reminders (part 4)

We traveled through time and space, our rocket crashed at the feet of a beautiful green woman, her friends put our ride-home back together again and—like that—our little interstellar day trip is at its end. 

“The boosters we attached to your rocket should provide enough thrust to put you beyond the planet’s pull.”  So says the green beauty whose name is a song.  “But I’m afraid we can’t point you in the right direction.  We only know it is somewhere out there.”  She points to the sky.     

She gives me a parting kiss, and no sooner am I back in the rocket than John starts complaining that he didn’t get a kiss.  Toby leaps over the stick shift and plants a fat one on his lips.

“Not the same,” he complains.

My head is still light, my lips are tingling…and there is the sound of thunder.  The rocket lifts, and the pink sky turns to black space.   

“If you can hear this,” another of Dr. Hudson’s prerecorded messages is triggered. 

“Not this again,” John says.

“As I was saying…if you can hear this, you have triggered the rocket’s homing system.”

“Homing system,” I cry with joy.  “We’re going home.”

“In ten seconds, the time field that opened to get you to point B, will reopen to bring you back to point A.”  Then, as a recorded afterthought, the doctor says, “Everything between those two points will be undone.”

The hoop at the nose of the rocket starts to glow.     

“What do you think he means by undone?” I ask John.

He shrugs.  “Doesn’t matter.  We’re going home.”

“…three,” the doctor’s voice counts.  “Two.  One.”

I grip the seat.  Toby’s nails grip my legs.

Each of us is braced. 

Waiting for it.

Still waiting for it. 

“There you are,” Dr. Archibald Hudson says.  The driver’s door opens and the white-haired rocket owner himself is waving to get us out of his rocket.  “I’m a very busy man,” he says to the cat.  “Forgive me if I ask you to show yourself out.”

There are no questions.  No welcome reception.  No glass of champaign to celebrate our epic mission-accomplished.

The three of us are too stunned to do anything but accept our marching orders and leave the laboratory.  There is no talk on the elevator ride up.  When we step outside the sunlight hits our eyes hard.

“What just happened?” John asks, daring to question the veracity of the past day, give or take one twelve-hour time differential. 

“Look,” I say and point across the street to the kid in the taboggan who was mowing that same yard before we left planet Earth.

“Can’t be,” John says. 

I check my phone, the first of us to sync with the times. 

“It’s the same day,” I confirm.  “Where did the time in-between go?”

Toby holds up his paws and forms a furry letter A.

“Like the message said would happen,” John recalls.  “We’re back at point A, and the whole rocket trip has been undone.  Even Dr. Hudson didn’t seem to know anything had happened.”

“I guess he wouldn’t.”  I try to think this through.  “He didn’t travel in time with us.  He never left point A.”

We walk the short distance back to our own neighborhood.  John says he needs time to process what just happened.  He walks away and stops.  “No one’s going to believe this,” he calls back like a man reading the last page of the book first and deciding this is not the one for him.

John’s right.  I don’t know why, but we need someone who was not with us to believe our story.  And there is one person who might just fit the bill.

The cat and I chart a short course, walk three houses down, and arrive at a door we know well.  We knock, and the original old guy opens up for us.

“Is there a problem with the filling?” Telly asks about the free dental service he provided one day minus one day ago.  “You know, you really do get what you pay for.”  He shows us into his living room and holds out a foil bag.  “Figs?”

Toby helps himself.

“We went to see Dr. Hudson,” I tell him.

“Did he confirm my time at NASA?”  Telly’s smile begins to grow.  “Hellova good baker, isn’t he?”  Telly’s expressive eyebrows start stretching before the main event.

“He did, and he is.  He also built a rocket in his basement.  It’s quite a green-energy machine.  It uses time for fuel and a Hoola-hoop for the launch.  Anyhow…”

There is no easy transition into uncharted conversation.

“John and Toby and I took his rocket out for a short trip into outer space, crashed on another planet, and met this beautiful woman who speaks English.”

“What are the chances?” Telly says, just playing along.

“She said she learned the language from a collection of writings from one earthling wife to her earthling husband, sort of a portrait of the beloved by the lover.  She said the lover’s sentiments were shared with all the warring people on her planet; they reminded everyone who and what they are to each other and saved them from self-destruction.  Oh, and the woman was green.”

“Green, was she?”  Telly’s waxing smile is almost too big for his face.  He leans back to laugh as his eyebrows practically leap off his head.

“And you want to know the most unbelievable part about this far-fetched story?”  I pause to let his thoughts run wild.  “We have proof.  Toby?”

The old guy puts his brows on pause as Toby reaches into his fur and removes a fur-covered cap.  He blows off the layers of orange and yellow to reveal the letters N A S A over the bill.

“This belong to you?” I ask.

Telly’s face falls slack, his disbelieving eyebrows suspended above him.  He reaches for the cap he hasn’t seen in some sixty years and looks inside at the loving reminders penned by his late wife.  At once, his eyes tear up.  He opens his mouth to speak but “Where…” is the only word he can get out.

“Where did we find it?” I help him.  “The green woman with the kiss.”

“Green woman,” he repeats after me.    

“Dr. Hudson’s rocket has a number of pre-recorded messages to let passengers know it probably wasn’t a good idea to climb onboard.  One of them indicated that by traveling back to our trip’s starting point, everything about the trip would be undone.  It was apparently erased from the mad scientist’s memory.  I’m assuming you don’t remember standing in line for a Rocket Burger before the launch.”

Telly raises his head, and his typically-expressive eyebrows slowly return to points A-1 and A-2 on his face.   

“Are you telling me my old cap traveled to another world?”

“I’m telling you the reminders Alexi wrote in that cap saved a planet from destroying itself.”

Rodin’s signature man sitting on a rock never looked so thoughtful as Telly as he considers the far-reaching influence of his wife’s inscriptions.

“He did it,” he says with no hint of doubt in his voice.

“You believe me?” 

“Archibald is a pretty smart guy.  Way back when, he had a bright future with NASA.”

“What happened?”

“Like you, he met a woman.”  Telly’s voice is uncharacteristically soft.  “My wife.”

“Alexi?” Toby and I meow.

“I knew Archie liked her.  I never worried about it.  But she did confess to me that on one occasion she was tempted by another man.  An older man.”

“You don’t mean Dr. Hudson.”  I laugh to stress the incredulity of the thought.  “If anything, he is a few years younger than you.”

“Unless an older Archibald went back in time to revisit her.”  He puts on his accustomed fedora and stands up.  “We have to go.”

“Go where?” I ask as I follow him out.  In the drive next to his house is the classic car he seldom drives anymore.  He pulls off the heavy plastic cover and throws me the keys. 

“The question is not where…but when.  If we’re going to stop Archibald from doing something, to what point in time do we go to do that?  Do you arrive at the moment of the thing you want to prevent?  Do you choose a time afterwards and then try to rebuild?  Or perhaps some time before so that we can put in safeguards, to warn or inoculate Alexi from a future caller?”

“Is Dr. Hudson something you can inoculate a person against?”

“I don’t know.  I’m just brainstorming my options.  Which may or may not even be options.  I’ve never done this before.”

“Well, how do you propose we do this?  Dr. Hudson is not just going to let you take his rocket out for a spin.  And your Chevy is no DeLorean.”

“First, let’s get to the place.  That’s our X, Y and Z coordinates.  Then we’ll work on the next coordinate.  Alexi.”

That’s when it hits me.  “Alexi.  She’s Point A.”

“Right.”

“You still don’t know when he went back.  It could be any time, any day over a sixty or seventy-year period.”

“I think any time before he met her will work,” Telly says.  “Get in.”

We drive five hours south, until we get to a small town just shy of the sprawling reach of Atlanta.  The town has all the signs of former growth, collapse, and revival.  Telly directs me to a charming neighborhood with a park built around train tracks no longer in use.  It’s late in the day when we pull into a small parking lot near the tracks and stop the car.

I look around at the restored wood-frame homes and the park’s pricey swings and slides.  “This is nice.”

“It is now,” Telly says, contrasting the here-and-now with the same here at another time.  “You see that house on the corner?”  He points across the street at a house with a front porch on both the first and second floors.  “That’s where we lived when I went back to Emory on the G.I. bill.”

“It’s gorgeous.”

“Yeah.  Now.”  He starts to lean nostalgic, when he shakes his head to snap back to our shared time and place.  “The sun will be setting soon.  We will be less conspicuous then.”

“We will be less conspicuous…doing what?”

“Just wait.”

Toby holds out his paw to Telly for another helping of figs. 

“Easy there, pal,” I warn him.  “We don’t know how well figs in intestinal transit will travel in time.”

When twilight covers the park, the things around us lose color and edge.  “It’s time,” Telly says and steps out of the car.  He opens the trunk and removes long jumper cables and two metal spikes.  A few feet in front of the car, he sticks both spikes into the ground slightly more than one car-width apart.  He points the spikes away from each other and a thin wire connecting them springs outward to form an arc.

“Pop the hood,” he tells me.  I watch as he hooks the jumper cables up to either metal spike and then one opposing end to the car battery’s negative terminal.  “This will create what my dear nemesis Archibald Hudson refers to as an energy field.  That’s a bit of a misnomer.  In function, it’s more of a flat worm hole.”

“Wait a minute.  You carry around a portable worm hole in your trunk along with the spare tire and the jack?”

“In sixty years, it’s never been put to the test.  Its functionality has been in theory only.”

“Don’t you sort of need the energy of an exploding star to create a wormhole?”

“Only in theory,” he answers with confidence.  He attaches the second cable to the positive terminal and hurries back to the car and pulls the passenger door shut.   “Once you turn the ignition, hit the gas hard.  This isn’t going to last long.”

“What isn’t going to last long?”

“Our window of opportunity.”  The one theme he hasn’t strayed from all day. 

 I turn the key and a familiar blue light fills the space within the wire hoop in front of the car.

“NOW,” Telly cries.  “GO.”

I hit the gas, spraying dirt and gravel as I drive us through the blue light. 

“STOP,” Telly cries.

I brake hard and the hood slams shut, the chrome grill just inches from a tractor trailer minus the tractor.  We couldn’t have traveled more than twenty feet, but it is clear from our surroundings, we are far from where we were.

The park is gone, the twilight too.  It is daytime, early afternoon, judging by the light.  The train tracks are still here, only now there is a line of container cars rusting on the tracks.  The trailer that is inches from the front of the car is covered by large swaths of rust, as are about four other abandoned trailers, their tires flat and bald.  We step out of the car.

“Whoa,” I say.  “We really did it.  Look at this place.”  We are facing the other side of the street where the same stretch of lovely two-story houses is far less lovely now.  Their paint is chipped and peeling, their wood porches sag in big frowns.  The house on the corner which Telly says he used to call home looks ready for demolition.  “What happened?”

“The better question would be what hasn’t happened yet.  It was a lovely neighborhood about forty years before we lived here, and it was just starting to make a comeback when we moved out.  See that pink bedsheet in the window there?”  He says this like a loving parent divining something of the Da Vinci in his preschooler’s crayon smash-up.  “The place came without curtains.”

But the old guy’s fondness for the old days fades like the twilight between days there and here.

“What do we do now?” I ask him.

“I don’t know.  How do you keep something that never happened from still-never happening?”

In the roughly five years I have known him, Telly’s confidence and his ability to gauge the outcome of any process has been rock solid.  Hearing now the existential doubt in my wise friend’s voice is more than disconcerting.  Like learning that Santa might not live at the North Pole, or that Bumbles, after all, might not bounce. 

“I understand now,” he says, “since the day Archibald met Alexi, she has been both his starting point and destination.”

“Telly, do I need to remind you which of the two of you your wife was married to all those years?”

He holds his head and nods.  “But I wonder, just as everything about your space odyssey was undone for everyone else by your traveling back in time, if my marriage—even who I have become over the years—could be undone.”

Toby climbs up Telly’s leg to slap him across the face.

“Stop that,” I demand.  “Be reasonable.  Alexi married you.  She chose you.  Your old pink bedsheet still flies in the window.  If you need a reminder, you have a fedora—and a NASA cap—filled with the reminders she wrote.”

At this Telly removes his hat and stares at the love notes written by his late wife.  As he reads, there is click on the other side of the street, and the front door of the corner house opens.  A young woman, early twenties, steps to the edge of the porch and puts up her hand to block the sun.

“Can I help you?” she calls across the street.

Telly pales.  “It’s her.”

When my friend says nothing, I call out, “We’re trying to figure out where we are.”  Then, to Telly, “Say something.”

The old guy holds his fedora over his heart, and I’m worried a weathered hat may not be enough to keep him from going into cardiac arrest.  At my cue, Toby climbs Telly’s leg again and slaps him across the face.

“That’s not quite what I meant,” I correct my furry mini-me.

Toby gives me an exasperated glare and stands on Telly’s shoulder so that he can purr comfort and confidence directly at his ear. 

“What do I say?” Telly asks me.

“What did you say to her the first time you met?  That must have worked then.”

“It was Christmas under the mistletoe, and we weren’t exactly talking.”

“What about after that,” I urge him to think faster as his beloved crosses the road between us.  Toby leans into the old man’s noggin to expedite his recollections.

“I told her I have no money and no job and that until I kissed her, I had no direction in life.”

Toby looks at me and shakes his head sadly.  It’s a beautiful line that only a very young man could get away with.

The young Alexi wades through the tall grass like the fearless prow of a ship.  Hair of dark chestnut falls past her shoulders.  Her eyes are green suns that defy one to look away.  The old guy who has never shown fear, trembles now behind the trembling hat in his hands.  The twenty-something he has loved for almost seventy years stops in front of him, bringing two distance here’s into one cataclysmic now.

“Hey there,” I say when Telly refuses to take the lead.  “We kind of ran out of gas.”

Alexi furrows her brow.  “I thought you said you were lost.”

“Yeah, that too.”  I look to Telly for help.

“How did your car end up so far off the road if you were running out of gas?” she asks.

Solid point.

“I thought I we were coasting into a parking lot?”

Alexi is looking hard at something behind us.  “Nice car.  It looks new, but old.  What is it?”

“Oh, it’s a 19…”  It dawns on me that I don’t know the year of the classic Chevy nor the year we have returned to.  “Let’s see.  Nineteen hundred annnd—"  I draw out my answer to give Telly a chance to intervene and date the car after the date we have arrived at.

“Why are you really here?” Alexi demands. 

“Okay, this is going to sound a little weird, but my friend here used to live in this neighborhood.  We were passing through and he wanted to stop and have a look at the old place.”

“Which house?” she asks my friend.  “Which one did you live in?”

Telly points to the corner lot with no trees.

“What’s wrong with him?” she asks me.  “Why doesn’t he speak?” 

“I think the cat on his shoulder got his tongue.  Show her Toby.”

Toby sticks out his tongue.  But the clever young woman is not convinced.

“Your cat doesn’t look so well either,” she says. 

Only now do I recognize the mild distress in my furry wingman. 

“Do I need to call the police?” she asks with absolutely no sign of fear or concern.  “Are you casing out the neighborhood to determine which houses you want to hit?”  Alexi frowns, more frustrated than concerned.

“Okay.”  It is time to come clean.  “We came here to prevent something from happening.  The thing is, we don’t know when it might….arrive.”

“Arrive.  Do you mean like a package?”

It is unclear to me how much information from the future I can share with the past without jeopardizing everything in between. 

Alexi looks to my friend for answers, and the fedora rises further up the old nose.

“Telly,” I demand.  “I kind of need your help here.”

“What did you call him?” the young Alexi asks. 

Toby digs his claws into the fedora and pulls it as far as Telly’s brows.

Alexi looks at me and says, “What are you not telling me?  This thing,” she says with air-quotes.  “Does it put me at risk?”

The three of us shake our heads.

“Who then?” she demands.

Alexi raises her hand and pulls Telly’s fedora down, revealing a beloved obscured with age.

“Your eyes,” she says, stepping back.

The cat leaps to the ground and holds his belly.

“I know you.  Don’t I?” Alexi asks the future.

Telly looks ready to give up the ghost.  Toby starts making a familiar toilet-plunging sound.  I’m thinking this would be a good time to ditch all plans and get both of them back to the car. 

“It is a young man’s decision to follow his love of a woman, like one star in a crowded sky.”  Telly finds his voice, but it’s half-choked and ready to croak.  “And it is an old man’s satisfaction to discover it was the best decision of his life.”

Alexi’s eyes widen.  She knows. 

Given no further explanation, she puts her hand on Telly’s chest and asks, “Was I unfaithful?”

“No,” he says.

“Did I change?”

He shakes his head.

“Then I am dead,” she concludes the inevitable. 

Telly presses his eyes shut.  He puts one wrinkled hand over the hand of his perfectly young bride.  “You are always in my heart.”

This is possibly the most beautiful moment I have ever witnessed.  For the cat, however, this human drama may be too much.  He excuses himself and steps away through the high weeds.

“But you have doubt,” Alexi says.  It is clear to her now that Telly has had reason to question her fidelity.

Telly opens his hands and widens his eyes as a man who has just opened the pirate’s chest of unspeakable treasure.

“How can I not?” 

His silent gaze proliferates with reasons ad absurdum.

“I see your silliness is something you will not outgrow.  So...”  Alexi exhales thoughtfully.  “I guess I will just tell you every day.  No, I will do better.  I will also put little notes in your books and whisper in your ears while you sleep.  I’ll spell out my love with indelible marker on the waistband of all your underwear.”  She smiles for him to understand.  “That way you will remember and never doubt.  In me or us.”

In the middle of this beautiful moment, someone makes a wretching sound on the other side of the street.  The three of us look and discover Toby in the yard of the corner lot licking his paw after a decidedly ill-timed expulsion of figs.

Time traveler tossing his figs.

“I swear.”  I am beside myself with embarrassment.  “I told him we didn’t know how undigested figs would travel in time.”

“You better go,” Alexi says to her future husband.

“But….”  Telly looks hurt and dismayed.  “We just got here.”

“And you are going to be pulling into the driveway any minute.  Catching me talking to an older him might be difficult to explain.”

No doubt.  It’s rather difficult to hear.

Alexi stands on her toes and gives her old husband a kiss just long and passionate enough to make me consider crossing the street and tossing my own figs.

The old guy is positively dazed after the first kiss he has had from his wife in many years.  He falters and staggers backward. 

“I’ll take it from here,” I say.  Toby and I walk our friend back to the car and buckle him into the passenger seat.  “I’ll do everything.  You just tell me how to get us back to the present.  Our present.” 

The long jumper cables are still connected to the grounding stakes.  They are just long enough to reach as far as the hood and the battery therein.  Telly is staring at the late wife who charted the rest of his life back in the way-back day.  When I slip inside behind the wheel, I see another car approaching from the far end of the street with a young driver who looks like he could be Telly’s son. 

Quickly, I turn the key in the ignition, and blue light fills the thin metal arc behind us.  I pull the gear shift into reverse, hit the gas hard, and brake just in time to avoid a line of cars parked behind us

It’s still day light, not exactly the time we left.  But the park is the same as we found it the day before.

“We made it,” Toby and I cry with relief. 

But Telly is quiet.  Dazed.

“Did that really happen?” he asks, already starting to doubt. 

“After everything she just told you?” I tell him.  I’m about to refer him to the reminders he carries in his fedora, when Toby directs my attention to something across the street.  “Would you look at that?” I say and point to the same corner lot that was treeless one day and one married life ago. 

“My God,” Telly says.  “Toby?”

The cat is blushing at the holy confusion. 

I have to laugh, but I am willing to credit the little guy with seeding a reminder to last a lifetime.

In the front yard of young-Telly and young-Alexi’s rental house, there is now a massive fig tree with iconic his and her green leaves. 

“I think it is safe to say,” I venture, “that what just happened did, in fact, happen.”

His head still reeling, Telly asks, “And what’s that?”

“Your indelible meaningful life.”

message (part 3)

Our rocket hurtles through black space.  Perhaps slips better describes our cosmic passage.  Or tiptoes.  For there is not a sound.  No vibrating metal under duress.  Just the timpani of three racing hearts in the cockpit as we watch the universe unfold in the monitor.  Stars shimmer, wobble and wink out.

“Where are the white streaks?”  John’s voice squeaks.  “This is not how they do it on Star Trek.  There are supposed to be white streaks.”  

He is right.  This is not what we would have expected if we had had expectations.  If we had any expectation after getting on the rocket, it would be getting off the rocket.  Not taking off in it.     

We are swiftly taken out of our earthly context where nothing means the same as it did before our launch.  Words like yesterday and tomorrow seem different from what they were.  Home is a word long gone.  Help is irrelevant, this far out. 

I tap on the door to my side and press one palm against its window, keenly aware that the few layers of metal and glass in Dr. Hudson’s DIY rocket are the only thing standing between the three of us and instant annihilation.  It defines the in we brought with us from the out that surrounds us.

There is a collective deep breath as we take hand in hand in paw.  This is all we have left.  Each other.

And then there interposes a voice.

“If you are hearing this, you are still alive.”

“God?” we cry.

“I recorded this message in the event something goes terribly wrong.”  It is the voice of Dr. Hudson.  “Clearly something has.  Terribly sorry about that.  There should be enough oxygen onboard for about three days.  After that, you will have to do without.  My sincere apologies.”

“This is it.”  My voice is flat, without hope for tomorrow or longing for yesterday.  “Less than 24 hours ago, Telly was describing for us the meaningful life.  He didn’t say anything about a meaningful end or what to do if the end comes before there is meaning.” 

“What are you talking about?”  John’s eyes are fixed on the monitor and the wobbling and winking-out of stars.  “There is always meaning.  Telly said it just isn’t summed up until you die.  That’s for others to figure out.”

