BRASS

Got this one sketched out and realized it reprises a portion of an earlier post, but I hope with more texture and nuance.  The topic is important enough to me to say to you as many ways as I can think of.  Don't feel cheated. Thanks for checking in.

Took the kids to a small-potatoes amusement park last week, Knobles Grove.  You may know the ubiquitous radio ads if not the park itself.  It's up in coal country, an easy 40 minutes from the homestead, by which I mean hunting ground, by which I mean parents' house.  I'm in my 40's and home still feels like someplace I gotta go to get to, not depart from.  Don't get me wrong, I never feel truly at ease or even that I'm where I'm supposed to be unless H and the kids are with me, and the last year or so has gouged that into sharper relief for me.  BUT, like Dorthy learned, there's just no place like home.  And for what that's worth, I think the north country is growing on my kids this way.  Camp Potter really is a place to stretch your legs, find a project, read a ton, cook a big meal, watch the sunset, listen to the thrushes, catch a fish, shoot a turkey, nap under the sound of rain on a tin roof or stitch together some workout with pull ups and car pushes.

But I digress.  The amusement park.  I grew up going to Knobles.  Once or twice a year someone— parent, neighbor, relative—would organize a trip.  This is where my fast ball was clocked at 49 m.p.h. a feat I have been unable to live down in 28 years.  Great bumper cars, decent haunted house, hideous food (but in a comforting way), and wooden roller coasters.  It's got a retro, throwback feel.  Like say a '30's depression carnival.  Quaint, little homely, fiercely independent.  You buy tickets for the rides.  Tickets!  It's rather like an anti-hershey park.  The old-timey carousel with scary-looking horses has a hundred-year old, deafening steam organ and if you go around on a perimeter steed, you can snatch at rings offered to the riders from a telescoping, mechanical arm.  Once per ride someone pulls the brass ring, a little bit of hoo-ha, a pat on the back, small moment of personal triumph, next group please.   It's a pretty easy thing, grabbing the rings, but it's made somewhat challenging or at least anxious by the RIGHT-NOW element and the lurking idea that if the ring doesn't come free your arm will be avulsed from its torso to hang bloody from the telescope.  You gotta out-rig your horse and ride almost side saddle and something about it feels death-defying to a kid.   The rings are steel and most, most, most of the time you get nothing but steel and when the ride is over you lob the steelies back into the mouth of a lion painted on canvas over a receiving bucket.  Getting the brass ring, well that's all luck of the draw but i've seen it missed, so, yes, luck, but you still gotta perform.  As it happens, my first time, at maybe 10 years old, I got the brass ring.   AND I got it again, in high school.  A sweet salve after getting roughed up by the radar gun.  You can't give your crush a fast ball, after all.  Has any other human being ever snagged the brass ring twice?  Seems silly to even ask.

On the Monday of my prodigal return to Knobles I'd had enough of the kiddie, round-they-go-take-a-picture rides and led us all over to the Phoenix, wooden roller coaster par excellence.  The closer we got to ride time, the more times we got to see ride-done cars pulling into dock, the more fear started to worry the faces of Wyatt Agnes and Adeline.  You can stay as buoyant and carefree as you want, but when a kid makes up his or her mind about what is going to be fun and what is going to suck, all your overly-enthusiastic smiles or doubtful looks are not going to dissuade.  So: Five of us, a ride away, screaming patrons, screeching wheels, a loudspeaker gargling (important?) instructions.  My three decided this was going to suck.  Additional problem: 2 to a car.  Wyatt, sorry, has to ride with stranger guy—totally cool and avuncular, but completely unknown—one ride cycle ahead of his family.  It'll be fine, just wait for us on the other side.  Another person might have reconsidered, thought through a different strategy.  Or just listened to his wife.  I am not another person.  Nope.  Wyatt, go with strange guy, you'll be fine, time to fly little bird.  Ags, with me.  Ads, with mom.  It's gonna be FUN dammit.  But I confess to feeling like a LCVP tailgate guy, Utah Beach.

