra la trills. A symphony of bones. I listened hard. The silence was thick and firm. Then, oh my God, I heard this boom boom boom coming towards us. Boom boom boom! Heavy wings beating on the ground. Might’ve been Godzilla. Poppa gave a final  puk puk trill cluk, and the most humongous turkey on earth busted through the brush smack into the clearing in front of our blind. Stout as a sergeant major. He came to a stop, stood at attention, and looked around. Poppa gave it one more lick. That big dandy fanned out his bodacious tail - a thing of beauty if you ever see one - an emperor  - danced and pranced in a circle, and made right for us. The shotgun jumped to Poppa’s shoulder and fired. That bird went down like a running back clotheslined by a linebacker. Whop. Down. Poppa didn’t move. One wing fluttered then fell still. Might’ve been the wind. We waited for the echo of the shot to fade away and then sat still some more. It goes so quiet in the woods when a hunter -  man or beast - takes prey. Something about that silence says you must sit still for a while. I got up when Poppa got up, and we walked to where the bird had fallen. Poppa knelt down to check the bird’s spurs, big ones, long, sharp, a good two inches.  He didn’t say one word for a bit until, with as much reverence as I’d ever heard him, he said:

“Been a bad old booger, but he's come and gone.”

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