“But what if I haven’t achieved enough, or left enough, for others to figure that out about me?”

“Man, that is not your concern.  Again, according to Telly and his fedora, there is the meaning of your life which you can’t know, and there is the meaningfulness of your life that only you can know.  Don’t compare yourself to Telly.  The rest of us just do the best we can.”

“My best.”  I review the short list.  “I’ve held down a remote job, paid my bills each month, carried my covid shot record in my wallet, kept up on current events with a lot of NPR.  I’ve maintained.”

“You met me,” John’s voice is punctuated with his former pulpit passion.

Toby jabs me with a nail to remind me of another relationship in my life.

“Your relationships,” he pauses dramatically.  “Your relationships…are part of the meaningfulness of your life.”

I can’t dispute anything he says.  “I just wish I had known sooner that this rocket trip was in our future.  I would have done some things.”

“I would have skipped the rocket,” John says.  

There is a long pause.

“John?”  I look beside me.  “Before our three days are up, I just want to say your friendship this past year has meant the world to me.  It has made a dark time a little brighter.”

John nods tearfully.  “Before our ride is over, I want to come clean and tell you…I hid two of those mini cakes with pink frosting under my seat.”

When Toby’s tail sinuates its way under John’s seat, the former paster shouts, “EH!  I’m coming clean.  I’m not giving up.”

His words—Earth-words we brought with us—ring in my ears.

“You’re right,” I tell him.

“What.  You’re okay with me holding out on you?”

“No.  But neither am I prepared to give up.  We’ve got enough oxygen for three days, and as long as we have breath there is hope.”

Toby and I look around us for something to pin that hope on.  He points to what looks like a steering wheel, or bar, in the dash and pedals on the floor.  Perhaps not exactly things I know, but things that look like things I know. 

“Hey John, the controls on my side look at lot like the wheel and pedals on a straight-drive car.”

“But this is not a car.”

Toby nods.  Solid point.

“Yeah, but…”  I leave it right there and tell John to hold onto something.

“What…why..”

I hit the brake pedal I think I know and turn the steering wheel hard.  The universe in the monitor turns.  The metal in the walls groans unnervingly.  My vision momentarily furs-over as someone scampers over my face.

I bring the wheel back to its home position as the rocket completes a 180-degree turn.  The universe in our monitor now retreats.  Red dots pop into being.  Red lines become white lines become Star Trek streaks.  Then white stars.  We slide backwards through the field of celestial lights as the distance between them swells with more black space.

“Oh my God.  We’re slowing down,” John says.  “It’s working.”

Gradually, the black space before us becomes pink and magenta.  Clouds appear.  There are mountain peaks…

                       ______________

Then Toby is tapping my face, as he does each morning long before I need to be up.  I open my eyes and remember we are in a rocket, flying through the fatal vacuum of space.  And I notice the rocket’s driver’s door is missing.  At once, I hold my breath to preserve the last of the oxygen in my lungs.  Toby shakes his head and pants like someone with access to a whole planet’s-worth of oxygen.  Reluctantly, I inhale, and then I do it again. 

On the monitor, I see a vast stretch of sand and rocks and craggy mountains that would look right at home on a post card from the moon.  In the distance, I see several figures in what look like space suits approaching us. 

“Are you seeing this?” John says.

“I see it.  I see them.”  These creatures from this other world.  “Looks like they have two legs and two arms.  Like us.”

Like us, the aliens from planet Earth.

“And big guns, unlike us,” John says.  “Man, I hate monster movies set in outer space.”

When the outside actors in this real-life moment are less than a hundred feet away, they remove their helmets.   Their complexions are different shades of green.  One of them, I can tell, is female.  Her cheeks are high, her lips full.  At fifty feet, she lowers her weapon and pushes back the flowing green hair from her emerald eyes. 

At twenty feet, I’m in love.

“Where are you going?” John cries when I step out of the capsule.  “We don’t know what these people are capable of.  We don’t even know if they’re people.”

“I know enough,” I answer him, charting the next few minutes for myself.  “I know I’m not waiting until my air runs out to do something meaningful in my life.”

When Toby hops onto my shoulder, the green outsiders point and smile.  I hear what sounds like music coming from their mouths. 

“Hello.  We are Loch and Toby,” I say to give them a sample of our own language.  “That’s John back there in the rocket.  This is a lovely planet you have here.  Forgive me if I sound like a typical American with just a few hours before he has to get back to the cruise ship….but does anyone here speak English?"

The one green woman I can’t take my eyes off of, cants her head curiously and repeats after me, “Lovely.”

At least, I think that’s what she says.  There is no real V or L in her enunciation keeping her vowels straight.

“My God.  You speak English?”

“My God,” the woman says.

I sense a certain misunderstanding and go through my introductions again.  “Loch and Toby,” I say and I point.

“Ahh and O’hey.”  She smiles as though to suggest the only misunderstanding is mine.  She pushes back her hair again, and her fellow green people look at her as though to ask Girl, what do you think you’re doing?

“Uh, Mr. Loch and Toby,” John says at my side.  “We don’t know anything about these people.  What they want.  Last time they ate.  What they eat.  Seriously, if she pulls out a bottle of catsup, I’m outta here.”

The woman approaches me and removes the gloves from her perfectly green hands.  Because I don’t want to scare her off and ruin this uniquely meaningful moment, I offer no resistance when she cups my cheek and jaw with one hand and puts the other over my throat.  “Speak,” she says.    

“Better do what she says,” John says, stepping behind me.  “I got your back.” 

“We’re from a planet called Earth, which, oddly enough, is the same name we call our dirt.”

“Really?” says the guy at my back.  “The first thing you think to say about our home planet is that?”

“I have no idea,” I forge on, “how to tell you where in the sky that is.  The little guy on my shoulder is Toby.  He’s a cat.  Most of his words sound the same.  So you have to listen closely for the intonation and consider how close to feeding time it is.”

I feel the two green hands riding the swell and collapse of each word.

“How do you make the words?” she asks.  At least, I think that’s what she’s asking.  Her vowels are solid, but her hard consonants are non-existent.  Her questions and hands, however, suggest to me she might recognize this shortcoming and want to do something about it.

“John?” I ask, sandwiched between two green palms.  “How do we speak?”

“Heck, I don’t know.  How do we breathe?  Isn’t it kind of automatic?”

“Exactly.  That’s why babies always ask you to pass them the bottle of milk instead of cry about it.”

“I meant we don’t have to think about it.  Once we know how.”

I jerk when the woman puts two green fingers in my mouth. 

“Ma’an,” John says.  “That’s not right.”  But the unconcerned wingman on my shoulder cranes his furry neck to peer inside my mouth. 

The woman’s fingers press down gently on my tongue. 

“Speak more.”

Follow the opportunities, I recall Telly’s words. 

So I take this unprecedented opportunity to describe for this woman the attention we commanded on Earth when we were just two guys and a cat in our rocket poking out of someone’s back yard.  I tell her some of my goals for the future, like getting back to Earth and confirming I remembered to turn the oven off before I left.  I list some of my favorite movies and restaurants.  And I express my reluctance to get involved in a long-distance relationship but my willingness to travel if I meet the right person.

The fingers in my mouth restrict the consonants formed at the front of my tongue, leaving only the hard K sound in the back of my mouth to work with. 

The probing woman shakes her head and pulls out her fingers.  Whatever she had in mind, this isn’t working. 

However, the interest in her face grows.  Her eyes shimmer behind a veil of tears.  I can’t remember a time when a woman was this interested in hearing what I have to say.  She looks determined that we are going to have a meaningful conversation, and she puts both her hands behind my head and pulls my nose against her nose.  “Speak more.”

Nose to nose to nose…

I repeat exactly what I have just said.  Global attention, electric oven, dinner and a movie, long-distance relationship and willingness to travel.  When I get to the right person, she puts her lips lightly against my lips.  

At this point, I find myself strangely less interested in the meaningfulness this moment is adding to my life than the moment itself.  If high school Spanish had been half as hands-on, I might have paid more attention to those crazy verb conjugations.

My forward student smiles to feel the front end of my puttering P’s and bouncing B’s.  Her eyes melt with each murmuring M.  When I ask why, the opening wha on our lips breaks into laughter. 

“More,” she says with more emm at the front.  

“Don’t mind me,” John says beside me.  “I’m just the guy who traveled with you through time and space so you could kiss one of the locals.”

I tell her more.  I tell her about the planet we call home, the rising tempers among electorates and the growing divisions over self-interests.  I tell her about the beautiful similarities of people on either side of climate changes, vaccines, gas prices, and the Depp/Heard trial.  Commonalities too easily overlooked.  I tell her about the small town I call home and the specific house with screened porch that is my home.

As a green tongue enters my mouth to plumb the process of human speech, my mumbling monologue falters.

“Em’ore,” she asks.  

It is not clear that this woman’s interest in me is anything more than linguistic.  I know there is no better way to master a new language than to speak it with another for whom it is their native tongue.  But she has brazenly taken this heuristic approach to a new level by asking me to speak with both our tongues. 

I give her em’oer. 

Going back to the screened porch, I tell her about the meaningful visits with friends, how we take our coffee, what we say in conversation.  I reference the guy next to me pouting by himself.  I explain that we talk a lot about women…because we are men and that’s what men do.  And I tell her about my ninety-two-year-old friend who doesn’t talk much about women, unless it is to reminisce about his late wife Alexi.  I describe his unworldly conception of wealth, his character as his sole possession, and his pursuit of opportunities to help others.  Mumbling tangentially, I add that he fixes teeth and prepares taxes at the unbeatable price of zero.  And given our remarkable age difference, I tell her he should be anything to me but the best friend he has become.  He is a model person whose end of life will show the world that he was second to none. 

And then I say his name.

At once, the woman pulls away and takes back her tongue. 

“Telly?” she asks with perfect ta and la.  Her eyes are wide, her expression that of a person who has just heard confirmation that something she could only believe before is true.

“You know this Telly?” she asks with perfect enunciation.   

“You sure do learn fast.”

She looks behind at her people.  “He knows Telly,” she says to them like it should mean something.  When it clearly doesn’t ring any bells, she rephrases herself.  “Ee oh elly.” 

The others understand at once and bow their heads.  One kneels. 

“What’s going on?” John asks. 

“We are ambassadors,” the woman says.  “We are on a mission to seek out intelligent life and bridge communities by sharing a message of love and civility.  Interestingly, the language you speak is the same by which our message was revealed to us.  We just did not know how it sounds.”

“Your message?” I repeat after her.

John and I look at each other, further bonding in our mutual confusion.

“How do you know this language?” I ask.  “Our language.”  

“Look,” John steps forward to make a point.  “If you’ve been listening to our old TV shows and newscasts, please know we are better than that.” 

The woman signals to one of her fellow ambassadors,  who steps forward and holds up a box.  The woman puts her hand over the box and the lid springs open. 

“If that’s a bottle of catsup…” John stops himself when he sees what it is the woman has pulled out.  An old baseball cap with the letters N A S and A embossed on the side.  She handles the cap with reverential care.  She turns it over and extends her arms show me something written inside. 

I peer at a multitude of letters I know, covering the underside of the cloth dome like astrological signs in the heavens. 

“In your arms I want for nothing,” I read.

“More,” she says.

“Your words are a poem, you sing to me.” 

“More.”  Her voice trembles.

“If we can’t pay rent, my body will shelter you.

When the big bad boss is in your face, remember who will wash you with kisses that night.

You smile at me and the sun pales.

If you are lost, I will find you.”

When you doubt yourself, I still believe.”

My voice comes to an emotion stop.  There are tears on the woman’s green cheeks. 

“Now,” she says, “after all this time, we hear how these words are said.  Cap-of-Telly was discovered by accident, caught on the leg of a satellite brought back to our planet for study.  It was almost discarded as trash until the writing inside was discovered.  Linguists like myself studied it until we could reconstruct the language and understand the inspired sentiments of the writer.  You said her name is Alexi?”

“Was.  She was Telly’s wife.”

“At the time when this was discovered, our planet was nearing its own self-destruction.  Its people were fractured with disagreement, and there was war on every continent.  When my colleagues and I broke the cap’s code and understood its message, we asked ourselves if this could be an answer to our prayers.  It said everything we needed to hear.  We shared its message, broadcasting it to people in every part of the world.  And they listened.” 

She presses her lips and her eyes flutter.  “They stopped fighting.”

“Telly’s old cap did all that?” John asks. 

“This,” the woman takes back the cap.  “It saved us from ourselves.”

Unbelievable.  Cap-of-Telly has literally transcended space and time to spread the message of one marriage and its secret for longevity.  The meaning of their two lives continues grow from planet to planet like an interstellar gospel.

John has to sit down.

Toby grooms.

“Will you be going back to your porch on Earth?” she asks me.

I look behind me at the capsule separated from the rocket, and the door separated from the capsule. 

“We would like to.  But we might have a few repairs standing in the way.”

“We can help,” she says.  “I would like you to take this, to return it to the man who inspired the writer of these words.”  She hands me the cap. 

I give it to Toby for safekeeping. 

“You know,” I say confidentially, “our rocket does have a back seat…if you want to go with us and meet Telly for yourself.”

Her smile is poetry, to borrow a line.  It sings.

“It is tempting,” she says.  “But I cannot.  Now that I can speak the language of Cap-of-Telly, I must teach others how to say the words, to reinforce the message that brought peace to our troubled world.”   

“Well, I tried.  By the way, I never got your name.”

Just as she responds, I put my lips to hers, and a sweet melodic phrase with no hard consonants fills me. 

“Ma’an,” John continues to pout.

I can’t begin to say the name of this linguist from another world, but I will never forget.

Boy with cat meets girl from outer-space.

embark (part 2)

Before leaving Telly’s backyard Drill & Fill dental practice, John and I ask the philosophical dentist a final question about the meaningful life, something he has mentioned more than once today.

“How do you chart a meaningful life?” he repeats back to me.  “Excellent question.  Impossible answer.  There is too much stumbling in life’s dark places and bumping your head on the unexpected to chart in advance what could become a meaningful life.  That said, without pain and darkness, I don’t know that any life would be meaningful.  And as there are different destinations any one life could take, there are many routes to get there.  One’s values can serve as a general compass.”  Telly taps his fedora, wherein we have seen with our own eyes the guiding words penned by his late Alexi.  “But the best direction doesn’t mean squat without the willingness to leave port and embark on the course.”

Got it. 

Or maybe not.

John, Toby and I dawdle on the street in front of Telly’s house, trying to work up the effort to will something or other. 

“What do you want to do the rest of the day?” I ask John.

“I dunno.  What do you want to do?”

Some conversations you never outgrow.

Toby, my feline mini-me, removes from his coat the business card on which Telly wrote the name and address of the one man he says can lay to rest any doubt we have regarding his former identity as a bonafide rocket scientist.  Just one of many jobs our friend has had in his meaningful life.

“Dr. Archibald Hudson,” I read the name out loud.  “What do you think?  It might be fun to check out Telly’s claim that he worked for NASA in the 70’s.”

“You don’t think he did,” John says accusingly.

“I don’t think he was ever a dentist.”

John rubs his cheek behind which a tooth was drilled on less than thirty minutes ago.  “But I can see him mowing medians for the DOT.”  Yet another job in Telly’s long list.   

“But NASA?”

Our rising curiosity fuels the will.

“How close does this Dr. Hudson live?”

I point ten minutes north-west.  

We estimate our tanks are filled with sufficient will to walk at least ten minutes.  And we embark.

The day is hot, and the effort to find Dr. Hudson is soon less rewarding than dawdling and speculating.  About the time our wills are coasting on fumes, we spot a kid mowing his parents’ yard, wearing a Waldo-striped toboggan to keep out the July heat.  Presumably.  He looks up at us, shakes his head and points across the street to the likely address that two men and a cat would be looking for.  We heed his direction and go to the front door of a ranch style house and knock. 

An older gentleman in a white housecoat opens the door and tells the cat on my shoulder he is a very busy man.

“Excuse me.”  I gently redirect the man’s attention.  “Dr. Hudson?  A mutual friend suggested we pay you a visit.”

“Mutual friend?” he blusters.  “I have no mutual friends.”

I show him the funeral home business card. 

“Blasted it all.  Look, if you’re here to sell me another burial policy…” 

“Other side,” I redirect him, and he turns the card over where he finds his name and address handprinted.  “The mutual friend is Telly Bishop,” I tell him.  “Old guy.  Like you.  He says the two of you used to play together with rockets.”

“Telly?”  His tone changes to one of disbelief and wonderment.  “You know Telly?”

“Yeah, we know Telly,” John says, strangely injecting a little pride into his claim. 

“We didn’t believe him when he said he used to work for NASA,” I tell him.  “He said he would show us his old work cap to prove it, but someone shot it into space.  He said you would be the next best thing.”

“The next best thing,” Dr. Hudson repeats after me and smiles cryptically.  “It is one of life’s ironies that we see others come into possession of exquisite treasures without actually doing anything to earn or deserve them, while I invest myself two-hundred percent and get nothing.”

John and I step back from the conversation’s sudden and pouty change of direction.  I have no idea what set the off the doctor, until Toby whispers in my ear with an idea.  

“It just occurred to me,” I tell him, “NASA probably had a whole cache of NASA caps in a closet, or in a box under someone’s desk.  Probably still do.”

“I’m not talking about caps.” 

“Cache-a-NASA caps,” John says and rocks his head. 

“Cache-a…” Dr. Hudson stops himself and strains with face and hands to take back the last two seconds.  “Unfortunately, our mutual employer frowned on launching co-workers into space without their written consent.”  He shrugs at the powers that be.  “So, at the time, sending Telly’s cap into space seemed like the next…best…thing.”  He slows down when he repeats my words back to me, like a car slowing to highlight the lift and drop of each despicable speed bump in the road.

Toby and I can tell something about placing second to Telly’s cap doesn’t sit well with the old guy.  “Technically, you are only next-best if we have the cap in-hand.  Without the cap, you are literally second-to-none.”

John stops chanting cache-a-NASA and looks at me as though to ask what the heck I think I’m doing.

But the guy in the white coat?  He smiles and asks, “Would you like to see what second-to-none looks like?”

“Sure,” we answer. 

We enter a wide foyer outfitted with a Lazy-Boy chair and a flat screen TV.  Off the foyer to the left, we enter a more spacious living-room with a second Lazy-Boy chair in front of a TV.  At the far end is the dining room with yet another big chair and big TV. 

“Nice,” John says, clearly prescribing to the single man’s essentials-only furnishing code.

The walls, however, clash with the minimalist furnishings, hosting a collection of awards, framed letters, ribbons, continuing education certificates, and glossy 8 X 10 pictures of the doctor at various stages of hair loss shaking hands with important looking people.  Curiously, there are at least a dozen pristine cache-a-NASA caps hanging from hooks.

“The kitchen?” I ask of the next room in which we find an overstuffed recliner, a big TV, refrigerator, and stove. 

Our guide says not a word.

In fact, he doesn’t open his mouth again until we pause in front of an elevator door, opposite the fifth recliner/TV ensemble on our tour.

“You are no doubt asking yourself why there is an elevator in a one-floor building,” he says. 

“To access an otherwise hidden route to leave port?” John proposes.

All Toby and I can do is stare at our friend.

“Interesting,” Dr. Hudson says with mystery as he pushes the button on the wall.  The door retracts into the wall and a magnanimous smile opens our host’s mouth. “Please,” he says and waves his arm for us to enter.

“Wait!” I stop everything.  Something about the elevator is all wrong.  “There’s no big chair and TV.”

“Seriously?” John says and boards the elevator with the doctor.  The cat on my shoulders tells me to just go with it.

“I want to point out—” I point out, “that this IS a one-story building.  And we are standing in an elevator on the house’s one and only floor.”

“And your point?” the doctor asks.

“Elevators go places.”

“Yes?” he encourages me to continue with my thought.

“Now, I’m just thinking out loud here.  But if our intention is to go somewhere, and we are in an elevator on the building’s only floor, we’re kind’a already there.  Aren’t we?”

“In time,” the doctor muses, “the place where you are becomes another place.”

Before we can puzzle over the statement, the doors slide shut and our stomachs drop.

“I feel something,” John says.

“I feel it too,” I say.

“Gentleman,” Dr. Hudson says to us.  “Relax.  We are going down.”

“Down where?  The crawlspace with a two-foot clearance?”

The man shakes his head.  “My laboratory.”

At once, the man’s white housecoat is transformed into a white lab coat.

“I am going to show you, friends of our mutual friend, what I have been working on for the last forty years.”  In the man’s eyes, I recognize a certain twinkle I have seen before in Telly’s eyes when he is speaking of his late wife.   

“A girl,” he announces with a certain flair.

“In the basement?” John asks.

“No!” the doctor says.  “The inspiration for my project.  The inspiration is a girl.”

“A girl?” John again questions the man who must be in his eighties by now.

“Okay, a woman,” he concedes.  “But she was much younger when I met her.”

“Now she would be what?”  John tries to add up numbers he can only guess at.  “Seventy years old.  Seventy-five.”

“If you take away the forty years,” the doctor says, “she hasn’t aged a day.”

If there is a response to this self-evident statement better than duh, we don’t know it.

Our ride stops and the doors open unto a dark and unspecified floor in the earth.  Dr. Hudson steps bravely into that dark and waves his arms frantically like a castaway on an island who has spotted a plane. 

Lights flicker on at either side and upward several hundred feet above us. 