Wyatt goes off with stranger danger and the forlorn look on his face must have been the look of all those poor orphans they shipped out west on trains 100 years ago. Welcome to Nebraska, kids, the tableland. Click Click Click up goes the coaster train.  SCREEEAAAM, down goes the coaster train.  Welcome to the Phoenix, you can't rise from the ashes without first burning to cinder. The stricken look on Wyatt's face upon return pretty much vaporized whatever thin thread of courage remained with the girls awaiting their turn and now desperately pleading to be manumitted from the orphan train and its awful master.  I gave the boy a big, searching, suggestive, thumbs up across track.  Thumbs up? Thumbs up?  Thumbs up, right?  He looked at his sisters and his sisters only and like Nero must have to other gladiators about to die, gave a unambiguous hell-ward-pointing thumb.  Last thing Heather does is give me an eye roll so large and aggressive I got a little woozy.  Last thing Ags says to me before the bar comes down trapping us in our death cabs:  Im only doing this 'cause you're making me.

Doubtless you love a good wooden roller coaster ride as much as I do, all shaky herky-jerky and sudden.  Well, the Phoenix does rise again. And again.  I had my arm firmly around Ags to lessen the violence, but, sweetheart, it's a wooden roller coaster.  She couldn't hear my comforting talk for the abject screaming the whole trip.  At some point the g-forces sucked the chewing gum from her mouth into her long hair.  Adders screamed as well except when abrupt changes in direction closed her teeth on her tongue making it bleed and making her parents out to be some kind of criminals.

And for a brief moment I might have thought about or regretted not being another, softer guy.  But what we were dealing with and what this blog post is about is fear.  See, we had this moment, Wyatt and I—in Maine—fretting about jumping from the boat into the icy Atlantic.  And then we had another (still in the middle of it, actually) having to do with the contact part of football.  And the girls and rock-climbing, and swimming and the list goes on. . . to include wooden roller coasters, the deep end and hell, even the dark.  No one's out to raise cowards.  No one.  I know that.  I'm trying to turn the screw even tighter by teaching my kids how to confront, to deal with, to live in the presence of fear. So they rode the Phoenix at gunpoint or close to it.  Football is actually another good example.  Most kids when they start pee-wee don't know how to hit.  They're afraid of contact.  And with good reason.  It just runs counter to everything they've learned in their life up to that point.  Run into something as hard as I can?  For what?  What about "be careful, watch what your doing, you're gonna get hurt?"  Nah, those are off the table now.  Sic 'em.  I remember very clearly liking being a football player WAY more than actually playing football.  I liked the gear and the esteem (it was central PA)  I didn't like the contact.  I was afraid.  Eventually, we got a good coach who taught us how to hit, gave us confidence and what I feared I soon embraced.  I'm trying to be my kids' good coach.  One of the beauties of football (there aren't many, but this one goes a LONG way) is that it will make lots of room for someone small and slow. . . if they are fearless.  In this way it is much like life.

See when I was going to die, I was gripped by a hollowing-out, blinding fear.  Racing pulse, panic, constantly on edge, unable to reason or see past the next hour. Sleepless. I have very little memory of this time, save the fear.  I feared heaven because the idea seems painfully boring.  I feared hell because it seems boringly painful.  I feared simply ceasing to exist because, well, this one doesn't really need an explanation now does it?—and that oughta tell you something—but who leaves a good party in the middle?  The thing is, I didn't die as soon as I thought I might.  I just hung around dreading moment to moment.  Terrific, paralyzing dread.  You have known real fear: it is work.  It's exhausting.  You breathe hard, you're contracted and tense.  Here's what happens if you stay in that heightened state too long:  you wear out, you get tired, you see the state for what it is—just a state, that you can ignore.  I'd like to claim some epiphany, a cloud-parting moment when I realized some secret, touched the rail, or solved the riddle.  I can't.  I didn't.  I just got tired.  Tired of being afraid all the damn time.  I couldn't keep it up.  I had to go on living.  Even if living meant dying.  I finally saw that you can choose not to be afraid.  It is not gravity or something ineluctable.  It's not even an emotion, though it often comes in emotional costume. It's plain and simple a choice we make.  Sure, sometimes something will give you a start, take your breath, catch you unaware.  But honestly, even that doesn't happen to me much anymore.  Guess it's why a roller coaster offers such appeal, even more than before: Thrill, virtual, play-pretend fear.  I'm not really afraid anymore.  Im just not.  You don't have to be either.  I know I could get sick again.  I could.  In fact, right now, the odds are I will.  Those are the breaks.  But I'm not afraid.  Not of dying.  I was. Terrified.  Sobbing, dreading, tortured and beggingly afraid.  Mainly, I think, because I didn't know how to.  Die, that is.  This was the great gift of my ordeal: I learned how to die.  I had to, I was out of options.  But I didn't die.  I don't know anything about being dead, but I know about dying.  To die you have to be humble and thankful and accepting but you also have to be brave and resolute and trusting.  The lesson I snatched from the arm of eternity is you gotta be these things to live, too.  The better you get at all these things, being thankful and humble and brave and trusting, the easier your life—and death—will be.