“Wow, this is some basement,” John says.  “Was all this here when you bought the place?”  As he talks, we approach a giant cylindrical object that reaches into the flickering heights.  “Say, how much value does a below-ground missile silo add to a house anyhow?”

“Wait a minute.”  It hits me.  “You’re a rocket scientist.”

“I am.”  Dr. Hudson seems utterly delighted to recognize the trajectory of my thinking process. 

“That’s not a missile.”

“Go on,” he urges me. 

“Did you build your own rocket?”

“I did.” 

I am more than impressed.  “But you were already at NASA.  Why didn’t you stay with their rocket program and save yourself a few dollars?”

He sighs for all the years since.  “They were interested in going places.   The moon.  Mars.  I was interested in going back.”

“Back,” the three of us repeat after him.

“Back to point A.”

“Sure,” John says agreeably.  Behind the doctor’s white coat, he winds his finger in crazy circles around one ear.

“Would you like some cake?” Dr. Hudson asks, apropos of nothing that has been said so far.  But John and I don’t need apropos where food is involved.   

He shows us to a table set with bite-size cakes under an upturned punch bowl.  He removes the glass cover and John and I help ourselves. 

“There now.  Let us have a closer look at the rocket.  Shall we?”  Dr. Hudson leads us to a platform with mesh sides and an open gate.  He closes the gate and the platform begins to rise.

John takes a first bite of cake and stops the moment it hits his tongue.  “Oh Sweet Jesus, this is good.”  This is the first time I have heard the former paster call on the lord to help describe anything.  But when I put one of the cakes in my mouth, I hear an angelic chorus singing in perfect C.  I grab the rail and hang on. 

The good scientist pauses to let our bodies and minds catch up with him. 

“You like?” he asks. 

“Second to none,” John says and holds my shoulder for support.

The platform stops and the doctor shows us across a metal plank to the side of the rocket.  I’ve seen pictures of the old capsules that brought our astronauts back to Earth.  The interior is typically cramped with small bucket seats that look about as comfortable as wooden bleachers at a high school pep rally.  So, you know, I’m kind’a expecting real old school discomfort.

But.         

“Behold.”  Dr. Hudson opens the capsule’s door, and we discover inside the day’s sixth overstuffed-recliner-with-big-TV ensemble.  With no less than a second recliner.

“Nice” I say.

“You like it?” Dr. Hudson asks.

“Second to none,” we answer in unison.

“I know,” he says humbly.

“What’s that up there on the nose of the rocket?”

“It looks like a giant hula hoop,” I say.

“No’oh,” Dr. Hudson says.  “That is the method of travel.”

John and I exchange blank looks.

“Wouldn’t one travel inside the rocket?” I ask.  “Rather than shaking it on the nose of the rocket?”

“What I mean to say is, the hoop, or field generator, is what enables the rocket to move through space.  There is only a modicum of gas in the tank, for directing the rocket once it is out of Earth’s atmosphere.  The real fuel is Time.”

Toby joins us in looking blank.

“The field generator—the hoop—propels the rocket into the next second.”

“Doesn’t the rocket already travel into the next second just by being there?”

“I’m trying to simply the physics for you.”  The doctor frowns.  “The rocket travels through the hoop into the next second of space-time, instantaneously arriving there a second before it would have otherwise.”

Those blanks looks just won’t stop.

“The motion is accomplished by giving the rocket a little kick in the beginning and pushing it through the hoop.  Once it is in motion, the field generator keeps it in motion by preserving the initial kick.”

“And where does the initial kick come from?”

“The ship is resting on a giant magnet that requires only a small jolt of electricity to give the rocket a little repulsive lift.”

“And you have tested this?”

“On paper.”

“And how high off the paper did it lift?” 

The doctor smiles sadly.  “Alas, I lack the funding for proper test subjects.”

“Yeah,” John agrees.  “That’s too bad.”   

“But I do have more treats,” he says with a smile as big as grandma pulling a fresh baking sheet of cookies out of the oven.

“Where?”  Our stomachs growl with the will to eat.

“In the glove compartment.”  When we are slow to respond, he adds, “In the rocket.”

I leap into the capsule first, seizing the driver’s seat.  John hits the passenger seat and pops open the glove compartment. 

“Jackpot.”

While John and I are doing our darnedest not to waste any crumbs on the folds of our shirts, Toby stands in the doorway, unwilling to commit himself to in or out.

“These are so good,” I say.

“You should taste the ones with the pink frosting,” John tells me. 

When it is clear to Toby that John and I are not going anywhere soon, he saunters in and climbs into my lap.  At once the door shuts.

“Hey,” John says.  “Why’d you shut the door.”

“I didn’t shut it.”

On the front dash monitor, we can see past the nose of the rocket where a disc of blue light begins to glow within the hoop. 

“Maybe we should get out,” I say.

“But there are more cakes in the back seat,” the doctor’s voice speaks through the dash speakers.  Our stomachs act with a will of their own.  We find the second cache-a-cakes and settle again into our seats.  I watch on the monitor as the light within the hoop grows brighter and more intense.  

“The ones with the pink frosting are the best,” John says. 

The only pink frosting I see is on John’s mouth and chin.

“Did you eat all the ones with pink frosting?” I ask him. 

“There are all kinds,” he quickly points out.  “Some with nuts.”

“But you said the cakes with pink frosting are the best.”

“Were.”

“I can’t believe you did that.  You ate them all.”  The earlier lessons of the day are called to mind.  “And after Telly just gave us his spiel about following opportunities and creating a meaningful life.”

“Man….”  John scoffs and laughs at the same time, scoff-laughing pink frosting right up his nose.  “I saw an opportunity, and I followed it.”   

Toby is unwilling to let himself be drawn into an argument.  He purposefully kneads my lap and curls himself into a tight cat-ball.

I try to recall more of the words of wisdom from Telly’s fedora, but nothing his wife Alexi wrote back in the day could have anticipated the gustatory joy of Dr. Hudson’s sweet cakes and the disappointment now of forgoing this second-to-none.

“I hope you’re satisfied with yourself.”  I get in one last dig.

“Meaningfully.”  His voice is deeper, slower.

“I think you’re misusing that word.”  I wait, but John doesn’t respond.  He begins to snore.

Once I talk myself out of stewing over such a petty matter, a heavy calm comes over me.  My body and head sink deeper into the plush cushioning of the recliner.  I’m used to feeling a little groggy after a big meal, but right now I feel poised to hibernate.  As I continue to watch the blue light in the monitor, I can see Toby’s reflection in the glass.  His chin settles and his furry eyelids close.  The heaviness weighs on my stomach and eyes like a drug. 

And then there is a thump. 

“WHA….” John cries.

I open my eyes and remember where I am: a big recliner in a capsule on top of a rocket.  A small light illuminates a dash panel and a spray of pink frosting covering the controls.  Beside me, John is pointing. 

Beyond the tip of his shaking finger is the monitor.

On the monitor is a field of stars.

to be continued…

While traveling with my cat through space in an armchair, I saw a few things of interest.

the opportunist (part 1)

The brim of Telly’s fedora taps me on the brow as he peers into my mouth.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” John asks as our ninety-two-year-old neighbor. 

Telly’s eyebrows lift his hat.  “Mostly.”  

Toby is balanced on John’s head, using his tail as a cantilever as he leans with John to see what’s going on with the drill and the clothespin in my mouth.

View from the dentist’s chair.

The old drill prospecting for cavities is connected to one end of a jointed swivel arm.  A metal cable loops around pulleys at the base of the drill and the joint in the arm, and then it cycles into and out of a round enamel housing where a motor buzzes like a hive.  I’ve seen period pictures of such contraptions from the 1940’s and 50’s, in the trade magazines my usual dentist has in his waiting room for patients to read.  When he’s not on vacation in Cabo.

The fedora bats me again on the head.  

“Hold this for me, will you?” Telly asks and hands John his hat.   

“You look different without that,” John says. 

Telly chuckles.  “I’m sure.  I only take my hat off for three things: coffee and looking into mouths.”

The rest of us wait. 

“You said three things,” John finally says what I can’t.

“I can’t get anything over on you.”  Telly laughs as he repositions my clothespin.   

“Your hat,” John says, looking inside it.  “It’s got some writing in it.  Whoa!  It’s FILLED with writing.  What is this?  It looks like a giant cheat sheet.”  He laughs.  “When I was a kid, I used to write my spelling words on the bottom of my shoes before tests.”

Telly explains that his late wife Alexi penned it for him a second time when he lost the original.

“The original what?”

“The original noggin-shaped manuscript.  Alexi knew there would be times and places she couldn’t be with me.  So she gave me my own cheat sheet—to borrow a phrase.”

“So it IS a cheat sheet,” John ribs him.  “Let’s see.”  He turns the hat to catch the light.  "It says here to love your neighbor, but remember who shares your bed at night.”

There is a twinkle in Telly’s eye.  “Alexi had a wonderful sense of humor.”

“Honor your parents but obey your wife.  I like it.”

“Unfortunately, some of the words haven’t traveled the years as well.  Sweat and wear has all but erased her definition of a good husband.  Which might not be altogether a bad thing.  Her’s was a tough one to live up to.”

“Here we go,” John says.  “The things of greatest worth can be had,” he reads, “but none of it can be bought.  Hmm.  That one sounds a little Zenish.”

Telly laughs.  “Or McCartney.  The hat is all about love.  But it speaks with philosophy, holy commandment, marital tenets, and a touch of smart-ass.”

“Here’s one underlined in red.” 

“Oh boy,” Telly says to me under his breath. 

“Meaningful comes before meaning.”  John reads at the tip of his finger.  “I make its meaning; you make it meaningful.”

“Alexi was referring to her life, its overarching meaning.  And she was suggesting that I might have something to do with its meaningfulness.”

“I like it.  But what does it mean?”

Telly sighs heavily as though he’s been asked to condense the dictionary into just a few words.  “Honestly, I don’t know if I can tell you.”

“Seriously?”  John laughs hard.  “As much as you like to pontificate?”

“It’s the sort of thing best understood by considering someone’s actions and motivations.  Alexi is saying that I made her life worth living.  But what she means, is that her interest in me and her actions toward me made her life meaningful.  Or more meaningful.  I’m sure the Beatles could say it better in a song.”

“But why the hat?  Why did she write all this in it?”

“The hat is also supposed to make me mindful of what I had with her.”

“So you wouldn’t look at other women?” John asks.

“That might have been the motivation.  But it needn’t have been.  I never looked at another woman, except to have a conversation or extract a tooth.”

“So they’re words to live by.”

“Well, words she wants me to live by.  She’s not asking everyone to prescribe to her perspective and her values.  Just me.  Although if everyone did, I’m sure the world would be a better place.  Alas,” he says with nostalgic flair, “There is only the one hat.”

“Here’s another one,” John says.  “Money is a concept.  What the hell!”

Telly smiles at our friend’s knee-jerk rejection.  “That one?” he says.  “I suppose the gist of it is: there is too much money in the world.”

“What?” John cries. 

Toby mewls. 

I launch a cotton ball across the room.  The absurdity of the comment lifts my back off the chair, my hands from the arm rests.  But the dental instrument in my mouth compels me to let the madman speak his mad thoughts. 

“The real problem,” John says playfully, “is there is too little of that money in my pocket, and too much in the pockets of the one percent.” 

“I don’t know, John.”  Telly winks at me.  “The wealthy one percent might be doing you a favor by holding onto all that wealth.”

“Doing me a favor?  Doing me a favor?”  John calls on his former oratory skills as a preacher.  But the poor man’s indignation gets the better of him and he can hardly speak.  At once, Toby drops to all-four and gives John’s head a quick baker’s pat to knead out the furrows in his brow.  “Doing me a favor?” he asks again.

            While the drill hums merrily along, Telly actually turns his head. 

Away. 

“Yes,” he says calmly.  “Read the hat for yourself.  Too much wealth and too much focus on one’s financial portfolio can come with great cost.”

When Telly finally looks back at my gaping mouth, he frowns like he just remembered something he should have been paying greater attention to.  

“How can you say that with a straight face when the whole world is on the brink of economic Armageddon?  Hey Loch, is his face straight?  I can’t see.”

I give John a thumbs-up.

 “You see,” Telly says thoughtfully, “money isn’t wealth—real wealth—unless you hold onto it.  And if you hold onto it, you forfeit opportunity.”

“Not the opportunity to make more money,” John argues.

Solid point, I corroborate with my thumbs. 

“Think about this,” Telly says.  “Your Ben Franklins are just strips of paper.  But it is agreed that they represent some value in the bank so that we can use them to buy things.  It’s more convenient than herding your cow into an Apple store to trade for an ipad.

“But whether you buy and sell with paper and coins or cows and grain, the more of it you have, the more it demands of you.  Can you imagine the wealth of Musk or Gates in terms of cows?  Musk and Bezos would have to step up their colonization of Mars for grazing needs alone.”

“The idea is preposterous,” John says.

“That’s my point.  The more you have, the more effort it takes to keep up with it.”

“I respectfully disagree.  Because of the wealth I inherited from my Aunt Giselle, I now own my house and car outright.”

“And that ownership?”  Telly’s expressive eyebrows pull back like a stage curtain.  “That’s a concept, too.”

“Telly, man, I love you.”  John smiles as he tries again to rub his head, and frowns when he keeps striking fur.  “But you are just wrong.  What is mine is mine.”

Telly’s face creases with amusement.  He keeps his back to John, but I can see the dentist’s hilarity, behind the scenes, where I really do wish he would pay more attention to the patient in his chair.

“Forgive me, John, if I start to sound too much like you when you had a pulpit.  But if you believe in God—or aliens on Haley’s Comet seeding planets with the stuff of life—how can you own what he, or they, have wrought.  Unless the bill of sale for your house is signed by the Almighty, the deed is just another social construct recognizing the address at which you receive mail and for which you pay taxes.  If the Maker didn’t sell it, you didn’t buy it.  Your only birthright is the opportunity—or opportunities—you are lucky enough to stumble upon or, in the case of you and Aunt Giselle, be born into.”

“Well…” John’s enthusiasm sags discernably.  “I still got the money.”

“You do.  And you paid your inheritance taxes.  Good job.  Because you embraced your opportunities and paid off your banknotes.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“I am.  But I’m also asking you to think outside the bank account and consider the character you forge over a lifetime.  When you leave this life and forfeit everything to family and state, the only thing that still belongs to you—the only thing that ever belonged to you—is your character.”

“I’m satisfied with who I am.”  John sounds oddly defensive.

“You should be.”

“Are you saying character-development is the meaning of life?”

Telly shakes his head.  “I can’t tell you the meaning of your life until you leave in a chariot of fire or the next passing of the comet.  Death defines your life.  And because I like you and would like to see you work on your character a little longer, I am perfectly content, for the time being, that your life have no meaning.”

The meaning of my life has been redacted to protect its meaning-in-progress.

Telly and I can hear John’s inner kettle starting to boil. 

“John, I’m just having fun with you.  I’m not trying to get under your skin.  God knows.  But you read the writing in the hat, and you asked me what it means.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask you about the rest.”

Telly rubs fine sandpaper over my new filling and tilts my chair back upright.  “All done,” he tells me. 

I rinse.  Then spit. 

“I want you two to know,” I say, “just how much it hurt to sit here and not be able to say anything when the two of you are discussing something I might have a thought or two about.” 

“Oh?” Telly says.  “What are your two thoughts.”  He is just tickled by himself.

“One: I can’t just email my creditors and tell them to write off my debt because I’m such a swell guy.  Two: why didn’t it hurt when you turned my mouth into a construction zone and gave me nothing more to block the pain than a clothespin on the tongue?  Three…”

“You said two.”

“AND THREE,” I demand.  “Where can I get a hat like that?”

Telly holds up his hand.  “So, one: you may have missed an implicit—albeit key—point.  While money is a concept, debt, unfortunately, is very real.  Two,” he says, moving right along.  “Did the clothespin work?  You seem kind of upset you’re not in more pain.”

“It did work.  But how did you know it would work?”

“Just a little trick I picked up in the Korean War when I was asked to pinch my tongue with my own fingers while a guy took out an abscessed tooth with a pocketknife.  MY tooth.”

John and I exchanged humbled looks.

“I used a similar technique back in the states when I worked in pain management.  And three,” he says and takes back from John that which is his.  “Get your own hat.”  He puts the seasoned fedora back on his head.

“You do realize you have just referenced yet another career to add to your long list of professions.  Pain manager, dentist….”

“Taxman,” John adds.

“Tax preparer,” Telly begs for specificity.  “George Harrison never wrote a song about the guy who prepares your taxes.”

“And mason.”  John adds yet another profession to the list.  “Mattie Philps sits behind me at church, and she told me you rebuilt one of the brick walls of her house.”

“I saw an opportunity to kill a solid week.”

John shakes his head emphatically.  “Miss Mattie said by the time you were done, you had added on a whole new room and a half-bath.”

“I like to build things.”

I ask him, “What else is on that list things you like to do?”

Telly takes a moment to consider.  “Slide down firehouse poles, police communities, teach history to middle-schoolers.”

“Telly.”  John jumps down from his seat and starts rinsing and spitting, even before his time in Telly’s chair.  “Usually, a person sticks with one job for twenty or thirty years and then retires.”  His tone is almost accusational.

“I follow the opportunities.”

“You should be considering retirement.”

“I have retired.  Several times.”

“Then you’re doing something wrong.”

“I’m trying to live a meaningful life.”

“Are we…”  John stops before he can get started.  “Have you…”  Still turning his key in the ignition.  “What is it?  Are we talking about the meaning of life or a meaningful life?”

Telly hesitates, forcing John to wait on him.  “Those are two different ideas.  One points to a definition I don’t know, and the other suggests a value that only you can know.”

John rubs the cat on his head.  “I’m confused.”

I take a turn and ask Telly if it is really necessary to change professions so many times to have a meaningful life.

“Of course not,” he says.  “I could have had a perfectly meaningful life if I had kept pulling teeth.  Same thing if I had remained at the Department of Transportation.  Or NASA.”

“What did you do for the DOT?” John asks.

“Are you kidding?” I commandeer.  “What did you do at NASA?”

“Cut grass,” he says to John, “and built rockets,” he says to me.  “Both were rewarding in their own right.”

“Rockets!  How in the world do you go from rockets to cutting grass?”

“This might be a good time to tell you that meaningful employment is only one variable in the equation for a meaningful life.”

“Yeah…yeah,” I say, waiving off the other variables.  “Do you have any pictures from your space days?”  

“Are you asking me if I can substantiate my claim of a paycheck from the space agency?  Not exactly.  I could if I still had my old NASA cap.  But a certain co-worker—who also wanted a hat like mine—thought it would be personally satisfying to throw it in with the satellite we were trying to get into space.”  He looks up, past the ceiling, to infinity and beyond.  “If he couldn’t have it, he didn’t want anyone to have it.”

“That’s certainly more inventive than the dog eating your homework,” John gives him.  “But it’s not exactly proof.”

Telly scratches his chin.  “I guess you could just speak with him.”

“Who?” I ask.  “The guy who sent your proof into space?  Do you still stay in touch?”

“I try not to, but he lives in town, on the other side of Cherry Street.”

“That’s within walking distance.”

“I know.”  The old guy moans.  “I left NASA, in part, to get away from Archibald.  And darned if that rascal didn't follow me.”

“Archibald,” I repeat the name to myself.  “Would you mind terribly—”

“If I told you where he lives so you can go there and verify my previous employment?” Telly finishes for me.  He sounds a tad disappointed to learn that our confidence in his words has its limitations. 

“Yeah.”  John doesn’t back down.

 Telly writes something and hands me a business card for a funeral home.

“What’s this?  Did someone die?”

“I used to buy these things in bulk when I was a director at a funeral home.  Waste not want not.”

“Funeral home?”

The old guy appears weary of my growing disbelief in his expanding resume.  “Here, take that silly clothespin off your tongue.  I think it’s cutting off the blood to your brain.”

“Before I leave, tell me what I owe you?”

“Nothing.”

“You just performed a procedure that would earn my regular dentist a good chunk of money.  And twenty percent of that chunk would come out of my pocket.  What do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” he says again. 

“Same crazy price he charged to do my taxes,” John says. 

“I charge nothing when I volunteer at the downtown dental clinic on Wednesdays, and I charge nothing for friends.  We are still...”  He tips his head down to peer over his glasses.  “...friends.  Aren’t we?”

“Totally.”

“Then stop making such a big deal of it.  Taking care of a tooth for you made this day more meaningful for me.”  He turns to John with a hint of the get-evenist.  “And it will add even more meaning to the day to get the homeowner with a deed from God and an ache in his tooth in my chair.”

The look of WHAT?

telephone line

John and Telly are at my house today for coffee and a disagreement.  Toby lets me know this is an opportunity for him to catch up on his cat-napping.  So he steps away to let my friends and I be human for a while.

“You really should get one of these,” John says, brandishing his new iphone.  “It’s like having a computer in your pocket.”

“I like to keep my pockets empty so I have a place to put my hands,” Telly says.  “If something comes along that needs computing, I still have my original equipment.”  He taps his ninety-two-year-old head.

“A smartphone doesn’t replace your original equipment.”  John is laughing now.  “It enhances it.”

Telly lifts the fedora out of the seat beside him and puts it on his head.  “This all the enhancement I need.”

“Look.”  John holds his phone in front of him and scrolls through screens of candy-colored apps.  “My whole life is in here.  My contacts, my Kindle app, my Instagram and Facebook.”

“What about the phone part?”

“Yes.  And a phone part.”

“No, I mean how good is the call quality?  Can you understand people on that thing?”

“Mostly.”  John looks at me to stop surfing Tik-Tok for kitten videos and help him make his case.