So what I feel emboldened to teach my kids and tell you is that fear is poisonous.  It's an energy sink and a waste of time.  Bad things are gonna happen.  So are good.  Those potentialities are in tension and constitute the pith of our time alive.  Fear is only a force coupler for the bad and a dilution of the good.  Rid yourself.  Go about your business, unafraid.  Im not talking about being reckless or stupid.  I'm talking about choices that are easy to forget are ours alone to make.

At the end of the Knobles day we stopped at the carousel.  When it was our turn I was at the back of the pack.  All the horses filled up, namely the perimeter horses, from which one can try for rings.  Ah, I thought, I'll just help with the kids and ride inside, standing next to my horse.  But something pulled me back.  I waited: behind the gate, first person in line for the next ride, while everyone else I was with went around.  Heather gave me a look like....you can imagine the look, and I deserved it.  But you can't get the brass ring from the inside.  Everyone dismounted, exited the ride.  I went in with the new group, picked an outside horse, feisty looking, flowing plaster mane, spiraled pole shooting out his back, one hoof tucked as if initiating a jump.  My party waited outside for the 43 year-old to finish his fake pony ride. Steel, steel, steel, steel.  Four steels rings.   Do I have to name alloy of the fifth?  Does ANYONE know ANYONE  who's claimed three brass rings in a lifetime?

You do.

JOBS AREN'T PALEO

The era of meaningful content grew a little more challenging in the last few weeks.  Sorry.  Material was fleeting and mercurial.  Good ideas hove in and out of view.  Mediocre ideas liked to linger and propagate.  Was also busy, though doing what exactly, I am hard pressed to say.  Also lazy, w/r/t this.  Here are a couple of arcs off the plasma globe.  Out with the garbage, in with the groceries.  Hope to hear from you.  Don't be sore at me.  They can't, they won't, they'll never stop the party.

Garbage:
Many of you know I wrote a novel, Marker.  Got close to publishment a couple years ago, but in the end, no.  Did a pretty thorough revision in the winter, agent took it back and cast the nets.  Couple nibbles early spring and then a big bite from a major house you'd recognize.  Things looked promising for a while, but in the end, as in the other ends, no.  Been at final desks or thereabout three times, now.  I'll say that rejection is very good for the ego, keeping it in check and all.  Also aids in existential angst, immobilizing self-doubt and generating giant ponderous questions that keep one from sleeping too much.  So, back in the shoebox goes Marker.  Gonna try to invent success through failure.

Local university posted a job for a strength and conditioning coach.  My interest was high.  The more I thought about it, the more I thought it was the sorta job I was made for.  Dusted off the resume, put the emphasis on coaching/teaching, thought, hell, this ain't a stretch, I make a pretty good candidate.  Many years experience coaching football and wrestling.  Some as a head, several as a dutiful assistant.  State Champion, National prep title.  Three CrossFit certifications, years of training very fit and very un-fit adults who quickly walk if the trainer doesn't get them results.  Built myself from the ground up three different times.  None pull ups to 30 butterfly in 10 short months.  I can do this job.  Damnit, I can kill this job.  But I wasn't allowed to apply.  The HR folks at said university required an exercise science or related degree.  Just to apply.  Me no habla exercise science.  A deal breaker.  If philosophy and writing aren't related to teaching, coaching, and communicating what is?  Apparently knowing how to calculate a VO2 max and where that puts one on the perceived rate of exertion scale is more important.  (actually I do speak a little ES, but consider it mostly falderal.)  The irony was not lost on Lut who pointed out that after a lifetime of running from the dumb jock label, the jocks finally exacted their revenge on me.  They don't want anything to do with a nerdy reader who honed his coaching skills in the (wrinkle nose) classroom.  I'll save HR departments for another post.  Anyway, can't get the job they won't let you apply for.  Kinda bitter about it.

Nearby private school was looking for an English teacher with capacity in American Lit, creative writing and some teaching experience.  This seemed like a decent fit if not lines out of my bio so I applied and they even let me.  But after some hemming and hawing the job went part time and then was hand delivered to a faculty spouse.  No interview for this guy.  Them's is the breaks sometimes.  School did me the solid of a really succinct form letter letting me know I wasn't up to snuff.  Man, I hate form letters more than greeting cards. (Maybe greeting cards don't hate form letters.  They should)  Not bitter but feeling kinda like hen shit on a pump handle.   I have been cleared for work, though I am supposed to avoid neckties and filing.  I'd like to be productive, to contribute.  Some scratch would be good.  I'm a poor to terrible employee but I'm good at what I do, can pull my weight and some more.  If you know of an opening for someone curious, well-read and particular, let me know.  Got any other ideas, let me know.  I'm open to suggestion.  Heather suggested Bachelorette party entertainment services, but she might've been being mean.

The boy started football practice this week.  He's all vim and joy and full of movement and hope.  The coaches are yellers and screamers, no idea about crowd control er team management.  They found their running backs in death by 40yd sprints, pulling last finishers out until only two remained.  Yeah, you want a fast running back, but. . . I don't know what I was expecting from the midget league D team, but it probably starts with bedrock fundamentals, three point stances, feet that keep moving, understanding the game, not a position.  Heavy sigh.  I don't really want the boy to like the game though I could hardly blame him if he did.  It is the most fun you can have not steering a wave runner.  I still have dreams where I get to suit up one more time.  Pilcher and Naughton are usually there and I often am short one crucial piece of equipment.  You don't need to be a shrink for that one.

Groceries:
The boy likes baseball too.  Loves it, really.  His favorite player is a center fielder for the Lancaster Barnstormers, that's an unaffiliated minor league team.  We walk to the park some evenings and keep score on Lut's scoresheet.  When the team is away the boy listens to the games on the radio and gives me the report in the morning while scarfing down a banana before we head out to the gym.  I hope he didn't inherit my arm.  I once was clocked at 49mph. which is pretty good for T-ball, but  I was 17 and the laughing stock of the field trip.  I still burn with the shame, but somehow it makes me smile too.  I think it makes me a true crossfitter, not being able to throw.  And this is surely evidence that success can result from failure. It just doesn't always look the way we think it will.

This ain't an exercise blog no more, but my numbers are good.  Squat is up.  Clean is up.  Jerk is up.  Last week I snatched 165 which is the number I relapsed at.  Not a big number, but a huge number if you follow me.  I have settled into a 9am class, teaching it, that is, at Crossfit Chupacabra.  Like all my classes they resisted me at first because I am hard to get along with but we understand and trust one another now and they are making huge gains and I'm so proud of how far we've come.  It's true what the blog says, there's always room for improvement.

Jimmy Z made his first quarterly trip back to the states and he made it in high James Adam Zientek fashion.  To sum up:  the door to the pinball machine's change box is broken, you have to wedge a piece of cardboard in there or hold it with your knee.  But if you get a good game going, your knee will get tired.  The dually still has steel belts peeking through thin spots on the tread.  It has been titled to me, but I'll be damned if I'm springing for tires. I only do motorcycle tires.  If someone else is buying.  The dually  DOES NOT fit on a 20ft trailer.  Or a 15 footer for that matter, both have been tried.  The color of the Chevy pickup purchased at a US Marshall's auction (6 inch lift, hail damage, prehistoric fruit in the cab) is not black.  It is Charcoal Gray.  Jim (I like to call him Pete and encourage you to do so as well) owns .00011 of all the 1970 Corvettes ever made.  One of them has a new radiator and if you only hand tools to the guy on the carpet-remnant creeper, you don't get to take any credit.  For the radiator.  Other things may be all your doing.  When Jim visits he drinks low carb beer.  I think he does this for me which I find ridiculous and touching at the same time.   He wasn't gone two hours when the girls asked "when's Jimmy coming back?"  I take delivery of the dually Thursday afternoon.  A tailgate party will probably result.