“It’s an impressive piece of technology that has given everyone with obsessive-compulsive-disorder—like our host—a new outlet.”  Telly holds up his hand when John’s cheeks and brows start bunching with indignation.  “I understand what a marvel it is.  I really do.  But I am quite content with the last generation of technology.”  He points to a niche in my kitchen wall wherein an old-school phone is nesting.  I am one of those who straddle the generations of technology.  Like Telly, I appreciate a phone call free of static and mumbling.  But don’t take my Tik-Tok.  “I have seen almost a century’s worth of one technology replacing the old,” the old guy says.  “You are not going to get a better call quality than analogue.”  

But John is ready with his rebuttal.  “Can Loch carry on a conversation with a rotary phone while he drives from home to the store?  That,” he points to the phone niche.  “That thing keeps him in one place like a dog on a chain.”

“If you are inclined to use your phone while driving,” the nonagenarian says calmly, “you and your car should be kept on a chain.”

“Can he tweet on his landline phone?”

“No!”  Telly roars with laughter.  “It’s a phone.”

On cue, the old analogue phone rings, something it seldom does.  I give out the landline number only to those I care to understand. 

I lift the receiver out of its cradle, and before the first hello, I can hear what sounds like a locomotive clamoring through a windstorm.

“Hello?” 

I hear nothing but a raging storm.

“Hello?” I try again.

“Loch, eh’abby.”  Like that chained dog, subjected to a downpour of human words, all I can make out is my name.

“Who is this?” I ask.

“Tabby!”  The caller finally makes herself clear.  Tabby is my next-door neighbor, eight years into a fraught relationship with parents in Information Technology who are still searching for the admin and about files on their late-model daughter.  “…need help!” she says.

I feel a twinge of panic.

The phone’s long spiral cord lets me walk as far as the window over the kitchen sink.  I look out at the house next door, but it looks perfectly normal.  “At you at home?” I ask.  “Where are you?”  I can hear a loud banging inside a larger volume of sound.  Possibly high winds.  Or big machinery.  I look behind me at John and Telly, whose coffees are on mid-air pause as they sense my budding concern.

“Talk to me,” I say and walk to the porch doors in the living room.  The heavy coil of telephone line that connects phone to wall drops to the floor as it accommodates my peripatetic proclivity.  “Tabby?”  I listen hard.  The call quality on the old phone is crystal clear, but the thing I am listening to is anything but.  “Have you fallen overboard in a typhoon?  Are you and your brother dueling with vacuum cleaners?”

“What is it?” John asks me.  He and Telly follow me to the porch door, through which we can see outside a calm sunny day. 

“Maybe it’s just a bad connection,” Telly says.  But he knows better.  This is, after all, reliable analogue technology. 

“Are you hurt?” I ask.  John looks at me and shakes his head. 

I open the porch doors to give myself more room.  John and Telly tip-toe in place as the phone’s bundled coil slithers past their feet, out the porch door, and out of the house. 

“Tabby, is anyone with you?” I ask.

“…can’t do this much longer,” the kid says in a moment of clarity.  “…driving me…” 

I walk away from the house as I try to recall my empathy training from work.  The person leading the class suggested that sympathy is a telephone line that spans the divide between employee and customer.  Empathy, on the other hand, eliminates the divide to the degree that one can put themself in the other person’s place. 

I figure it should work outside the office as well.   

So I do my best to put myself on the other end of the call.  I ask myself to understand what the young girl is going through.  Where she is.  What is happening.  As my mind divines the target, my body feels the chain-and-sprocket jerk of Life taking us steadily uphill.     

There is a sudden drop in temperature.  “Tabby, what’s happening?”

I look up into the blue sky where a dark cloud is taking shape. 

On the ground, fallen leaves begin to stir.

There is a cry or a laugh.  Maybe a scream.  I can’t tell. 

“Tabby!”  My empathetic stomach pulls the caller’s panic into me.  Anything could be happening.  Something always does.

My stress level sores.

“Loch!” Telly calls from the porch steps.  “Get back here.”

A shadow falls over my house and friends, even as I turn. 

“Now!” Telly demands.

Over the phone, all I can hear is the howling of wind, the crashing of surf, the erratic pounding of what sounds like buildings collapsing about a little girl who reached out to me for help. 

At once, my feet leave the ground.

“LOCH!” John shouts.

The storm on two ends of a phone call lifts me above friends and over my house.  Into the darkening sky.  Static stress crackles in the air and calls the hairs on my neck and arms to attention.

Far below me, the last of the cord spins out, just as John and Telly grab hold of it.  The phone’s base drops as I clutch the receiver with both hands, uncertain now which end is which.  “I know it looks bad right now,” I shout, trying to reassure Tabby.  “But we can get through this.” 

My body wheels in a circle like a kite in a hurricane, no doubt exactly what my eight-year-old neighbor is going through.   

“Hang up the phone,” Telly calls to me. 

“She needs someone to understand,” I shout back.

John has both his legs wrapped and braced within the iron railing beside my porch steps.  He is holding one leg of Telly while the rest of Telly sways in the air above his head.  The earth-bound side of the telephone line is wrapped around the old guy’s hands, the only two hands holding me back from the vortex churning above. 

And I see more.

There is a third human anchor dangling from Telly’s other leg.  Tabby, the very person I am supposed to be having a conversation with.  Her legs scissor back and forth without a firm ground connection.

“Stop flying around,” the kid sings out.  “I was just washing my shoes in the washing machine.”

“What?”  I am sure I heard wrong.

“Confound-it, Loch!” Telly cries.  “You are empathizing with a house appliance!  Get back down here!”

She’s safe, I tell myself.  Tabby’s okay.  But I have started something I cannot stop.  The past two years of covid alerts, lockdowns and toilet paper shortages have given me plenty of practice in responding in all the wrong ways to Life’s stressors.  Quite without intention, I have raised worry to a fine art.  Now, by virtue of that art, I am inextricably bound by my own masterpiece.  It is too strong.  My grip is weakening.

And then I see him. 

My one-cat calvary is hardly a ball of fur as he travels up the phone line like a master of the high wire.     

Toby runs the line, leaps from the phone’s swinging base and catches my shoulder.  Without a meow, he throws himself across my head and reaches his forepaws under my nose.  He tightens his body, stronger than the tides of wind.  And he begins to purr.  Not the gentle armchair purr I know, but a mega-watt pulsing that breaks up my worried thoughts. 

In seconds, I can feel the vortex above us losing momentum.  This allows John and Telly to reel us in before I get another call.   

“What was that?” John asks the moment I have both feet on the ground.   

“I should have let go,” Telly says with a tad of disgust.

“I couldn’t help it.  I was worried.”  I turn to Tabby.  “About you.”

“Why?”  Tabby pretends to be all-innocent.  “I was just washing my shoes.” 

“And you called to tell me that?”

“I was bored,” she says.

“She was looking something more entertaining than spinning sneakers,” John says to me.  “And she found it.”

“You know,” Telly says to John, “if she had called him on his cell phone, we would have lost him.” 

“Are you about to argue that its anchor to the wall gives the analogue phone an advantage over a smart phone?”  John scoffs.  “Seriously?”

“I’ll prove it,” Telly says.  “Tabby go put your shoes in the dryer now and call Loch on his cell phone.”

“No more calls.”  I hold up my hands.  “Not today.  This empathy is powerful stuff.”

Telly nods his fedora.  “It’s usually practiced between two biological self-aware life forms.  Just saying.”

“Imagine how much understanding people could achieve if they used it responsibly,” John piggie-backs.

“Seriously,” I say.  “I wonder if I should report this to HR.  This sort of thing wasn’t covered in their empathy class.”

“Of course, it wasn’t covered,” John says.  “For most people, it isn’t a thing!” 

“Can we do it again?” Tabby asks brazenly.

“Yes it is a thing and no we can’t do it again.”

“Everyone’s right,” Telly announces.

“About what?” I ask him.

“Empathy is powerful, empathic links between man and machine are not a thing, and we should strive to do it again.  Maybe not quite what we just witnessed.”  He points up and moves his finger like an astronaut stirring his weightless mocha in space.  “But real empathy is both healing and preventative.  Just think, if we could really put ourselves in someone else’s shoes—”

“As opposed to putting ourselves in touch with the shoes….”

Telly nods patiently at John.  “If we could really empathize with others, we would be less likely to fight with them or oppress them.  It’s more than a customer service trick to keep people buying your product.”

“Amen,” says John, the former paster among us says.  “And don’t think it’s as easy as just listening to somebody complain.  You have to forget yourself in the moment and put that person first.”

“Did Loch put our washing machine first?” Tabby asks incredulously.

“For the purpose of this conversation only,” Telly says as he frowns at me, “I will say yes.  But I hope he never gives me a reason to say that again.”

“I don’t know,” I tell them.  “Right now I’m in touch with three coffees back in the house, feeling cold and neglected.”

“I guess I can allow that.”  Telly smiles from chin to brow.

John opens the screen door for us to go back in. 

“Me too,” the kid says.  “I want to see how high Loch goes when he puts his coffee first.”

“Great,” I moan at the center of attention.  “All right, Toby.”

Telly stops me then when I raise my hands to take the cat off my head.  “Why don’t you wait until you’re inside…with a ceiling over your head.”

Calm and collected, under care of a cat.

the cat’s example

I’ve promised Tabby, my next-door neighbor, that I would teach her how to play chess.  Not that I’m any kind of chess whiz.  I’ve made that clear to her.  But I know the rules and I know the moves each piece can make.  By that I am able to navigate the checkered playing field, lose my king’s men sensibly and, in the end, lose my king.

Toby, my cat, is in the kitchen, sitting on the counter.  I tell him, “I’m going to go clean up before our guest arrives.” 

He gives me a deadpan face, his head cocked curiously at a thirty-degree angle. 

Five minutes later, I return to kitchen to ask him if he’s seen my Godzilla tee-shirt.  Mind you, five minutes have passed, and he is still sitting on the counter, still cocking his head curiously at about thirty degrees.  Still deadpan. 

Five minutes and you haven’t found your shirt, he says before I can get a word out. 

I forget what I was going to ask him and leave to find my shirt.

Twenty minutes later, I’m wearing the shirt, and Toby is still on the counter, still cocking his head, still at about thirty degrees, still wearing the same curiously deadpan expression.

“How do you do that?” I ask him.  “I can’t hold the same position or expression for more than sixty seconds without leaning or cramping up.”

The cat shrugs.

But I’m being rhetorical.  How he can hold his body in one position so long, I don’t know.  But the deadpan expression?  That I know.

Until recently, I had assumed cats were not as facially expressive as people—or dogs, for that matter—because they considered themselves above such displays, or maybe they didn’t get it, the whole feeling thing.  Or maybe they were just bored by everything that is not a red laser dot.

But such is not the case.

Those facial muscles in a person or a dog used to register emotion are simply absent in cats. 

“I wonder what puzzlement or wistfulness would look like on you,” I say to him.

Toby points to his face.  Like this, he answers.

“But that’s the same look.”  I shake my head.  “If only you had the right muscles.”

Excuse me, he says

“Your facial musculature is not as evolved as a human’s.  So you can’t do this.”  Quickly, I run through my pallet of key facial expressions.

He says that all but one of the looks I just sampled for him suggest some unsettledness on my part, perhaps an accident of over-evolvement.  The one exception is my home expression, what I think of as my non-expression.

Toby says he doesn’t need my larger repertoire of expressions.  One or two will do.  For he is not as easily pushed out of his center of calm. 

“What does that mean?” I ask him.

Basically, he says, he sees no reason to stress as much as I do.

You stress.  I stress.  We all stress.

He shakes his head and points to his face.  No lines.  Then he points at me.

“Don’t say it!” I cry, well aware of my lines.  “But you’ve got lines.  They’re just covered with fur so nobody can see them.” 

He tells me I’m confusing wrinkles for lines.  My face, he explains, is as expressive as an open diary and as sensitive to bumps in the road as an electrocardiogram.

“You’re mixing analogies,” I point out.

My face, he points out, is currently mixing embarrassment and incredulity, with a dash of indignation.  And we haven’t even hit a bump.  He suggests that I follow his example, unplug the sensing equipment and just enjoy the ride.  Perhaps, if I do, I will be able to see my journey’s destination before I begin.

“WAIT?  What does that mean?”

No sooner does Toby drop that Time bomb on me, than he points out the window.

There is a knock.  She’s here.

“We will definitely continue this conversation later,” I tell him.  “Hey there, Tabby,” I greet our neighbor and unlatch the screen door.  “The cat in the window was telling me he can see through Time.  And then he took a peek and told me you were coming.”

The eight-year-old scowls.  “I told you yesterday I was coming over.”

“And here you are, just in time for chess school.”  I show her into the kitchen.  “Why don’t we do this at the table.  Toby, can you get the chess pieces?”   

“I should be pretty good at chess,” the eight-year-old says while I set up the board.  “I’m good at most things.”

“It’s good to be a confident chess player,” I tell her.  “And a confident chess player is more likely to be a good chess player if she knows the rules of the game.  So.” I start from the top.  “The object of chess is to capture the other player’s king.”

“That’s it?” she asks with a sharp laugh.  “That’s easy.  What about the queen?  Or the horsey?”

“You can capture them.  But the person who captures the other person’s king first wins.  You want to protect the king at all costs.”

She rolls her eyes.  “Guys,” she intones with a verdict a little early for her age.

“If you want to switch it up and play last-queen-standing, we can do that.”

“No,” she says.  “I guess I need to learn to play the same way everyone else plays.”

“Thank you for that big concession.”  I smile.  Tabby doesn’t.  The kid is all business.  

“Let’s meet some of the chess pieces you will be playing with.  Each one brings their own fancy footwork to the game.”  I bring each of the six types forward to demonstrate.  “Pawns promenade straight ahead, one space at a time.  The king also moves one space at a time, but he can move in any direction.  The queen can do everything the king can do, except better.  If no one is standing her way, she can sashay all the way across the board.

“Now let’s look at the king’s men.  The rook can rock forward and back and side to side.  The sly bishop can boogie in a diagonal direction.”

“So, one queen is worth a king, a pawn, a rook plus a bishop?”

“More or less.  The horsey, on the other hand, takes two steps in any direction and then one step to the side.”

“Huh.  Can the queen do that?”

“The queen still hasn’t learned the sidestep.”

Tabby mulls this over.  “Everyone should move the same way.  This is stupid.”   

“Tell me again why it is you want to learn to play a game that is so stupid.”

“Margorie Hicks,” she answers.  “She brought her dad’s chess set for show-and-tell and asked if anyone wanted to play her.  Well, nobody else knows how to play.  Margorie smiled like we’re all dummies and asked if she should bring the game Candy Land instead.”

“I love Candy Land.”

She glares at me like the future woman she will be one day.

“Got it,” I say agreeably.  “This is a story of revenge.”

“Yeah.”  The kid sounds pleased to be understood at last.

“Well, chess is the civilized way to get your revenge by showing you’re a better strategist.”
“What is that?”

“A strategist is someone who prepares for any move the other person could make.”

At once, the girl’s enthusiasm deflates.  “How do I know what they’re going to do?”

I look to my Time-divining cat.  “Would you like to field that one?”

Toby stares right through me to a time when I will not be in my present chair.

“Allow me,” I say.  “You know how it is said the end is in the beginning?”

“No,” Tabby says flatly.

“Well, they say the end is in the beginning.  Meaning that clues for what is to come may already be here in the present.”

“Where?”

“On the board, in the history of moves made so far, even in the other person’s face.”

“In their face?”

“If a player is worried and stressed about what is going to happen next, it could show in their face.  Plus, it could prevent them from seeing the next best move to make.”

“What if I don’t stress?” Tabby asks.  “What if I’m playing chess with Margorie and I don’t worry about what’s going to happen.  Then can I see what’s next so I know whether to move the bishop or the horsey?”

“This is where Toby’s idea may get a little fuzzy for me.  I’m comfortable saying that stress and worry can prevent you from being ready for the unexpected move.  Toby suggests that if a player doesn’t stress, they can see the end of the game in the beginning.”

The kid turns to Toby with a mix of puzzlement and admiration.  “Show me,” she says to the cat. 

“Hold on,” I tell her and laugh.  “You don’t think that’s stupid, too?”

She shakes her head vehemently.  “I want to learn to see the future.”

The kid’s willingness to believe the unbelievable is classic cute.

Toby, however, hears something different.  He hears a genuine request worthy of his respect.  And respecting the youth at the table who wants what any vengeful eight-year-old wants, he steps up to the chess board opposite me as though to challenge me to a game.

Tabby believes what she is seeing and looks at me to get onboard.

“Really?”  I look at the two deadpan faces at the table with me.  “Okay…okay.”  I humor her by moving one of my pawns one space forward.  “Let’s see if Toby is serious about his challenge.”  

And darned if Toby doesn’t copy me by pushing the corresponding pawn on his side of the board forward one space.

As amusing and as mystifying as this is, I decide to complicate things by moving my knight (horsey, for those of just eight years) forward two spaces and one left. 

Toby studies the board.  He leans over and bites the head of the knight opposite me, picks it up and moves it forward two spaces and one left.

Tabby laughs and claps her hands.  “He’s really good,” she says.  For a fleeting second, I feel a stab of jealousy and want to ask her just how good she thinks the cat in the room would be without someone to copy.  I suspect this registers on my face, loud and clear, when she tells me, “But you’re pretty good too.”

Watching the cat duplicate my moves is fun and darling, until the first man is captured.

“Ah!” Tabby cries with alarm.  “You took his horsey.”

“I did,” I tell her.  “This is not Cinderella’s ballroom.  It’s war.  And if you were paying attention, you saw that my furry opponent established a pattern of copying each of my moves.  I simply used my knowledge of that short history to anticipate his next move.”

“Is that fair?”

“That’s life on a chessboard.  Do you want to win when you challenge Margorie to a game?”  This quiets the girl so the slaughter can continue. 

More than once, I do look the other way when Toby innocently puts a high-ranking piece in harm’s way.  But when he puts his queen in the open like a doe in a sunny glade, I can’t just let that go.

“Loch!  You took his queen!”  Tabby is outraged.  “She is the only girl on his side.  And she’s the best.  You said so.”  She looks to Toby to see what he is going to do about it.  But the little guy doesn’t seem to recognize there is a problem. 

“If Toby can perceive the next move before it plays, then he knew that was coming.”

With perfect cat calm, Toby clarifies for me that he is unable to see my next move before I make it; but he can perceive the whole game at once and both our places in the game.

“What does that mean?” I ask him.

He tells me, simply, he is not worried about losing another rook or bishop.

“Of course, you aren’t,” I gloat.  “I’ve already captured those pieces.”

The game runs its inevitable course, and Tabby is just devastated to see her champion’s army so swiftly dismantled.  Eventually, he is down to his king and one pawn.  Surrounding his two pieces is my full army.   

“Check,” I say.

“Check what?” Tabby asks, sticking her nose in her armpit.

“The game, Tabby.  My last move put his king at risk of being captured.  So, I’m supposed to say check.”

“Now you’re going to capture his king, too?”  It is almost too much for the poor kid.  “What if someone can’t say check?” she asks, looking ahead and recognizing a certain logistical hurdle.  “Can Toby just say meow?”

“I don’t know.  Toby says meow to a lot of things.  How would I know he isn’t just asking for treats?” 

“Maybe he could wink.”

“We are here to learn the rules, and there is no meow in the rules.” 

A few tears appear strategically on Tabby’s cheeks.

Alas, I have no defense against a woman’s tears, even if she isn’t quite a woman yet. 

“I’ll tell you what…  If Toby should need to express to me something along the lines of your defeat is imminent, he can just wink at me.”  This seems to satisfy her.

Toby studies the board.  I assume he is ready to concede when, instead, he steps onto the board.  He raises his paw and holds it in the air like a student with a question.  He looks at me, still expressing no stress, no doubt or question in his face. 

And he gives me a little wink. 

Before I can consider what that might mean, he brings his paw down on the game and swipes my king onto its side.

“Whoa,” Tabby says, much impressed.  “What does that mean?”

I study the board where Toby left off, after putting himself directly in the game as one of the king’s men—or the king’s cat—and taking the immediate future into his own paws.

“Is that in the rules?” the girl asks.

When I don’t answer right away, she asks me if swiping the king is like spiking a football.  “Or did you do something wrong?  Is that like time-out?”  She looks at the board again.  And then she looks at me.  “Does it mean Toby wins?”

Toby is standing over my fallen king like a cat with its prey.  Or like any number of things he is wont to knock off a shelf, off a counter, off the mantel.  Just off.  And down.  It’s what cats do.  And I know this!  I should have seen this in the beginning when I realized the competition was a cat.

“I think Toby is trying to make a point,” I tell her.  “I’m not certain what it is—maybe something along the lines of stress and time—but insofar as he is making a point…(I sigh)…I guess Toby wins.”  The kid pumps her fist and gives the cat a high-five.  “But don’t try that with Margorie,” I warn her.

“HA!” Tabby practically barks.  “I am so going to do that with Margorie.  Did you see?  Toby made the future happen.”

“That’s kind of true.  But Tabby, if you want the satisfaction of beating Margorie fair and square—by the rules—then you don’t want to follow the cat’s example.”

I don’t believe Tabby thinks for a second that she can see through Time.  But now that she has seen first-hand how to cheat the causal nature of time, she is prepared to use it in her strategy against her classmate.  “Winning would be nice,” she says and winks.  “But I think it will be more satisfying to make a point.” 