We live close to Plum Street in Lancaster.  The street Plum is home to six or seven bars in about 4 blocks.  The Plum Street Crawl.  I can't really vouch for any but The American Bar and Grill.  40 cent wings, tattooed waitresses and Golden Tee.  Every couple weeks we hike down there for wings and happy hour drink prices, teach the kids how to play video golf and tie knots in cherry stems.  This link is a recent shot that will not disappoint.  I am identified by the initials PNT.  Long as I've been playing vid, I've always been POT, for a couple obvious reasons.  Many years, many many high-score lists.  So I hit this shot and the machine flips out and says do you want to post your shot to YouTube?  Of course the answer is NO.  Unless you're with your 8 year old son.  Please dad, please dad, please dad, please dad. PLEASE. DAD.  PLEASE.  Long fake sigh....ok.  Then, while entering my initials, the boy's excitement sent him into the track ball just before I hit start.  PNT.  Might have to keep it.

Last week HG took the girls to NYC for a couple nights in a fancy hotel and Central Park and the Library and being young women about town.  It was their birthday.  The boy and I struck out for the coast of Maine.  On the way we listened to a Mike Lupica book about an American Legion baseball team in Florida.  A very Jeter-like character and a very A-Rod like character.  Totally enjoyable.  We also got in 10 or 12 chapters of Huck Finn.  Makes 16 hours almost slip away.  Got caught in Boston traffic.  We stopped in TroyNY to have lunch with KME and son, Rex.  Totally worth it.  I wish all my friends lived closer.  If you have kids, you've probably noticed all the storybooks that are set in Maine.  That's because it's pretty much a storybook place.  Bracing cold water, boats, and puffy clouds and sunshine and lobster pots and views of the Atlantic that lodge in the soul-mind and you can take with you.  I know of no kids books set in Troy NY.  The place produced KME, so I'm not going to be hasty with my conclusions.  Down East the boy was white-knuckled on the sailboat, brave as a native on the fishing boat, ate like a horse, slept like a dog, and barely cried when he took a fastball on the knee (my fastball, but still).  The Luts were ever so gracious, would have driven twice as far for half the stay. You just can't sleep without the sound of surf the way you can with it.

Finally, this is not like me at all, but I am determined to live frankly and honestly in the time left.  Seriously determined and the blog reminds me.  Less ducking, dissembling, pretending, posturing (unless for humor's sake).  With more vulnerability (especially for humor's sake).  This is normally something I'd sit on for a long time, but I think it's important to push on the limits of comfort, test the default settings. So here goes:  When the agent pulled the plug on Marker he insisted he liked my stuff and asked if I had anything else.  In fact I've been accruing pages. And they were starting to take some kind of shape.  Epistolary novel.  Dying man to young son. (don't roll your eyes yet)  The man has only his guns to leave the son and through them and their stories he tells the boy his own story.  It's a brief excerpt in much better shape than the rest of the pages, if it's in any shape at all.  I submit it for the reasons noted above, but also to leverage myself.  It's harder not to work when people know you should be working.  You are not encouraged to comment.  I am not soliciting feedback.  Do so if you like, of course, I've probably heard much worse than you can cook up.  Simply want you to know what I am up to.  Let us know what you're doing.

Sant, Sant, Sant, Potter, Potter aboard the Lark

11-87

       Won in a poker game.  Another man's wedding band was in the pot too.  And a stereo with speakers as high as your head is now.  I gave the ring back.  What was I going to do with somebody else's jewelry?  Pawn it or melt it down, I guess.  I didn't want that on my conscience, too.  The marriage was shot.  I knew it.  John Decker, that's probably a name you remember if not the man.  His wife Jenny and I were friendly when she and John were not.  I told you I would be leaving soon and you said daddy write me a letter and it broke my heart near to pieces.  I said, What should it say?  And you said, everything.  Well that's a start at everything, at all the things you wouldn't know.  Like me and Jenny Decker.   She was a good woman.  Nothing compared to your mother, not a moon-cast shadow, but a good person.  Hell, so was John.  He wasn't much of a husband, but I'm one to talk.  Not one to talk is what I mean.  Shitfire but this is going to be hard.