Toby’s win was in the beginning.

modeled behavior

When my cat Toby loses himself in a cloth ball laced with catnip, I wonder if, in fact, he has lost himself.  That which defines his kind among kinds.

In fact, I wonder about my own complicity in altering my cat’s natural programming, his internal software (so to speak).  You can pluck a cat’s whiskers (if you don’t mind a good bloodletting), shave his tail or coat of fur.  But if you take away some part of his instincts, like curiosity, constant grooming or stalking prey…is he even a cat?

Toby is homebound and, as such, denied the opportunity to be outside where he can hunt something more sporting than squeaking plastic hamburgers and ping-pong balls.  Ours is an old house with a basement and dirt crawlspace.  A door in kitchen lets onto the basement landing and a flight of steps.  I let Toby down there, on occasion, for critter-control.  It lets him flex his curiosity while giving him real paws-on experience stalking the crawlspace.

More than once he has brought the body of a mouse upstairs and deposited it on the kitchen floor.  Interestingly, each time he has done that, said body of mouse has returned from the throes of death and scampered back down the basement steps with Toby in tow. 

No doubt I am guilty of not providing the little guy with the proper modelling to effectively kill his prey.   

Furthermore, I have observed Toby hesitate more than once when the reanimated mouse lost its bearings and tried to exit the kitchen into the dining room.  On those occasions, rather than pick the mouse up again with his teeth, Toby has corralled—perhaps herded is a better word—it, with the finesse of a diminutive border collie, back into the basement domain.  Strange.

I hear a similar assessment from my friend John while he and Telly are visiting to try out my new find: fermented coffee. 

It went like, “Strange.”  John cants his head while he stares at the brew in his cup.

“Fermented coffee is just like regular coffee,” I tell him.  “Only better.”

“No.  Your cat not acting like a cat,” he says.  “That is strange.”

Telly waves the aromatic steam from his coffee into his ninety-two-year-old nostrils.  “It is peculiar.”

“Please don’t mistake this coffee for the fermented coffee of old.”

“Your cat,” Telly clarifies.  “How many times has he brought up a mouse from downstairs.”

“I don’t know.  Ten.  Fifteen times.”

“And it never occurred to you to call pest control?”

“Never.  That’s poisonous and expensive.  Plus, my live-in exterminator’s services are free.”

John smiles.  “You know, you do get what you pay for.”  He waits for me to frown and then he smiles. 

“Well, fermented coffee is a little more expensive.  But it has a much richer taste and it’s gentler on the stomach.  Maybe because it’s already partially digested.”

“What?”  John stops Telly’s hand from waving in the steam from his cup.  “Are you serving us repurposed coffee?”

“No, relax.  Years ago, before science intervened, the beans for this kind of coffee were fermented by cats.  The beans were ingested by a civet, which a type of cat.  The beans went through the cat’s digestive system where they were fermented, exited the other end, and were collected by humans who then used the beans to make a smoother fuller-bodied coffee.”

“You’re kidding,” John all but asks me to say as he lowers his cup.

“Relax,” I tell him.  “Nowadays, the beans are processed, naturally, in a lab.  No cats involved.”

Telly takes his first sip.  “I like it.  I can’t tell the difference between this and the coffee of old, as you put it.”

“Wait,” John says.  “You have had this….cat-crap coffee before.”

“Yes, sir.  When I was a buyer for fine rugs, I made numerous trips to India where I enjoyed the cat’s blend.  But Loch is wrong about one point.  The cat’s way is the natural way.  Not your fancy lab.”

“Would you rather drink something you knew was fermented in a civet’s bowels?” I ask him.

Telly shakes his head.  “I’m not being critical.  I like to keep my coffee and cats separate, thank-you-very-much.  Which is why I’m picking the yellow hair out of my coffee now.  I’m just pointing out the error in your claim of more-natural.”

Enter one live-in cat with mouse in mouth.

“Look what the cat brought in,” John says.

Toby drops the mouse and stands there as one waiting for applause.  The mouse lays still, as a dead mouse should, and then he opens one eye.

“He’s faking it,” Telly says.  “That mouse is playing possum.”

I shake my head.  “Mice don’t play possum.”

“If a cat can play border collie, a mouse can play possum.”

I tell him, “If you are right, I’m sure the mouse is just hoping Toby will think his job is done and walk away.”

Without thinking about it, I stand up and remove a small bag from the top of the fridge.  I shake out a few treats and give them to Toby as payment for his services.  Toby then nudges the mouse to stand up, and the two of them head for the basement door.

“Hold it right there!” Telly demands.  John’s frozen arm causes coffee to slosh onto his shirt.  I’m frozen with one finger still in the treat bag.  And the cat and mouse trying to leave us freeze in the doorway.  Telly stands and approaches the basement door.  “I have an idea,” he says under a wrinkled brow.   

Telly removes a bottle of White-Out from his pants pocket.

“Why are you carrying around a bottle of White-Out?”

“Because I might have an idea.”  He leans over the rodent, puts a drop of the white liquid on its head and gently blows, causing the white dot to dry at once.  It is one of the more surreal moments I have seen Telly have with a rodent.  When I take a step forward, the moment crashes and the mouse flies out the door and into the basement.  Telly and Toby look at me as though I am guilty of some infraction of natural law.

“So, what was that all about?” I ask him.

“I don’t think Toby has brought you fifteen mice from the basement.  I think he has brought you the same mouse fifteen times.”

I laugh.  “Telly, that is ridiculous.  Toby just doesn’t know how to finish the job.”

“He certainly knows how to get his treats,” John says.

We sit down again with our coffees and Telly asks me, “Have you tried to solve your mouse problem by any other method?”

“Actually, I have.  I bought one of those humane mouse traps a few months ago.  Within twenty-four hours, we had a mouse.”

“We?” Telly repeats after me.

John asks me what I did with the mouse.

“I kept it in the see-through plastic trap box a few days while I figured out what to do about it.”

John has a face of disgust.  “Didn’t it start to stink after the first day?”

“Humane trap,” I repeat myself.  “The mouse wasn’t dead.  I gave it food and water.  And a washcloth for a bed.  I think it was quite educational for Toby to study his number one prey up close.”

“Unbelievable.”  John now has a different face of disgust.  “And what did you do with it.”

“We let it go in the back yard.”

Like a Greek chorus, John and Telly say in unison, “You let it go in the back yard.”

“I wasn’t going to let it go in the house.”

“You might as well have,” Telly says.  “Toby!” he calls out, causing more coffee to leap out of John’s cup and onto his shirt.  “Bring me a mouse.”

At once, the cat disappears into the basement.  This is followed by scampering, feral meowing, and a natural squeaky-toy sound.  Moments later, Toby returns to the kitchen and deposits his latest catch onto the linoleum floor.  “Emm hm,” Telly intones.  “I see something.”  

We all see it. 

A white dot. 

On the head of the mouse with one eye peeping open.

“And what does that prove?” I ask.

Two men, a cat and one peeping rodent each look at me with worn patience.  “Killer here has a friend.”

John laughs so hard, he douses himself with the rest of his coffee.  “Crap!” he says.

“Cat-crap,” I correct him.  “Here, I’ll get you some more,” I say, giving myself an excuse to step away from the table and distance myself from the expressions of scorn and disbelief.

“In just a few months,” John says, “your modeled behavior has undone thousands, if not millions, of years of evolution.  The killer instinct is part of what makes a cat a cat.”

And here, John voices my very concerns.  With my back to the table, I consider that I have unwittingly done my furry friend a grave disservice.  I mean, he still looks like a cat.  He walks the cat-walk and he still meows like nobody’s business.  But is he still running the original CAT 1.0 of his saber tooth forefather?   

Their little secret now out of the basement, Toby and the dotted one drop their cat-and-mouse charade.  The mouse climbs onto Toby’s back and Toby hops them up to the counter.  We watch each other as I prepare another cup of coffee.

I take the fresh coffee back to the table and tell John to pace himself and not pour the whole cup on himself at one time.

“Is it so wrong to find a friend where you least expect it?” I ask, nodding my head toward the counter where some serious grooming is in progress.   

“Evolution,” John says again.  “How much cat do you think is still left under the coat?”

Looking for a defense, I seize on what I have at hand. 

“What about the coffee connoisseur who walks diligently behind a cat and collects its poop with the intention of brewing it?  How much of the connoisseur is left of that person if he discovers a way to harvest the same fermented beans in the steel and glass bowels of a lab?  Isn’t that an evolution of sorts?  Doesn’t that make him smarter and less likely to gross out his guests when he explains what they are drinking?”

John finally gets his cup as close as his mouth and takes his first sip.  “Hold on.  That IS good.”

“Told you.”

“As for Toby,” Telly says, bringing us back to the cat in the story.  “I don’t know that you can undo Mother Nature.  Killer instincts are still part of what makes a cat a cat.  You can’t eradicate centuries of development in a few months.  But…”  His brow begins to wrinkle, and I suspect a thought brewing.  I wait for the bottle of White-Out to appear.  “Maybe you can add to them.”

“That’s still undermining evolution,” John says.

“I’m not talking about making all cats and mice across the board friendly toward each other.  That would be as unnatural as both sides of the house and senate working together.  But maybe one can rise above their instincts…to be better than their kind.”

“How in the world?” John asks.

“Maybe by spending a little safe time with the enemy, in a humane box, of course.  Like our cat and mouse, after someone,” he pauses the hopeful thought to glare at me, “modeled a little unnatural behavior.”

“I like that,” I say.  “Being better than his kind.”

Telly puts his hand over John’s cup before laughing hard.  “Please do not think I’m giving you full credit for the new-and-improved Toby.  You simply gave him a learning opportunity.  In the end, whether he is posing for the camera with his latest kill, or making faces with you for a selfie, he has to be true to himself.  And if selfies make for a better life, he will pass that along to next generation.  That,” he says to John, “is your evolution.”

A family portrait.

diagonal lines

I’m working from home.  Still.  I appreciate the opportunity to work from a place where I can ensure everyone is either vaccinated or wearing a mask.  Or a cat.  But I miss being around people. 

Mostly. 

What I don’t miss is the anger, the ultra-self-centeredness, the indignation, the violence.  Not that I remember any of that happening in the office.  There, everyone got along.  Of course, at that time, there was no office-wide pandemic to bring out our worst.  As employees of the same customer-centric company, we all had the same agenda.    

The behavior I don’t miss is the type I have witnessed on the global reality show that plays nightly on the news.  On the flat-screen TV over my mantel, everyone has a different agenda.  Their own.  Life in the time of Covid has provided a stage on which too many actors have given their worst performances.  Disgusted with it all, I took down my flat screen and set it at the curb for pick-up.  When I remembered just how much I paid for the thing, I reclaimed the expensive set and, with even greater disgust, re-hung it over the mantel.  But I haven’t plugged it in.

So.  I’m relaxing in front of a blank screen when someone knocks on my porch door.  Through the French doors I see Tabby, my next door neighbors’ kid, tapping her foot impatiently on the other side of the screened door.  The eight-year-old girl with a curmudgeon’s attitude waits for me to let her in.

“Hey Tabby,” I greet her.  “How was your first day of third grade?” 

The attitude in her brows drops and she tells me, “I don’t know.”  When I look closer, I see her eyes are red and troubled.

“Oh, boy,” I grumble.  “You look like you need to sit down with a cat.”

“I sure do.”  No sooner does she sit down, than Toby, my accommodating therapy cat, hops into her lap.  At once, tears drop from the girl’s face, and Toby looks up at her as though to ask if he needs to find a dryer lap.

The kid removes her mask to wipe her eyes, and it practically falls apart in her hands. 

“Is that the same mask I gave you at the beginning of summer?”

She nods her head.

“Do your parents have any masks?”

She shakes her head ‘no’.   

“It looks like you’ve been wearing it.”

“Every day.”

“Maybe we can do something about that.  I’ve got several masks I haven’t even taken out of the plastic seal.  They’re supposed to look like the mouth and nose of animals.”  The excitement I hope to see in her, over the prospect of being something other than herself, doesn’t exactly manifest itself.

“People are animals,” she says.

“Yeah, but I don’t have a people mask.  You’ll have to settle for a duck or a bear.  You could be a cat.”

“No, the people at my school.  They’re the animals.”

“Bad first day?  Listen, if it’s reading or math, I got you.  I know, at first glance, math teachers and their crazy formulas can seem wild and vicious.”

“Not that.” 

I wait for her to get it out. 

“The people in front of the school.” 

Toby and I look at each other, waiting to hear if she is going to share more.

“What people in front of the school?”

“I don’t know.  The angry people.  They were holding signs and yelling the same thing at the same time.  Ya ya ya,” she samples for us.  “One of them was Brian’s mom.  We all know, because she kept coming to our classroom window and yelling his name.  Brian sat on the floor under the window so she couldn’t see him.  He looked like he was going to cry, so I gave him one of my Pop Tarts.”

Toby does what Toby does, and pulls the girl’s hands around him to help her re-center herself.

“That was nice of you.”

“I know.”

“Okay.”  I hold up one finger.  “We have one intrusive mother.  Who else?”

“Kimmy said she thinks they were parents, mostly.  Our teacher said there were looters from out of town hoping to get free school supplies.”  She holds onto Toby like a restraining bar on a wild school ride as she describes a classic scene of protest.  “And then,” she says excitedly, “…and then they wouldn’t go away.  So Principal Bobby had to go outside.”

“Principal Bobby.  I like that.”

“It’s his name!”  She practically glares.  “He warned the people to go home or else he was going to write them up.”

“Write them up for what?”

“I don’t know,” she cries.  “I’m not an adult.” 

It is true that writing-up is a uniquely adult action.  (Although, I have heard the girl threaten her parents Alice and Dan with similar consequences.)  School is a place of learning and growing-up for children and teens, but it is an institution run by adults in a world governed by adults.  By drawing a clear demarcation between her and the parties on both sides of the protest, Tabby underscores her reliance on—and vulnerability to—the actions of those adults. 

“And you don’t know what they were saying.”

She looks weary beyond her eight years.  “No,” she says.  “But I drew what was on their signs.”  She hands me a piece of paper on which she has transcribed several circles framing a mask, a syringe, a transgender symbol, a dinosaur, and a soccer ball.  Each is stuck through with a diagonal line. 

“Huh.  Do you know what these mean?” I ask her.

“Of course, I do.”  She bends back the page in my hands to point.  “This one means to stop and put on your mask.  This one is stop for a shot.”  She hesitates over the transgender symbol before saying, “Stop and be nice to bunnies?”  She laughs, pushing through.  “That’s stop for dinosaurs and that one is to stop and play ball.”
Toby looks up at me and shakes his head.

“Have you shared these with your mother?”

“Alice is zooming for work with her door locked.”

Again, Toby shakes his head.

“I see.  Well, I like a positive spin on things, and your interpretation of each sign is certainly positive.  Unfortunately, they fail to capture some of the nuances of each idea.”

“What’s a nuance?”

“What is a nuance,” I muse out loud.  “Let’s start with the circle with the line through it.  As you suggested, it can mean to stop or prohibit.  But in this case, the diagonal line also means that whatever is inside the circle is bad or wrong.”

“The diagonal line does all that?” she asks.

Toby and I give our young student a moment to reverse course on all of her positive interpretations. 

“So, you have a picture of a shot, no doubt representing the vaccine.  Some people are worried about getting the vaccine.”

“I know.  I hate shots.”

“Me too.  But in this case, the diagonal line means shots are dangerous or unnecessary.  The person holding that sign could also be saying they have a right to choose whether to get the shot or not.”

The girl is uncharacteristically silent.

“Moving on.”  I turn the page of symbols around to face the student on the porch.  “The picture of a mask…is a picture of a mask.”

“The diagonal lines means masks are dangerous?”

“Maybe more like uncomfortable.  It could also mean that people have the right to not wear a mask.” 

“Do Kimmy and I have the right to make them wear a mask when they are around us?”

“That is the question of the day.  While America is definitely the land of big hearts, concern for one’s own personal rights is sometimes so great, we can lose sight of other people’s personal rights.”

“What are personal rights?”

“There are ten of them spelled out under something called the Bill of Rights.  Like the right to say what you want, the right to own property, to have a gun, the right to vote in elections.”

“I can have a gun and vote in elections?”

Toby shakes his head a little more vehemently this time.

“Not quite yet.  You can when you are an adult.”

“Gee Laweeze.  Are there any rights for kids?”

I google her question on my phone.  “Each child has the right to a safe and healthy home environment,” I read.

When the list stops after one, she asks, “That’s it?”

“Kids have other rights, but to exercise most of them, they need the help of an adult.  Like a mom or dad.”

“Are masks in the constitution?”

“Not specifically.  But right number nine says that just because a specific right didn’t make the top ten list doesn’t mean it isn’t a right.”

“It should be in the constitution,” she says decidedly.  “Everyone knows there is virus.  Why wouldn’t they want to be safe?”  She tries to work through this long-trending puzzle. 

“I think some people are less concerned about getting sick than forfeiting their right to get sick.” 

“That doesn’t make sense,” she cries, causing the cat in her lap to lift his head.    

“This is just a screened-porch chat, not a political forum.  I’m not telling you what makes sense.  I’m telling you what the signs mean.”

She crosses her arms around Toby and all but squeezes the breath out of him.   “My friend Kimmy thinks her mask keeps other people from seeing she is chewing gum.  But I can tell.”

“I’ll bet you can.  Now, let’s look at the circle with the bunny ears.”  First, I make a quick sketch of the traditional male and female signs, so that we have a point of comparison.  “This circle here stands for a boy and this one is for a girl.  And as much as the symbol you copied looks like a bunny, it actually stands for boys and girls who are not just boys and girls.”

“Huh?”  She doesn’t get it, and I don’t know that I’m the person to tell her about the birds and the bees and the birds-to-be.

“Imagine a spoon.  You know what that looks like.”  Tabby closes her eyes and presumably conjures an image of a spoon.  “Now imagine a fork.  Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Now imagine something in between.”

“A spork,” she says as her eyes spring open.  “I know because that’s what Alice packs in my lunch each day.”

“Very good.  Now, using your powers of empathy, let’s go a step further.  Imagine a spoon that looks like a spoon but, deep down inside, thinks like a fork.”

“Spoons can’t think.”

“Not if the person imagining them lacks empathy and imagination.”

“Okay,” she says to humor me.  “Think like a fork.”

“Think like a spoon that thinks like a fork.”  After my gentle correction, her brows soften and lift with understanding. 

“Kimmy’s a spork,” she blurts out, surprised to find herself so close to the issues.  Then she frowns.  “Does that mean the people outside don’t want me to be her friend?”

“Despite what others want, one of your rights is to choose your own friends.”

“I wonder if Kimmy knows what the diagonal line means.”

“Maybe you should pack an extra Pop Tart tomorrow.”

She nods, in full agreement.

“Next on your list is a dinosaur.”

At this, Tabby giggles and rocks back in her seat.  “They don’t want dinosaurs in school.”

“Close.  They don’t think the school should teach evolution.  That’s what the dinosaur represents.”

“My brother and I watch a lot of David Attenborough.  He talks a lot about animals and bones.  Why don’t people want us to learn about evolution.”

“Some people don’t believe in evolution.  Do you know what that is?”

“I just said I watch a lot of David Attenborough,” she snaps at me.  “For people who don’t want to learn it, they could all be in put in their own classroom.”

“They could.  But that presents another problem.  If we don’t all get the same information, then we live in different worlds.  In one world there will be things everyone can see that are invisible in the other world.”

“What things?”

“Suppose one classroom is taught that the president of the United States only does what his dog tells him to do.”

“That’s stupid.”  Toby backs her up on this.

“It is.  But what if that is what you are taught?  What if you never attend a different class that teaches the president is able to run the country just fine without consulting his dog?  The students from your class and the students from the other class will have very different views about dogs in the White House.”

“He should have a cat,” she says after some prodding by a certain cat.

“No doubt.  Now, let’s look at the soccer ball.  That’s a tough one.  Who doesn’t like soccer?  I wonder if there is more to this symbol.”

“There were a bunch of hairs all over it, but I didn’t draw them because they were icky.”

“Okay, that helps.  Now that you and I have the same icky information, I believe your soccer ball is actually a virus particle.”

“They’re that big?” she asks incredulously.

“Tabby.  Are dinosaurs that small?  No.  This size just works best on a sign.” 

“They don’t want there to be a virus,” she says, trying to look ahead.

“I think we are all ready for the virus to leave.  But there are some people who don’t believe there is a virus.  Or they don’t believe a virus should control so much of what we do.  That’s kind of that rights thing again.”

She crosses her brows.  “If people watched more TV they would know there is a virus.”

“That could depend on what channel you’re watching.  What if you never saw anything on TV about the virus?”

“Then you’re watching the wrong shows.”

Toby and I can’t help but laugh.  “Remember, each person has a right to watch the shows they want, assuming mom and dad approve.  And each mom and dad have the right to put their kid in a school that teaches what they want their children to learn.”

“But then they have to live in a different world.”  She sticks out her fingers as though she is working through a math problem.  When she can’t make the numbers add up to her satisfaction, she concludes, “I think adults have too many rights.”

“You probably won’t feel that way in ten years.  Until then, keep plenty of Pop Tarts in your backpack and be the best third-grader you can be.”

“How?”

“Think of this time as a test we are all taking together.  Not everyone is going to have the same answers.”

“Duh! Then they would be cheating.”

“So, until the teacher calls time-up, keep giving the best answers you can and respect everyone.  Covid is also testing us on how we respond to each other.”

“It would be easier to respond if I had a mask.”  The look she gives me has absolutely no nuance.

“I have a whole zoo of animal masks.  I think one of them has your name on it.”

Toby hears his cue and races out of the porch. 

“I have the right to be something other than a duck,” the girl says with her usual larger-than-eight-year-old attitude.

The cat returns holding a plastic-sealed mask in his mouth.  Tabby takes the mask and holds it up for inspection.

“YES!” she roars, scaring the birds outside into the air.  She tears open the plastic and dons a mask with prehistoric snout and teeth.  “Do I look like T-Rex?” she asks hopefully.

“The spitting image.  Just be a respectful T-Rex and don’t eat the protesters.”  Now Toby and Tabby are shaking their heads at me.  “And remember, if you need to respond to a sign with a diagonal line across a duck, I’ve got a mask for that too.”

The evolution of masks to hide the gum one is chewing in school.

the calm club

“Let me get this right,” John says.  “You are actively meditating while you walk around the pond.”

“Well, I’m trying,” I answer, in full transparency.  “It’s called a walking meditation.”

“Sounds a lot to me like sleep-walking,” Telly chimes in. 

“It would probably be much more of a real meditation if I could close my eyes,” I explain.  “There is so much out there to distract me.  Like a certain cat,” I say, hurling my voice like an imperious javelin, “who, unprovoked, will start tearing across the grounds, pole-vaulting over picnickers and using the backs of sunbathers like a pommel horse.  Not only is it embarrassing, but it is next to impossible to meditate through.”

The subject of my complaint listens from his roost on the mantel, unshakable in his calm. 

“Maybe walking is too much effort to quiet the mind,” Telly says.  “Maybe the body requires stillness… in one place.”  He taps each arm of his easy chair to demonstrate what one place in time might look like. 

I invited Telly and John over to watch the Olympic games with me.  As Toby has taken up a position directly below the television, we are actually watching the Olympic games and one cat.  When Big Jeff learned from Telly there would be food, he invited himself.  The food is little more than chips and a bowl of guacamole.  But it’s darn good guacamole.  Not that anyone else is going to know, as the bowl just stopped on Big Jeff’s big lap. 

Truly, I have enjoyed watching these Olympic games, perhaps more this year than ever.  They have been a wonderful diversion from those less-than-wonderful things in 2020 that continue into 2021.  Not that the games are free of politics.  And, of course, for big business, they are big business.  But if we focus on just the games and the athletes, we can enjoy the team- and individual-competitions and witness just what poetry of grace the human body is capable of.

“Are you going to use words like poetry and grace for the next two hours?” Telly asks me with a wink.

“My party…my house…my over-the-top verbiage.  Besides, the performances this year have been breathtaking.”

John agrees with me.  He also says he feels a little guilty about enjoying the televised poetry and grace so much.  “Aside from pushing a button on the remote, there is zero effort required of us to participate as spectators.  We’re just couch potatoes with a view.  The athletes, on the other hand, put in four years of hard work.”

Big Jeff cracks open another bag of chips, and I see any hope of partaking of the dip, that was as expensive to make as ten avocados, dwindle before my eyes.

“Well,” I say, “the rest of us did have to get through the last four years, which, given those particular four years, is an accomplishment, I think, as impressive as a Biles triple-flip-double-twist dismount.”

Jeff laughs and coughs a few chips into his private bowl of dip.  “I love watching other people exert themselves.”

“Point taken,” John says.  “But that’s four years.  Most of the athletes have more in the game than four years.  They have invested the bulk of their childhood in practicing, sacrificing, qualifying.  And for what?  A thirty second routine?”

Three of us shake our heads.  One of us curls his tail.  

“What do you suppose gets into a young person that makes them aspire to be an Olympic athlete?”  A former associate pastor, John draws on what he knows.  “I can tell you what might call a person to God or the church.  But the Olympics?”    

“Other athletes?” Telly suggests.  “Recognizing that they can throw a lead ball farther than anyone else?” 

“Recognizing they are Sha’Carri Richardson?” I suggest.

“Stop it,” John says.  “I’m serious.  That’s a lot of work to put into a short performance that will probably yield no positive financial outcome.  Keep in mind, you have to have a lot of losers to yield one winner.”

The winner of the dip raises a chip to his three losers. 

“And the difference between those winners and the athletes they beat out may be just tenths of seconds.  And don’t get me started on the judges and commentators,” John says, clearly a self-starter in such matters.  “They go absolutely nuts if a gymnast steps back too far on the matt after a dismount.  Heck, I step back just trying to stand still.  Is that really enough to say that one person is better than another?”

“In the context of the Olympics?”  Telly pauses to suggest that he doesn’t like what he is going to say next.  “Yes, it is.” 

But John disagrees.

“Let’s put this in a real-world context,” the former pastor says to our ninety-two-year-old neighbor.  “Let’s say you and I sell socks.”

“I want to sell socks,” I tell him.

Big Jeff also wants to toss his chip into the sock ring.

“Okay, we all sell socks.  At the end of a month, let’s say I make an even ten thousand dollars in commission.”

“Woah!  That’s a lot of money selling socks,” Big Jeff says as crumbs of disbelief tumble into the dip.

“This is just an example.”

“I want to make ten thousand,” I say to the architect of a world of sales in which socks rival cars.

“Yeah, well you don’t.”  John is uncompromising.  “This is the real world.” 

“No, it’s not.”  Telly laughs.

“Can you really make that much selling socks?” 

Kudos to Big Jeff and his probing question.  Telly and I lean in to hear the answer.

“Guys, listen to me,” John tries to rein us in.  “Loch makes nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents.  Telly makes one penny less than that.  Jeff makes one cent less than Telly.  So who is the better sock salesman?”

“Wait…why do you get to make more?” I ask.

“It’s my example.”

“It’s my house.”

“Gee Louweeze!”  This is as close to cursing as I have ever heard the former pastor get.  “How much do you want to make?”

“Two pennies more.  Just enough to make me the top salesperson.” 

“Done,” John speaks and it is so.  “Now you make a whopping one penny more than me.  That one cent is the only thing that differentiates your performance from mine.  But what do you think that one penny is going to buy you?  You can’t even buy one sock for that.  If Jeff made four more cents, putting him in the lead, that wouldn’t buy him enough dip to cover one chip.”

Big Jeff pulls the bowl of guacamole tight.

“On top of this,” John continues, “let’s say we have a supervisor who judges our sales performance.  If you don’t make a sale, that’s one point deducted from your maximum potential score.  If you’re caught speaking to a customer when you have crumbs on your mouth from the chips you’re not supposed to be eating while on the floor, that’s two more deductions.  Then maybe you say something the customer is offended by.  Well, his or her hurt feelings get escalated to the boss who makes another big deduction from your overall score.”

“Pennies aside,” I ask for clarification, “what does the best score get a person?”

“Bragging rights and a gold star next to their name on the breakroom roster.”  Telly is on a real Biles roll.

“But in the end, I still have my one cent lead,” I say.  “Right?”

“Yes,” John says.  “But so what?  You bested me by one penny, Telly by two, and Big John by three.  What does that mean?”

The three of us are waiting for the other sock to drop.

“It means there is real money to be made selling socks,” Telly says.  “Who knew?”

“My point is…”  John waits for his small congregation to stop laughing.  “If they made it to the Olympics, they are all great athletes.”

“Can we do more than sell socks?” Big Jeff asks.

John frowns.  “What do you mean?” 

At this point, Big Jeff raises a finger to buy time to clear his mouth of avocado.  

“In John’s absurd example, we’re really good at selling socks,” Telly takes the baton and runs with it.  “What happens if everyone starts wearing sandals and doesn’t need socks anymore.  As good as we are at selling socks, the stores don’t need sock sellers.  In that scenario, what are we going to do with this one thing we are good at?”

“Can we get good at something else?”  Big Jeff surprises us with this follow-up question. 

“Simone Biles wasn’t born a great gymnast,” I say.  “It’s quite likely that by her remarkable discipline and perseverance, she could have become anything.  She chose to become the gymnastics world’s Goat.”

“She’s a goat?”  Telly is confused.

“The Greatest gymnast Of All Time.”

“Acronyms!” Telly groans and looks above until one of his ninety-two-year-old vertebrae audibly complains.

“Brace yourself Telly, there could be a GROAT in the making.”  Before my senior friend can risk hurting himself by looking up too high, I unpack the new acronym.  “The Greatest Runner Of All Time.”

“Again?” John says to me.

I nod.  “Sha’Carri Richardson.”

“Okay, let’s talk about Sha’Carri.”  John sounds a little put-out to leave the sock business, but he’s willing to talk about anything.  “First, here is someone else who put years of hard work developing her talent, but because she smoked a little weed to comfort herself when her mother passed, the Olympic committee banned her from competing.  Which is complete bullshit.”  THIS is the new closest we have heard John come to cursing.  “So, she doesn’t even get a ticket to Japan with a shot at being one of the losers.”  He looks worked up enough to slap a lectern or ask the house for a collective amen.

“True,” I concede.  “But by being banned this year, Sha’Carri is perhaps more associated with the games than many of the actual winners.  And then there is Simone Biles, who, after a lifetime of hard work, bowed out of the games because her head was not in the right place to perform at her accustomed high level.  No wins for her either.  But by her courage to speak so openly about mental well-being, which has been taboo for athletes in the past, she has achieved yet another move impossible for those before her.  Everyone is talking about Simone and her courage so much that the 2021 Olympics could easily be renamed the 2021 Biles.”

“And your point?” John begs.

“Even losers can be winners.  Remarkable winners.”

“I accept that Biles achieved an unexpected win for strength of character.  But what is your case for the GROAT?”

“First, she’s Sha’Carri Richardson.” 

“She was banned,” Telly says, obsessing like John over a little thing like not getting to the games.  “And you cannot prove or justify something by saying it is because it is.  A person can’t be self-referential in their own proof.”

“Oh, but she is.  Even if it was outside the Olympic arena, She’Carri is the first American woman to really threaten the standing record set by Flo-Jo in the ‘88 Olympic games.  Granted, Elaine Thompson-Herah of Jamaica did beat Flo-Jo’s record by one-hundredth of a second.  But at twenty-one, Sha’Carri is just getting started.  To understand her potential, all you have to do is look at the last forty meters of her run.”

The A B C’s of the Olympic Games.

“You’re just going to ignore the first half of the race?” John asks.

“I am.  For the first half of the race, she is just like you and me, just another sock seller.  But instead of trying to outsell her competitors by another penny or two, she distinguishes herself by pulling away from the pack, like a rocket in runners’ shoes.  Her top end speed, as they call it, is impressive enough.  But as one who works hard to control his stress, here is the thing about her performance that really captivates me.” 

Big Jeff turns his chair and bowl to better listen. 

“In those last four seconds, Sha-Carri has an expression on her face that is almost Zen-like in its calm.  I can’t say it lasts long after she crosses the finish line.  But at the point where her body is doing what no body should be able to do, the inner-Sha’Carri appears to settle into a state of calm and accept the impossible moment as just another four seconds in her life.  I would call it a Biles Calm, but it’s Sha’Carri’s calm.”

Telly, who has done everything in his ninety-two years, tells me, “I competed in the 400-meter run in two Olympics.  I didn’t win any gold, but I did learn how to find that groove you’re describing.   If you would like, sometime, I can show you how it’s done.”

Our jaws drop.  We’ve seen Telly walk.  We’ve seen the wobble.  It’s difficult to reconcile that wobble with the poetry and grace we have seen today in the games. 

“You and Sha’Carri…” Big Jeff begins but can’t bring himself to finish.

Telly nods and helps out his friend.  “We have that in common.  If you consider the context of time and age.”

While Jeff is pulling his jaw back into place, the TV above us takes a commercial break to let big business do its thing. 

John is done with socks and pennies. 

Telly seems satisfied with the disruption his past has made on the present.

Without anyone saying or doing anything more, an unprovoking calm descends on the room. 

And then it happens.

Something scratches out of the blocks, and I look up in time to see Toby leap from the mantel in a blur of fur.  He scratches off the wall and grabs the curtains, pulling his rear legs up and parallel to the floor.  He propels himself through the air, patting the top of Big Jeff’s big head with his front legs while bringing his rear legs up and over, twisting and turning his body—even extending one leg out for a quick mid-air groom—before completing his last revolution and sticking a landing on the far edge of the bowl in Jeff’s lap.  But the moment he hits, one paw slips from the edge and Toby’s front legs pinwheel in vain to push back time and gravity.  His body succumbs, at last, to the inevitable and he falls back, tail first, into the uneaten guacamole. 

A laugh is building in all of us, but first we have to work through the awe that one cat’s athletics has just evoked in us.

“Unbelievable,” John says about what he has just seen.

“I think someone has been watching the games too long,” I say to Toby.

“Did you see him lick his leg in mid-air?” Jeff says, quickly salvaging the last dippable dip with a chip.  “I mean, it was like he just forgot for a moment he was in the middle of a real-life Biles routine.”

“We all saw it,” Telly assures him.  Then to Toby, he says, “Welcome to the club.”

Presented with all the dip he can lick, Toby is deaf to praise.

“The calm club,” John says, thinking out loud.  “Sha’Carri, Telly, and Toby.”

John shakes his head at this more-real real-world example of less-than winners.  “You know, I don’t think that could never be repeated,” he says, attributing a more than perfect score to Toby’s slipped-paw landing.  “I wonder what got into him.”  

“I don’t know. But happens every time we go for a walk,” I say, reminding them. “Right now, I’m more concerned about what got onto him.” I ask Big Jeff to keep him in the bowl. “I’m going to get a few wet-wipes for our furry Olympian.”

Another aspiring athlete out of the blocks.

quiet

Not a word is said.  Silence sits between us like a ring after the music stops.  Here, but not.

John bobs his head, picking up on the missing beat.

Telly sways like the silent bars of a string movement.

I’m listening for a key, a degree of purity, something that says this is the real deal.

One rear leg lifted like a cello’s neck, my cat Toby licks and ducks and licks again.

“Well?” John asks me.  “Is that what you’re talking about.”
I want to think it’s out of respect….but Toby actually stops what he’s doing before I answer.

“No,” I say, sure of myself, sure of the answer.  “I mean, yeah, that was quiet.”  The four of us made an intentional, if conversationally awkward, thirty-second silence.  But the longer we did it, the more insincere it felt.  Toward the end, honestly, I was just faking it.

“But not…”  Even through John’s denim mask, I can discern the thoughtful roll of his jaw.  “…IT.”

“Have you considered wearing earplugs?” Telly says, mask-free with all his expressive features on display.  “Or, if you’re on a budget…fingers.  Your own, preferably.”   

Toby and I left our masks in another room.  We’ve had our double dose of the vaccine.  Telly?  The doctors say he has natural immunity.  John has had two shots of Moderna, but he says after a year of hiding half his face, he feels naked now without it.  But no matter how protected or invulnerable we are against the virus at large, some of us find ourselves a little sensitive to the demoralizing noise of people divided over masks, the election, ideology, Brittany Spears.  Everything.  

“It’s like we’re sitting in traffic,” I explain, “wondering when the guy with his windows down is going to grow some empathy and turn down his stereo or, God-willing, blow a speaker.  But it’s more than that.  I mean, I can hear it in my eyes when I read a post or a tweet.  It can sound like a four-letter shout after a good toe-stubbing, or an angry evangelist with great stamina ranting on the street corner while he keeps pushing the pedestrian button to keep his audience in place while he goes on and on.”

John looks at me to ask if I’m done.  “I get it man,” he says.  “It’s like…I don’t know…an undertow.  It pulls at you no matter what other thing you’re trying to pay attention to.  Subversive.”  His mask billows out.  “That’s the word I was looking for.  I can be in the check-out line, trying to catch myself up my favorite celebs, and then I read a word like filibuster or recount, and I start to doubt my general positive view of humanity.”

Telly’s eyebrows appeal to a higher common-sense as he tells us, “You two are taking this way too seriously.  I mean, yes, it is serious.  The noise is there.  But you don’t have to listen to it.” 

In the ensuing silence, all we can hear is the deliberate lick of one cat with a grooming compulsion. 

“The trick,” Telly says, “is to stay focused.  That mindfulness thing you’re always telling me to do,” he says to me.  “If you focus on one thing or one voice at a time, you don’t hear the ambient chorus.”

“That sounds dangerously close to unaware,” John says.

“How to break through the generation barrier,” my ninety-two-year-old neighbor muses out loud.  “Okay, you two like analogies.  Try this one.  The three of us are here together.  Just the three of us.”

The ever-present licking sound volumes-up.

“Okay, the FOUR us,” he says.  “Now, tell me, why is it that Scottie, my very argumentative grandson-in-law, is not with us right now?  Or close-minded Ed from across the street?”

“Because we want to have a pleasant conversation?” John suggests.

“Exactly.  And because we want to have a pleasant conversation, we chose—or you chose, Loch—not to invite them.  So?”

John and I look at each other, wondering who is going to tackle the dangling so. 

I’m not going to do it, and I hold perfectly still. 

Well, I’m not going to do it, John’s straying eyes make clear.   

“So…neither one of them are here with us now,” Telly answers himself, unwilling to sit through another thirty-seconds of nothing-said.  “Let’s call them the noise.” 

We try to ignore the other noise my cat is making. 

“By mindfully not inviting them to the conversation,” Telly continues, “you keep them out of the conversation, and their voices off of the porch.  That, gentlemen, is how you treat the negative noise building in our country, by not giving it the attention it is clamoring for.” 

John nods his head.  “But there is always someone who is going to give it attention, retweet it or click a Like button.  And that will encourage it.”

“Yes.”  Telly agrees.  “But not you.  Let’s go back to the traffic stopped at the light.  The guy showing off his new base speaker, or subwoofer, is never going to turn it down.  So?”

This again? 

I hold still enough to disappear.  John looks solidly into one corner.

Toby lays down and puts his paws over his head.

“Crank up the Goldberg Variations,” I finally answer.  “Or Enya.  I love Enya.”  There is a murmuring of consent.  We all love Enya.

“But only if you want base-guy to pull you out of your car and challenge you to a stereo brawl.”  John looks at me completely serious.  At least from the mask up.  God only knows what’s going on under the mask.

“No,” Telly says.  “You roll up your window.  It’s that easy.  Of course, John’s scenario might be more entertaining for everyone else stuck in traffic with you.”

I ignore the ensuing laughter.  “What I want is a quiet I can feel.  That I can wrap around me like a heavy blanket.  Don’t get me wrong, I love our country’s first amendment.”

John points out that free speech and the ability to connect with a thousand people within seconds is bringing, not just our country, but the whole world closer together.  

“Like two cats in a bag.”

“No’oh,” John says to me.  Toby looks at John and asks him to be serious.  “Well, maybe.  But think about it.  Social media is extending free speech across borders into countries that don’t have otherwise have that privilege.”

“Is it possible we have forgotten what a privilege it is?” 

“Listen, I fought in two wars to defend that amendment,” Telly says with the growing indignation of an online post.  “Trust me, free speech is not something you can put a price on.”

“Maybe not, but there can be a price to pay: hearing all that free speech.  Unsolicited, mean, self-righteous, petty and divisive.” 

Telly shrugs.  “Well, I’m afraid you’re stuck with it until the next 3-mile meteor takes us out or hackers turn off our power grid, because free speech and all its inglorious platforms appear here to stay.”

“You guys,” John appeals to us.  “Connectivity is one of the great triumphs of our age.  We just need to work out some of the attitudinal glitches.”

“Maybe if there were a code of conduct for online behavior,” Telly says.  “Of course, it would be impossible to enforce.”

“Not if you gave everyone their own volume control,” I say.  “Or a filter that takes out bad ideas.”

John shakes his head.  “Not going to work.  You can’t stop people from being people.”

I tell him, “I don’t want to stop people from being people.”

“I get it.  You want to be able to sit at the traffic light without feeling accosted by an over-amplified base line.”  John lifts his brows to ask if he what he got he got right.

Telly points out that the traffic light will eventually turn green.  “And then Loch can go somewhere, somewhere the base-guy is not.”

“Not if he has Loch’s cell number, or Facebook handle” John says.  “Remember, we’re still connected.”

“Guys, I’m right here,” I remind them.  “Right here.”  Toby helps me out by climbing into my lap and laying down to mark the here where I am.

“He could go to a library,” Telly says.

John shakes his head.  “Too many shushing codes of behavior.”

“He could hang out in a doctor’s waiting room.”

Unbelievable.  The longer I am talked about in the third person, the less place I have in the conversation.

“Sure,” John says with an edge of sarcasm.  “If you like watching Property Brothers episodes back-to-back.  Really, don’t you think those two guys are the same person?”

Telly shakes his head.  “I remember when waiting rooms didn’t include a TV on the wall waiting with you, talking over you.  Heck, I remember when homes didn’t have a television set squatting in the living room.”

“How did you live without television?” a voice beyond the porch asks.  Actually, it comes from just the other side of the screen door, where Tabby, my eight-year-old neighbor, is questioning another generation’s more primitive lifestyle.

“Hey Tabby,” I say.  “Come on in.”  

“Hello there,” Telly says.  “And to answer your question, we had radio.  And newspapers.  But every family had a big radio we gathered around for certain shows like The Shadow and The Lone Ranger, music of the day.  Even the news.”

“So, you were still connected,” Tabby says.

“More or less.  The only real difference between free speech then and free speech now is that when you talk back to your television now-a-days, everyone can hear it.”

“It becomes part a conversation,” John says.

“A million people talking at the same time is not a conversation,” I insist.

“Then what is it?” 

“The reason you have to leave, one in a while, to find a more quiet place.” 

Tabby turns to look at me.  “Is that where you are going?”

Going? 