            I killed every turkey on the wall of the basement with that gun, the 11-87.  And I would have killed myself with it too, if I could've found the stones to do so.  There were a couple times there when it was bad, but I never could screw up the guts.  It was mostly a lack of courage, I want you to know that, but I was also troubled by the idea of you all cleaning up after me. When I was a boy a man down the street blew his brains out in the basement.  A hell of a thing.  The ambulance was there for about three minutes and the cleaning van three days.  We knew more about the mess than the old man, apparently he'd just had enough, a feeling I know.  But they had a hell of a time scrubbing pieces and stains of him out of the parge coat and the house sat vacant for years.  I thought that would just not be right and I have always to do right by you.  It will doubtless be years before your mother lets you have this, but I die confident that whatever thoughts you have of me you will know that.  That I tried to do right by you.

            You said tell you everything and your eight-year-old psyche knew what your brain yet could not.  That there was much to tell.  That's why you didn't say tell me a story how you usually do.  I'm convinced.  Everything, you said.  You've always had an old soul and if the soul is deathless like we are told, mine will wander the cosmos looking for yours, a piece of itself.  I gotta tell you, I doubt it like hell, the soul and all, but the idea of yours gives me great comfort.

            And you surely will want to know the manner of my decline and what of your family, the part that is me and the parts that are your mother and all of it.  I would if I were you.  Everything, you said.  I will tell you, though I am not much inclined to discuss a good part of it.  My sickness.  The fool I was with your mother.  I will tell you everything I can think to tell, as those were your instructions.  And I'll give you everything too.  Such as there is to give.  My guns.  There is more, papers and effects I think they say.  But it is worthless, and it will be just a less gory version of cleaning up after me.  I wish there were more.  I wish I had more to leave you.  But I do not.  Some iron, some ammo, a good name.

            Certainly there will be those who contradict what I tell you here.  Certainly.  You will make up your own mind as you should.  All I'll say is I aim for you to know the truth, to know me as best you can from what you remember and what I can provide for you here.  Just the other day you came in from playing baseball, your hair was matted with sweat and you smelled like outside.  I could tell you had forgotten about me, about your situation, our situation.  Forgotten it in your play.  When you came in I could see it all snap at your attention like a choke chain does a neck, the oxygen, the meds, the hospice lady.  I would just as soon die as have to see that look come over your face anymore.  I hope there are many days to come for you where you are no longer burdened with the fact of me in this state, days unencumbered by fatherlessness.  I know that is a bold hope.  I hope too there is some memory left of our salad days.

            Like that summer we lived in a row house on the east side of the city.  The Hospital was very close and at night the helicopters hovered in low over the houses looking for the pad.  The sirens cried down Lime Street and the cruisers shone their searches in the raceways, across the porches and into the yards.  Children's voices could be heard late into the night, voices of adults fighting, and then police voices squelching over the radios in the cars idling in the street.

            Our block was a row of peeling Victorians cut up into apartments. Our house was much like the others, except whole, un-apportioned. This was your first home and whenever we drive back through the neighborhood you thrill to see it, though I'm not sure how much you could remember.  Our neighbors were renters and retirees and laborers and drunks and crazies and petty crooks.  And the immigrants Cuban, Kosovar, Ethiopian and Dominican.  There were no trees on the street, so we broke a slab and planted a maple hoping for shade someday.  In the back yard I planted a redbud that I hoped would grow to shade your sandbox.

            I remember you were in the sandbox when I told you I was sick and you were there again when I came back from Baltimore for the first time.

            The sandbox I built for you.  You went down for a nap and I got a shovel and commenced digging.  I didn’t know how, but I didn’t not know how either.  Your mother asked me what I was doing and I said digging a sandbox and something about it made her want to cry.  Simple things always made her cry.  The hard things, the whoppers, the things that torture your sleep and you fear in the belly, she would set her jaw against them and not flinch.  But the simplest things would fill her eyes and her eyes sparkled even more than usual when they were filled with tears.  I could almost cry myself thinking about it, if I wasn't all cried out.  She stopped me from digging and held me tight and then kissed me below the ear.  The surest ways to win her over were making her laugh or doing something for you.  And I always knew I had her won when she kissed me below the ear.