“Tabby, I’m sitting right here with a cat in my lap.  I’m not going anywhere.”

“You said you were sitting in the car listening to base.”

We all have a good laugh.

“How long were you standing there listening to us?” I ask her.

“As far back as the noise.”

“That long,” John says, looking at me when I am the only one who is facing the screen door.

“I was just fantasizing about some place I could go where the quiet is so big you can feel it hug you from every side.”

Tabby smiles like a cat by the open hearth.  “I like that place too.”

Hold on.  “What place?” we all ask. 

Tabby laughs, as though adults can be just the cutest things.  “When you live in the same house with a little brother and two parents, you have to find your quiet place.”

“Where?” we ask again.  I was being figurative for the sake of a moving complaint.  But Tabby has found that impossible place.

“Your bedroom?” Telly asks.

“Your imagination?”

She shakes her head.  “I go there with Number Two all the time.” 

I stop John before his mind can go there.  “Number Two is what she calls her doll.”

John lets this sink in before he asks, “So…”  He is clearly trying to keep his mind from going there.  “…where is it that you and Number Two go?”  

The girl actually points, suggesting a place you could find on Google Maps.  “The big church with the pretty windows.”

“Talk about your political hotbeds,” Telly says.

“What does that mean?” the girl asks him.

“The noise,” he says.  “We were talking about the noise people make and how to get away from it.”

“Not going to happen at church,” John says.  “I had a short run as an associate pastor.  It never occurred to me when I was in divinity school that some of the same political foot-stomping we see in the senate, you can find behind church doors.”

“Why did you leave?” Tabby asks him.  “Was it noisy?”

John’s mask lifts with a smile at the innocent question.  “It was suggested to me that I need to narrow the scope of my beliefs.”

When this fails to turn the light on for her, John says, “I believe in everything.  Even people.  I want everyone to win.  But not everyone wants everyone else to win.  It’s not so much a church-thing as a people-thing.  But it does happen at a church and it can create a bit of noise.”

“I don’t go to church during church,” the girl says.  “I go after, when you don’t hear other people stomping and talking in loud shoes.”

The former pastor and the veteran for free speech look confused. 

“Do you mean when no one is there?” John asks.

“I’m there,” Tabby says.  “And I take Number Two, because she doesn’t talk unless I ask her to.”

“Do you…pray?”

She screws up her face.  “We watch.”

“You watch,” John repeats what he has just heard.  “You watch what?”

Now Tabby looks confused.  “I thought you said you were a pastor.”

Smile lines crease at the corners of John’s eyes, but his confidence in the matter appears to be only mask-deep.

“You should know,” she hammers home her point.

John looks at me and back to the eight-year-old among us.  His smile lines wizen, and for the first time today, he removes his mask.  What he reveals is the face of a man who recognizes an opportunity he didn’t know before that he might need. “Remind us.”

Tabby puts her hands together as if she is going to do the one thing she just told us she doesn’t do at the big building with pretty windows.  “Here is the church.  And here is the steeple.”  We all know this visual analogy from childhood.  You bend your hands outward and reveal all the people. 

But that’s not what happens. 

Tabby keeps her hands solemnly clasped.  The rest of us become as wordless as a bunch of Number Two’s, as we stare at the hands, half-expecting there to be something to see.

“We leave our shoes at the door,” the girl says as one who has been taught something about respect.  “And then we sit in the front and watch the quiet.”

Our loud shoes left at the door, we watch the quiet.

signatures

The cat and I hesitate at the open door of the sedan, wherein the same attractive woman I thought I just left at the drop zone is looking out the window at me.  I look behind me to check.  And, sure enough, there Svetlana is, in her skydiving suit, about fifty yards away, arms still crossed, eyes still glaring.  I look again in front of me, and there she is in the car, beckoning me.

“How are you doing this?” I ask.  “What…did you make a copy of yourself.”

“No,” she says patiently and smiles.  “Our mother did.”

Sisters.

“I am possibly going your way?” she says.

My date with sister number one took a bit of a nose-dive.  But sister number two has presented me with an unique opportunity to wipe the date-slate clean and take what I have learned with the first sister and try it again.  She has also presented me with a possible way home.   

Toby hops in.  I unzip my skydiving suit and slide in next to him. 

“You take off clothes and you are still wearing clothes?” she asks me.

“Yeah, but I can only do that so many times in a row.”

“My name is Davina,” she takes my hand and squeezes it gently.  “My sister Svetlana…her heart is in the right place.  Her brain, not so much.”

I laugh.  “She wanted me to hand over a vial with a virus that would change a person’s political identity.”

Davina laughs with me as she puts the car in gear.  Then she asks, “Did you?”

“Did I…?”

“Did you give her the vial?”  She pulls from the curb and takes us out of the parking area.

Toby elbows me and gives me a look that suggests, like her sister, Davina’s grasp of reality might be just-so-much. 

“There is no vial,” I tell her.  “I thought we were dropping into a coffee shop, to talk, to get to know each other.”

“You are not scientist?”

“I don’t even own a vial.”

She narrows her eyes at me, eyes that really should be watching the road. 

“This is more perfect,” she says.  “You are nobody.”

My self-defenses rally to sit up straighter and puff out my chest.  “Well, I don’t think it necessarily takes a vial to make somebody a somebody.”

“Nobody knows you.  Nobody suspect you.  I don’t know you,” she offers as evidence.

“Maybe we could do something about that,” I tell her, imaging her lips parted over a smoking coffee cup.  “What do you do for a living?  What’s your favorite color?”

She laughs.  “I live to make difference.  Your country doesn’t understand what a beautiful thing Democracy is.  And so fragile.”

“I think some of us know.  The last year kind of hammered-home that point.”

Davina scowls.  “It continues.  Twenty-twenty…twenty-twenty-one.  It is all the same.  So dangerous.”

“And you are trying to make a difference?”

“Like Svetlana, I am a political activist.  But I was first.  She is always copying what I do.”

“You don’t deal in vials, do you?”

“Davina deals in legitimacy.  She believes in power of numbers.  Votes or endorsements.  Numbers have weight.”

Speaking of herself in the third person seems to increase her personal number by one. 

“At the present, I am trying to undo insanity to limit voting opportunities.  We the People? she says.  Democracy?  Voting is where rubber meets the American road.”

“So what are you doing about it?”

Davina tells me she has a friend who has promised to get her four or five signatures on a letter condemning the recent voting-curtailing efforts.  The friend is attending an event today at which a number of political heavyweights will be present.  “The problem is I am not unknown.”

“Are you sure?  I don’t really know you.  Not yet.”

“I will be recognized.  Actually, I will be identified as my sister, and that will cast doubt on my intention.”

“I guess the two of you do look alike.”

“Like same person.  But you,” she says.  “Nobody will know you.  Nobody will suspect.”  I wait to hear where this is going.  “Perhaps, if you take this letter to my friend, afterwards….we have coffee?”

“That’s it?  I just hand a letter to your friend and…”

“We get to know each other.”  She reaches into the backseat and hands me a briefcase.  “Open it.”

I put the slim black case on my lap and open it.  Papers leap and slide.

“Be careful,” she admonishes me.  “The letter is on top.”

“What’s all this other paperwork?”

She shrugs.  “I print everything that come with DIY template suite for activists.  Just in case.”

Toby and I exchange looks.  We still need that way home.

“Sure.  I can give a friend a letter.  Where is your friend?”

It appears that my back-to-back dates with identical sisters coincides with the wedding of a political somebody’s niece, and that particular somebody is friendly with representatives on both sides of the aisle.  It will happen at a church, not in the church, but behind the church in a big tent.

Davina parks in a lot across the street from a large church and dons dark glasses and a mask.  “In case someone see me.”

“Ready Toby?”  The two us pull up our own masks.  “Wait.  How will your friend know me?”

Davina is already pointing her phone.  She takes a picture. 

“Wait…I wasn’t smiling.”

“You are wearing mask.”

“Right.”

“My friend will find you.  You just have to get inside.”

“Got it.”

Davina thinks carrying a piece of paper by itself will look suspicious.  She asks me to take the whole brief case.  Nothing suspicious about a briefcase at an outdoor wedding. 

“Remember,” she reminds me.  “You are nobody.”

Toby hops on my shoulder and we cross the parking lot and the street.  A number of reporters are pooled outside the main entrance to the church.  All the reporters seem to know each other.  “Who are you?” they ask me. 

“Nobody,” I answer with a wave.  I turn to see two reporters approaching from one side of the building, shaking their heads.

“We couldn’t get past security,” one of them says.

Toby’s points to the church door which none of the reporters are able to get past.

So, I walk around the side of the church where we encounter two guys in black suits.  As we get closer, they grow taller and more menacing.

“Hey guys, I’m looking for a cat.”

They look at each other.  “There’s a cat on your shoulder,” one says.

“Not that cat.  The one who rides on my other shoulder.  Don’t you see how unbalanced this makes me.  I know I saw him run around the church this way.  Have you seen him?”

The two men seem to shrink back to normal size.  “I didn’t see a cat.  Did you see a cat?”  They shake their heads.

“Do you mind if I take a quick look?” I ask.

“You’re not a reporter, are you?
I pshaw.  “I’m nobody.” 

Like alakazam or open sesame, the self-effacing identifier parts the way for me to continue.

“Okay, Toby.  We’re looking for a friend.  A friend we won’t know.”

I see the tent Davina said the event would be held under.  And a short distance from the tent is another pool of people, members of the press, I learn, who were able to circumvent guards without anything on their shoulder.

But this, we discover, is as close as anyone is getting.

“Twenty-five senators, ten house members,” one woman says, “all under the same tent, and we’re stuck out here.”  My heart is ready to go out to these members of the press when I see someone I recognize.  Not someone I know, exactly.  But someone my heart goes out to before it would a disgruntled wedding crasher.

The recognized person catches our eyes and claps either side of her face as she hurries toward us.  “What a darling cat!”

“Elizabeth Warren,” I say, testing this new and unexpected reality.  “You’re Elizabeth Warren.”

“I am,” she says, just like a normal person. 

“I saw you on Stephen Colbert.  You were in Charleston, before the election.  He was asking some silly questions that really tested your human side.   You were awesome!”

She smiles to be recognized for more than her plans for everything.   “And who is your little friend?”

“Toby, this is Elizabeth.  Elizabeth…Toby.”

The senator is simply beside herself.  “My friend just loves cats,” she says and takes my free hand.  “Let’s pop inside real quick so she can meet you.”

I leave the pool of reporters even more disgruntled than when I found them.

“Amy!” Elizabeth calls.  “AMY.”

A woman turns.  And she is none other than Amy Klobuchar.

“Come here, I want you to meet someone.”

The senator from Minnesota hurries over with a smile too grand to be disguised by a mere face mask.  “Oh my!” she says, nearly giddy.  “And who do we have here?”

While Toby is introducing us, I look around and see face after face I recognize from news snippets, Twitter mugshots and late-night shows.  I am positively star-struck.  I know these are not Hollywood celebrities or Iron Chefs.  But these are the powers that be, who we the people put in place to run the big show called America. 

“I’m sorry,” I interrupt Toby and Amy.  “But….” I look from her to Senator Warren.  “Can I get your autographs?”

I crack open the brief case before they can answer.  I reach into the middle of the stack—leaving the top-letter be—and remove a piece of paper.  I take a pen from my shirt pocket and hold it up, too excited to get my words out. 

“Of course,” Senator Klobuchar says and signs her name.  Senator Warren accepts the paper and pen and signs right below.

“What do we have here?” a man says.

“Cory Booker!” I sing like a groupie.

“Uh…yeah.”  He grins, looking from senator to senator.  “First time around a lot of politicians?”

All I can do is nod.

He accepts the letter from Elizabeth Warren, signs his name, grins at me and passes it off to one of his co-senators.

I try to follow the letter, but Amy and Elizabeth will not let Toby go. 

“He has the most beautiful green eyes.”

“And his coat is so soft.”

“I just love his little mask!”

I stand on my toes, trying to track my sheet of autographs.  I’ll probably never get another chance like this. 

A man with white hair leans in to our little pow-wow and says the wedding will be starting shortly.  “They’re seating people.”

“Oh-my-God!”  My outburst makes all of us jump.  “You have mittens just like Burnie Sanders!”

He recovers with a smile.  “I think this belongs to you.  I hope you don’t mind that I put my Burnie Sanders on it.”

No sooner do the three senators excuse themselves than another man appears and looks around before asking me, “Looking for a friend?”

“It’s you!”

“You’re not very good at discretion.”

I fumble with the briefcase, get the letter on top and hand it to him.  He nods.  “Tell Davina I already have three signatures in the bag.”

Toby and I leave the party, make our way through the disgruntled reporters, around the building to the two security guys.

“Did you find your cat?”

“Still looking,” I call behind me.

We bypass the reporters in front of the church and cross the street directly, making our way through the parked cars to the one in back with Davina. 

“Did you find him?” she asks. 

“He found us.  And he said he has at least three signatures in the bag.”

“Perfect.”

I buckle up and look over my collection of autographs.  They are on the front and back of a form letter, a letter not of condemnation, but an endorsement of voting practices that would make it easier for a working person to vote.  I read out loud, “Mail-in ballots.  Drive-thru ballet boxes.  A mobile voting bus that will go to voters who can’t make it to polling centers.”

Davina laughs at the language.  “That is one of the fantasy letters that comes with the activist suite.  We are a long way from being able to use a letter like that.  Why are you reading it to me?”

“This was the first paper I could get out of the case to get a few autographs.”

We are not even rolling yet when Davina brakes hard.  

“A few autographs?”

My finger runs down the list.  “Nineteen is Nancy P., there’s a Mitch here, and then Burnie Sanders makes twenty-one.”  I look up at her.  “Twenty-one.”

“What?”  She takes the signed letter from me.  “Who are you that you get so many people to sign a letter like this?”

“Nobody.”  I have to grin.  “But I do have a cat.”

Toby puffs out his chest and rubs his nails on his coat.

When we are finally seated in a cozy coffee shop called Some Like It Hot, Davina tells me, “You must let me have that letter with twenty-one signatures.  It…it could save Democracy.”  She is beside herself.  I’m directly opposite her.

Toby stops slurping his milk to hear my answer.

“If my collection of autographs can do all that, I can part with it.  It’s the least I can do.”   

At this point, Toby and Davina are both purring.

So. 

“Now that we have that out of the way,” I say as I stir my coffee.  “Let’s talk about your favorite color.”

Embarrassed for his politically star-struck human.

jump

As I approach the small prop plane, I see Svetlana, my date, watching me.  She looks ready for anything, in the same pink and black skydiving suit featured in her online photo.

Previously, I explained to Toby that if the health of a prospective relationship hinges on my willingness to leave planet Earth, we may have a problem.  You see, I can’t fly.  No wings.  None.  And I don’t see the logic in letting a man-made device over which I have absolutely no control hoist me miles into the sky and trusting it to bring me back in one piece.

Svetlana said it is not necessary to rely on the plane to bring me back.

I told her.  I told her I had reservations about accepting her invitation to a date at fifteen-hundred feet.  I mean, this is just date-one.  Skydiving is something a jaded couple does months or years into a relationship when they are looking for something to rekindle the old flame.  Or snuff it out completely.  She LOL’d and SMH’d.  She said our efforts were for a greater cause.

“Greater cause?” I repeated to Toby.  “Do you think she’s talking about two coffees and an in-person conversation without acronyms?”

He shrugged.  But he also thought this could be good for me.  Something new.  Something different.  And, more importantly, it could be a good test to gauge the progress of my latest stress-management efforts. 

“Wouldn’t it be easier to manage my stress by not putting myself in stressful situations?”

He shook his head.  I should go with the flow, he quoted himself.

At some point in our online messaging, Svetlana started throwing out these cryptic phrases:

The two will become as one.

Donkeys and elephants will lay down together.

Everyone will drink the same lemonade.

“Meow?”  Now I was quoting Toby! 

I don’t do crazy.  And watching Svetlana’s side of the conversation devolve into nonsense, I was ready to bail on the conversation and jump to the next profile.  In fact, Toby did bail, running across the keyboard and messaging a rather scientific-looking expression in his wake:

C6 H8 O 

At once, Svetlana followed this with a line of hearts.

Now that made sense.  I was hooked. 

Which leads to now.

“Do you have it?” Svetlana asks by way of greeting.

“Are you referring to my courage?  The written excuse to stay on the ground?”  I pat down the jumpsuit I was given when I arrived.  “It’s in here somewhere.”

She laughs.  “Nice suit.”

Like those striped shoes you rent at the bowling alley, you can’t be too choosy when you don’t bring your own gear to a jump.  “It’s the right height, but a little baggy, more of a suit-built-for-two.  How did you get one so….not baggy?”  Svetlana’s jump suit fits her like a colorful second skin.

“This is not my first jump.” 

I learn that another couple will be jumping with us.  Their experience shows.  Like Svetlana’s, their suits fit.

I don my mask as the four of us pile into the plane.  I buckle up and put a hand over my stomach to keep it in place.  “Am I the only one wearing Depends?”  I laugh alone.   

The engine starts.  It revs the propeller.  It chatters in my bones.  I watch out the window as the ground races past.  Slowly, it retreats.

“Don’t look so nervous,” Svetlana says to me. 

“I used to have this recurring dream in which I was falling out of the sky.  It was terrifying.  But I would always wake up before I hit.  Now I’m living the dream.”

Svetlana taps my knee affectionately and says, “The difference today…if you hit, you die.”

Very reassuring.

I am wearing the rental chute pack on my back.  The man and woman jumping with us have their chute packs on.  I sort of wish Svetlana would do the same. 

“We should be at the drop zone soon,” she says.

“This would probably be a good time to put on your chute.”

She waves this off with a smile. 

“We will be remembered for this,” the woman of the couple says out of the blue.

“As heroes,” the guy with her says.

Svetlana nods.  “Heroes.”

Everyone is suddenly looking at me.  “Yeah.  Sure.  Memory is a funny thing.  I guess we could be remembered as heroes, or maybe just four people who jumped out of a plane.”

A bit of unwarranted laughter ensues.

Then, for the second time today, Svetlana asks, “Did you bring it?”

It. 

It could be anything. 

It is clearly something important to her.  Important enough to ask about twice.

I put my hand over my chest pocket.  “I’ve got something in here.  I think it’s the former lump in my throat, making its way south.”

“No games,” Svetlana says dramatically.  “Angelica is right.  We will be remembered after this day as heroes.  We will change history with it.  A simple vial.”

It is a vial? 

“So, Svetlana, what is in it?” I probe.  “What is in the vial?”

“The variant,” she says with a mix of glee and indignation.

Still not on the same page with her, I ask, “Variant of what?  And don’t give me another it.”

“The virus,” she says, like it is not something I should have to be reminded of.  “When we release the next variant of the virus at the landing site, everyone will take it back to their cities, to their friends and loved ones.  The contagion will spread and we will be ready to lead a revolution.”

“A revolution of what?  Sick people?”

Like a person reading from a script, my date plows on.  “Its infection will change minds on a molecular level.  It will make everyone to see as we see, as Democrats.  It will homogenize the country and make us all of like mind, so maybe congress can pass something for a change.”

I tell her, “I don’t know that there is much of a correlation between biology and ideology.”

I turn to the other couple for back-up and discover them rolling one hand over the other rather diabolically.

Svetlana opens the door to the first three-mile step.   

“No more games.”  She turns back around and aims a gun at me.

The pilot looks back at my nose-diving first date and says, “You said not like last time.”

“This isn’t the first?” I cry.  But now I understand they are all in on it, this one-sided revolution.

“Give me the vial,” she says.

“Svetlana, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Her expression suggests she is considering the real possibility that she has stepped into an alternate air-trip less radical than the one she packed for.  “I set up the profile as I was advised.  Liberal for Life.  I mentioned the donkey and elephant.  The lemonade we would all drink.  And YOU responded with the formulaic equation for the virus.”

“Hey, I’m just a single guy looking for someone who likes coffee.  A liberal lifer would be preferable, but I’m not ruling out a laid-back elephant.”

“Noooo,” the little revolutionary starts to come undone.  In what is possibly a last-ditch effort to make this day go her way, Svetlana chooses not to believe me and says, “I don’t believe you.”

I shrug.  “Sorry.  That’s all I got.”  But again, she doesn’t believe.

She puts the gun in my face while she pinches the dongle on my chest pocket zipper.  She pulls the vertical zipper down fast.  At once, like everyone’s favorite Alien preemie, Toby pops his head out of the pocket.

Svetlana screams.  “WHAT IS….IT?”

“IT is a cat.”

“I don’t do cats,” she cries. 

“That’s okay.  Toby’s not the one looking for a relationship.”

“What!  Is he a carrier of the variant?”  She tries valiantly to force things to go her way.  “Is this your way of disguising the virus?”

“No’oh.”  Toby shakes his head with me.  “This is the little guy I brought along for moral support.  Plus, I think he wanted make certain I actually follow through with the jump.”

“Who brings a cat to a jump?” Angelica asks rhetorically.

“Sweetheart,” her male half says.  “He’s sitting right beside you.”

Meanwhile, Svetlana’s face reflects the agonizing process of almost losing it and—at last—to  getting it.

“You really have no idea?” she asks me.

“Sure, I have an idea.  NOW.  But I don’t have a secret laboratory in my basement.”

She puts her hand on the side of the open door and holds the back of her other hand against her brow.  “I have failed.”

“Listen, we’re just forty minutes into this date.  Anything could happen.”

“We would have been remembered,” she says to the other couple.

“We can still be remembered,” I insist.  “Let’s land this party and pose with Toby for a few selfies.  We upload them—Badda-bing badda-boom—we go viral and no one forgets us.”