            I kept digging and filled the flower beds with top soil, then the pots.  Filled the neighbor's beds and the neighbor's pots too.  I dug past the top soil and threw the outtake in the alley, taped the blister on my thumb.  The yard was long and narrow, so I believed that the sandbox should be very deep, and it was.  Silly deep.  The deepest sandbox ever, I declared.  I lined the bottom with pavers and dumped in bags and bags and bags of sand. It’s awfully deep your mother said.  Not deep, I said, profound.  And that got me another kiss.  I thought it would take you another year to get to the bottom but that evening while we were eating a picnic dinner on blanket in the yard you dug down and down until you put your feet on the cinder pavers so pleased with yourself.  That’s the way you have always been.  The first time I gave you a sandwich cookie you studied it as you ate it and when I gave you a second cookie, you studied it a moment more and then pulled the two halves apart with aplomb and went at the icing, squirrel to nuts.  People never believe that story, so I stopped telling it, but it’s true.

            When I came back from Baltimore the first time you were in the sandbox beneath the redbud.  You rubbed my bald head and said haircut, haircut.  Yes, haircut, I said, and we filled the trucks with sand then emptied them, buried the trucks to excavate them.

            One morning I came into your room.  You were standing in your crib with a book and you said, Today I am Christopher Robin.  I said, What would you like to do today Christopher Robin?  And you said, See Pooh and Piglet.

            As I say, this is the way you always were.  We were very happy.  We had a son and a new house and your mother got tenure at the university.  I took you to the park and the museums and the market.  In the spring I went turkey hunting mornings on what was your grandfather's land.  In May I brought home a tom I killed.  It was a prize bird, maybe a record if I had bothered to check. A fat old tom whose beard I could see dragging in the dirt at 60 yards.  He was magnificent and he strutted the field I was watching as if he knew his own beauty.  Turkeys are so haughty and regal anyway, but this one was a specimen—puffed up and self assured, proud and domineering.  I had hunted hard all spring without taking a shot.  That morning, the old tom gobbled from his roost before first light.  I gave a soft sleepy call and he roared back at me two three four times in a row, double gobbles.  Our hearts racing, I knew he flew down because of the thump on the forest floor, so big and close he was.  I called again, meek and soft, but he was mum.  I was patient.  I could hear him scratching the leaves.  When I called again he answered but he was farther away and making tracks.  I gave him time to make some distance so that I could follow him without spooking him, calling every 50 yards or so.  He was heading south and dawn was breaking bright.  Towhees were calling and somewhere a woodpecker laughed.  If I closed the distance between the tom and me, he answered.  If I stayed put and called, he was silent.  It went on like that, call and gobble, me following.  I crossed two property lines, the big stream down into a draw, up a rise and had to laugh being called by a gobbler instead of the other way around.  When I crested the rise I saw where I was, the near side of Haskill’s field and I knew the score.  Haskill had just turned his field that week.  The tom was off to feed on the worms and grubs in the new dirt and there wasn't any stopping him, just like chickens will hot step after you carrying a shovel of kitchen scraps through the yard.  On my hands and knees I crawled to the tree line and waited on the bird.  It was a long time and my heart swelled for the tom.  He gobbled at nothing and spat and drummed and puffed up and turned like a tank on maneuvers.  I hated to kill him.  I always hate killing turkeys, but I was determined to make you a call from the wing bones.  When the tom fed behind a wheel on Haskill’s hay wagon I gave a call that brought him to me.  That night you and I slobbered over turkey and gravy like a couple of roadside crows.  That tom’s wing bones I boiled free of cartilage and sinew.  I cleaned out the little bit of marrow left and fit them together with an epoxy.  It is a fine call.  I painted it with some Elmer’s glue and water, at trick I learned from the guy who did the English mount of the ten-point that hangs in your room.  The glue is bone white and gives a protective coating.  It is probably overkill for a wing-bone call, but I wanted you to have something nice.  You’ll find it in the gun safe.  I had intended to give it to you for your birthday that year but then everything happened.  Your mother will see that you get it at some point, I’m sure.  And now you know its story.  Haskill is who found your grandfather.  Don't know if you know that or not.  You should go see him if he's still breathing.  He would talk to you, I'm sure, and let you hunt, if you hunt.  Remember his field when it is newly plowed.  Set up in the tree line and do not call as you normally would.  They will come to you.

excerpted from the novel in progress

I'm Gonna Miss You When I'm Gone

by Christopher Potter