“God help me,” my date says and lets herself fall out.

“Svetlana!” the other man cries.  “She’s not wearing her chute.”  

I’m pretty certain, at this point, that a second date is out of the question. 

“Well?” the pilot calls out for somebody to do something.  Aside from a certain someone’s trick of pretending everything is okay, my mind is a blank.

The other couple does their best to distance themselves from me and the open door.

I go to the door.  I hold onto a strap and lean just enough to look beyond the plane for any sign of my date.  And I can just see this cute dot dropping into the fluff of clouds.  Toby reminds me that I am wearing a chute and the lovely nut who just bailed on us is not.

We both know what this means.

Toby pulls the pocket zipper up to his neck and gives me a cat nod.  Unlike in the dream version where I am shanghaied in, I boldly step into the sky.    

This high up, the wind howls. 

At once, the flow begins. 

Down.

I try to harness my natural Pollyanna impulse—that everything is and will be okay—and will Toby and me back onto the plane.  But we continue to fall.  I am utterly powerless, without footing or leverage.  We are simply a guy and cat and there is not one thing I can do.

Badda-bing badda boom! 
At once, something comes over me.  Or out of me.  By recognizing I have forfeited all my power—and that the plane is probably not going to circle back and catch me on the wing—my cup of stress is emptied. 

I am like a blade of grass on the wind.  A petal on water.

“Hey,” I shout to Toby.  “I did it.  I just did the petal trick.”

Toby is pleased.  But, he points out, we are still falling.  And we are not the only ones.

He’s right. 

I reach like Superman and turn falling unto flying.  I see something cute ahead.  We race with the flow until a speck of Svetlana grows in proximity until she is close enough to touch.

“You!” she cries and backstrokes away from me.

“Excuse me!  Someone forgot to put on their parachute before they jumped out of the plane.  Let me hook you up to my harness.  We can finish this, in tandem.”

“I ask for virus and you bring me cat!”

“I bring you a way to survive the landing so you can change voters’ minds the old-fashion way.  A TikTok video with a cute liberal dance.”  I swim a little closer.

She shakes her head.  “I don’t do cats.”  And she swims further back.

There is only one way to do this.  Toby and I both know it.  In one swift move, he unzips his travel-pocket and leaps into the sky, sailing over Svetlana’s head, leading her to pivot toward him and put her back to me.  While she is distracted by the animal she doesn’t do, I tack in fast and put my arm around her and hook her harness up to mine.

“Games,” she cries into the blue.  “You are all games.”

Toby and I look at each other for a quick are-we-really-doing-this? reality check.  “Svetlana, just hush and tell me how to deploy the chute.”  She groans to be so bothered.

I watch as Toby tiptoes on wisps of clouds.  The rushing air pushes up his fur to follow his lips, making him one big furry smile.    

It is just the cutest most surreal sight until the chute deploys.  A force pulls at the straps around my thighs as we air-brake in a bank of clouds.  All I can see is white.

“TOBY!” I call out.

I hear a faint meow.

“Cats!” Svetlana cries with exasperation.

The clouds pass and still no sign of Toby.

“TOBY?”

“Me-yow?” he says. 

I look up to find him standing upside down on the belly of our brightly colored canopy.  My first thought is to tell him to get down from there.  He does this same thing at the house and leaves a trail of paw prints on the ceiling that are almost impossible to get off.  But this time, I tell him to dig in and hang on.

Now, with a couple minutes to kill, I try to start an air-to-ground conversation about the best place to get a coffee after a jump.  That’s when we hear a rip.  Svetlana and I look above us where the chute is tearing outward from the insertion of each of Toby’s claws.  Svetlana laughs fatalistically.  “It is coming undone,” she says.  “We will hit the ground and we will die.”

“You know, for a Democrat, you really are a downer.” 

I reach with one hand, but Toby is too far.  He looks at me.  His face tells me it’s been swell, and then he rolls selflessly onto his back and slides across the chute into the wide open.

My heart tears outward from the place wherein the little guy has had a place so long.

“There,” Svetlana says, satisfied.  “No cats.”

And then I see him.  Falling into view, legs out to maximize wind drag.

“What?” Svetlana cries.

My reserve heart deploys at once and I am buoyed up.

I motion to Toby to make his way closer so I can reach him.  He shakes his head, looking from me to my date.   

He keeps his distance, pirouetting and somersaulting in a real air ballet.

“Get over here!” I yell.  “The ground is coming up fast.”

“Ten seconds,” Svetlana estimates.  “Nine,” she updates her assessment.

I glare at our furry hero. 

“Eight.”

I shout at him that the whole nine-lives thing is likely a myth.  “In any case, let’s not test it today.”

“Seven,” Svetlana says inevitably.  Then “Six.”

Toby smiles at me and gives me a thumbs-up.  He looks down at himself and fiddles with something on his chest.  All at once, the orange and yellow on his body slips off and up, ripples briefly overhead and billows out into a furry coat-chute.

“My god!” Svetlana says.

“No,” I tell her.  “My cat!  And what a cat!”

Five, four, three and two have passed without announcement.  But zero hits me like a ton of Svetlana.  I hit the ground.  Svetlana hits me.  We roll a few times before she releases her harness and rolls to safety. 

Despite being able to get to my feet, I’m certain I’ve broken every bone in my body.  I probably just can’t feel it yet for all the adrenaline.  I spot Toby nearby, tucking in his coat. 

Svetlana looks at me in a posture of reassessment.

“Despite your choice of pet, you exhibit good character and courage.  We could use that in our efforts.”

“Your effort to infect the brains of conservatives and bend them to your will?”  I shake my head.  “I’m all about getting the leaders I want into office, but I’m more about protecting the process that makes it possible.  As crazy as it sounds, a real Democracy needs more than one side.  Conservatives need liberals and liberals sort of need conservatives.  They act off of each other, like checks and balances.  Otherwise, what you have is a zombie republic.”

“That is an interesting idea,” she says and removes her helmet to push back her hair.  She narrows her eyes and purses her lips.  It is a move, I know, to undermine my reason, to infect me with will-bending longing.  “Maybe we talk about it over coffee.”

“Sorry,” I tell her, “but this independent cat-lover doesn’t do Svetlana.”

Toby and I walk toward a large parking area where Liberals and Conservatives in jumpsuits from around the country are arriving in droves to participate in the overhead games.  We look back and see Svetlana watching our side exit.  But when we look forward again, there she is watching us out of the rolled-down window of a dark sedan.  Toby and I do a quick double-take, back to the Svetlana we just left, and forward again to the Svetlana in front of us.  The latter motions with her finger for us to approach.

“Hurry,” she says.  “Get in.”

Leaving the drop zone together.

guys day out

Someone’s paw taps my face in syncopation with the alarm clock.

“Morning already?”  I stretch with an indulgence that pulls a whine out of me.  My eyes flutter in the hard light.  My body pops and cracks with lament as it tries to transition into the new day.

But Toby is calm.  We’ve been here before. 

I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand up.  Like a video character resurrected from my last losing battle, I remember my circumstances: adrift in the time of Covid with a cat.  Oh!  And then the existential pain!  I put a hand to my side.

Before I can transition myself back under the covers, Toby lets loose with an imperative meow that verges toward yodeling.

“I’m up,” I insist and stagger to the kitchen.  I put a scoop of food on his plate and wince at the day.

Toby looks up at me with a face that asks if I can please take my audible issues to another room while he eats.

Fair enough.

I go into the dining room and stare out the window at nothing.  I remember, as a kid, my parents asking me when I was ill or hurt where the pain is.  I remember being able to point inside where the greater part of me was in dark mystery.  Pin-pointing the source of discomfort was fairly simple, within a few inches.  Now it’s even easier.  It’s all over.  Inside and out.  My scalp cringes, my hairs dither and curl.  My red eyes sting.  My soles ache.  My stomach (a.k.a. pain central) swells and collapses.  It all hurts, thrums, beats and bleats.

The joyful crunching in the kitchen stops.  Soft padded steps approach, and someone hops up onto the standup piano beside me.

Why? Toby asks.

“Why what?”

He holds his side and makes a pained over-the-top expression. 

“Oh.  That.”  I consider the list.  It follows me, even into sleep.  “You know.  This past year and its hydra of viruses that have continued right into this year.  The hate, the violence, the conspiracy theories and alternate facts (seriously?), masks and lack of masks, the divisions between groups, the isolation…and that little thing called covid 19.”

Toby tells me to sit down on the piano bench and take several cleansing breaths.  He instructs me to rest my wrists on my knees and form a circle with the thumb and middle finger of each hand.  Now he asks if I can close my eyes and do absolutely nothing. 

“Are you kidding?  Nothing is about the only thing I can still do well,” I say with generous self-pity.  “I know nothing….I got nothing…I can do nothing like nobody’s business.” 

When Toby hisses at me, I shut up and do what he says.  I close my eyes.  I take lots of rapid cleansing breaths.  I clench my teeth and concentrate with so much effort that the zero in each hand collapses with a snap.

“Is that supposed to happen?” I ask him.

Toby shakes his head.  He says I’m doing it all wrong. 

Clearly. 

He says I need to relax.

“Relax…relax.”  It sounds like a spiritless cheer at a stress workshop.  “Okay.  This is what I’m going to do,” I tell him.  “I’m going to stop watching the news.  I’m deleting all my newsy podcast subscriptions.  The world is the one doing it all wrong and it is tearing me up.”

Toby assumes a lotus position and suggests it is wrong to think I can bend the world to my will.

“I know.  I can hardly impose it on myself.  You see all the bags of kale chips and exercise bands collecting dust.”  I laugh as the tide of stress begins to rise.  “I just need to stop listening to all the news.  It’s all bad.  And after so much of it, it just feels bad to be in-the-know.  It hurts to be informed.”

Toby points out that the news—real news and not alternative news—is knowledge.  Knowledge is power.  In fact, he says, it is more than power, it is direction for action.

“Yeah.  Well, I say turn it off.  Don’t they say that ignorance is bliss?”

Toby deplores a few nails as he turns my face back to him. 

Being informed, he wants me to know, enables us to know what needs to be done.  But there is a caveat.

I slap my leg.  “I knew it!  There’s always a catch.  Like a self-renewing magazine subscription and no phone number or option online to stop it.”

He stares at me with a cat’s deadpan expression. 

“Sorry,” I tell him.  “You were saying…there is a caveat.”

He nods and reminds me that I am not all-powerful. 

“Ok-ay.”  I don’t know where he’s going with this.  I’ve already demonstrated that I can’t even do nothing effectively. 

Toby points out that he doesn’t get treats every time he meows at me.  And no matter how much he kneads my chest at night, it is never as soft and cushy as he would like. 

“Are you trying to tell me you want a treat?”

He tells me I should embrace my limitations.   

“What?”

My feline Zen-master suggests that recognizing what I can’t do, accepting it and then not trying to do it anyhow, could be liberating.  I might save a small fortune on Tums.

“Okay,” I answer, willing to indulge him.  “How?”

Since I am clearly too worked up to meditate properly, he suggests pretending—for the moment—to be a petal on the water. 

“A petal on the water,” I scoff.  “It sounds like you’re trying to trick me into meditating.”

With a great big Chesire smile, he tells me I am absolutely right.  But we could call it something less poetic and more in-the-world.  Like going with the flow.

“Okay.  That sounds more doable that floating.”  I get dressed and ask my furry guide to lead on.

Toby licks his paw and holds it up to test the current flow.  Treats, he says.  The crunchy kind.

I slap my leg.  “I knew it!”

After a quick snack he licks his paw again and holds it up.  He turns his paw slowly, trying to pick up on the faintest signal.  Finally, he yawns and suggests a nap.  So I kick back in the reclining chair in the den and Toby hops onboard.  Naps, I have noticed before, figure heavily in a cat’s flow.

When we wake up, Toby licks his paw again and tests the winds.  This leads us to sit on the edge of the sofa and stare for a long time at something that isn’t there. 

Next, another nap. 

It’s curious that the only thing I wanted to do when I was still in bed is no longer of interest to me.  Once I’m up, I want to do things.  But the one thing the cat says I need to do most—relax—remains just beyond my reach. 

I ask myself if relaxing necessarily involves a loss of consciousness.  And while I watch Toby resting like a veritable petal on my chest, the phone rings.

“Loch, it’s Telly.”

“Telly?”

“Yes.  That’s why I introduced myself that way.”  My ninety-two-year-old friend is just tickled at himself.  “Say, could you do me a favor?”

Toby opens one eye at me.

Telly explains, “I need someone to drive my car around the block a few times.  It needs to be driven every so often.  I would do it myself, but I’ve fallen onto my very comfortable couch and can’t bring myself to get up.”

This actually sounds promising.  Telly’s needful car is not just old, it’s classic, as in somewhere in the 1950’s classic, with beautiful blue curves and chrome retro-futuristic molding and bumper.  Inside, it’s a no-frills car, no FM radio, no automatic transmission, no seatbelts.  But it is packed with personality.  And for the old guy who let his driver’s license expire years ago, it’s packed with memories of his late wife Alexi, who was the one who drove it.

Real quick, I lick my hand and hold it up.  So poised, I reason that if I say no to my friend, I could be bucking the flow my little guide is asking me to follow for the sake of my empathetic gut.

Now both of the cat’s eyes are watching me.

“Telly, we’ll be right over.”

The cat on my shoulder points out that going with the flow is not always as easy and as obvious as this.  The flow doesn’t always use the phone to call our attention to it.  Toby just doesn’t want me to have unrealistic expectations for tomorrow.

“Are you really trying to derail my flow-going with a warning.” 

He gives me a Cat-nod.  And I think I might just be learning something.

When we get to our friend’s house, he is waiting for us next to the car whose slip cover he has already removed.  He hands me a key with a string tied to it.

“Be gentle with her,” he says.  “Remember, she has some age on her.”

“Do you want to ride with us?” I ask.  “That way you could keep an eye on me.”

He shakes his head.  “I trust you.  Besides, I need to get back to my memory-foam sofa before it forgets me.”

Toby and I get in the car and roll down the windows.  I crank the engine and back the car into the street.  I know my friend is watching us, so I let the car coast ever so gently to the end of the block. 

“Where to?” I ask my co-pilot.

Toby licks his paw and holds it out the window. 

We spend the next hour driving around our small town, going wherever the day or Toby’s paw takes us.  The windows are down.  The wind is in our hair and fur.  We end up at the lake behind the college and park on a gentle slope where we can watch the politics of geese.  “Look how close those honkers are to each other,” I say.  “And not one mask between them.”

I’m just trying to be funny, but the cat doesn’t take it that way. 

Toby marches across the seat and settles himself adamantly in my lap.  At once, he begins to purr like a lullaby, doing the very thing he has spent the day advising me not to do: trying to impose my will on another.  As a general rule, it doesn’t work and then it leads to stress.  My stress.  I try to work up a little indignation about my teacher not walking the walk he has advised me to take.  But I can’t.  There is just no resisting the purr.  It works like a psycho-soothing machine generating its own flow, going directly into me via pain central.

The cat knows this. 

And so, I take the only action available to me.  I let go.  And relax.

Toby shows off his new tattoo sleeve on our guys day out.

touch of Telly

Vicarious. 

It’s the perfect word to describe life in the time of Covid.  While the virus abounds, travel and dining-out is as close as one’s television…if we don’t mind someone else having all the fun.  And those of us following the CDC’s life-preserving guidelines thank God for those who are not.  For these are the people still doing everything we all did a year ago before…you know.  On any given weekend, I will reach out to several such friends, and after a few phone calls, I feel I’ve squeezed enough game nights, weddings, pizza parties, and in-class grade school lessons to fill a month of weekends.

All safely. 

All vicariously.

On this Saturday, I’m attending two parties on the block, less vicariously than distant.  

The first of these events is at Ed Filbert’s house.  Ed lives across the street and a couple houses down from me.  And after he hosted a super-spreader event to celebrate his sixty-eighth birthday, my side of the street is as close as I’m willing to get to the post-event gathering.  Ed and at least twenty of the fifty-some people who attended his party, have tested positive for Covid.  Exactly two weeks later, he is hosting a number of medical providers in astronaut suits.  His infected wife was admitted to the local hospital and given the last of the beds in the area.  Since Ed already has a bed at his home, that is where they are treating him.

I’m just standing on the safe side of the street, minding another person’s business, when a familiar person stops to watch with me.  He, along with most of the grill-masters in this and the adjoining neighborhood, crashed my party-for-two, a few months back, when I couldn’t get the grill lit.

“Hey,” the guy says.  “I remember you.”  He grins.  “I didn’t introduce myself last time.  My name’s John.”

“Juan?” I ask, when his mask filters back key letters.

“John,” he says again.  “As in….”  He looks around us.  “The gospel of John?”

I look around us, wondering where the heck he saw that.  “John.  Hey.  My name’s Loch.  As in the Lochness Monster.”  His brows go up, clearly impressed.

“Who’s the little guy?” he refers to the cat on my shoulder.

“Say hello to Toby.”  They do a quick fist/paw bump.

“How about this other guy?” John asks, referencing the house we’re watching.

“Name’s Ed Filbert.”

“Like the nut?”

I shrug.  “It fits.  But it looks like this party is winding down.  After they carried in the ventilator, people started to leave.”

John frowns.  But I tell him there’s a more happening party happening further up the street.  I invite him to join Toby and me.

Here, again, we find medical personnel, but these are different.  They are not on-hand to minister to or to heal.  These are scientists who have come to investigate why my ninety-two-year-old friend Telly has not gotten sick, even after three weeks playing nursemaid to Scott, his virus-infected son-in-law. 

Telly has suggested that this is the quintessential non-bipartisan stance on anything.  He and Scott sit on opposite sides of the political aisle.  “Perhaps our different worldviews,” he says. “is the ultimate protection against the other party’s illness.”

We find Scott milling about the front yard, recovered after a long bout with Covid, but still a likely carrier of the virus.  His wife, Ally, is wearing surgical scrubs, a mask and rubber gloves so that she can hold his hand.  It’s almost sweet. 

“Hey Ally…Scott,” I call out.  “This is John.”  John waves.  “We thought we would check in on your grandfather and see if the doctors have been able to figure out why he hasn’t gotten sick.”

“They have been in and out of the house this whole week,” Ally says.  “They took so much of his blood in the beginning, they had to let a few days pass before they could take any more.  They think….”

“He is one tough old bastard,” Scott says.  This is, perhaps, the nicest thing I have ever heard Scott say about his grandfather-in-law.

“No,” Ally says.  “I mean, yes, he is tough!  But after the last round of tests, they say they think Grandfather may have a natural immunity to the virus.”

“Do you mean, like…he’s just asymptomatic?” John asks.

No sooner is the question asked than the man himself appears on the front porch.

“Hey, Telly,” John calls.

“Yo, John.”

“Hold on.”  I stop everything.  “You know Telly?”

John shakes his head.  “Who doesn’t know Telly?”

Back to Telly.  “Yo, Loch…Toby.”  We wave to our tough old friend.  “It seems when the doctors gave a shot of my blood to a vial of Covid, none of the virus was left standing.”  He grins, rather pleased with his blood.  Not only can he not catch the virus, but the virus can’t catch him.  “I’m like Teflon.”

“You’re like Teflon, pangolins and bats all rolled into one,” I tell him.

“Did you know that around 500 corona viruses have been found in bats?” John talks like gospel.  

One of the scientists steps from the house and removes his mask within sneezing distance of Telly.  “We found his blood effective at immobilizing or destroying at least twenty of those corona viruses.”

John’s jaw drops.

The cat on my shoulder drops.

“We don’t understand it,” the doctor says.  “We can only confirm what we have found.  Since he can’t carry the virus, he can’t give it to another person.”  The doctor hands Telly a note.  “I’m releasing you to return to normal life with other people.  Congratulations.” 

Telly walks across the yard.  As he is about to pass Scott, the latter steps away from him.

“Why are you doing that?” Ally asks of her husband.  “He took care of you when I couldn’t.”

Scott frowns as he says, “He made me watch CNN for hours on end.”

“Back to normal,” Telly says with a grin and joins us on the sidewalk.

“Telly, why don’t you and John come down to my house so we can celebrate your release with a distant round of coffees?” 

John points to a plastic valve on his mask and pulls out a straw.  Then he pokes the straw through the hole.  “I am so ready to coffee,” he says, turning the drink into a word of action.  “I don’t even have to remove my mask.”

I am impressed.  “Where did you get that?”

“Made it.”

“You made it?”

“John here is quite the entrepreneur,” Telly says as we hit the road.  “He designed, patented and set up a small manufacturing team in one of the empty warehouses downtown.”

John laughs.  “I couldn’t have done it without Telly.”

I turn to the old guy walking between us.  “When did you learn to patent and manufacture?”

“I didn’t.”

“Telly and I were at a coffee shop just before the first lockdown, and the waitress told him he couldn’t remove his mask inside.”

Telly turns to me so I can see his eyes roll.  He explains, “We were supposed to slip one of these bendy straws up through the bottom of the mask and into our mouth.  For anyone with nostrils, that’s an accident waiting to happen.  Of course, this only encouraged all their other customers to take their coffees and go.”

“But not Telly,” John says grandly.  “He pinched a hole in the front of his mask and poked a straw right through it.  Genius.”

“Our friend John took it from there.”

“I call it Poke It In.  They’re selling like hotcakes online.”

“Poke it in?” I repeat after him. 

“Hey,” John says.  “The name is its own direction.”

I ask Telly to let me know the next time he is about to spur entrepreneurial invention. 

“Gladly,” he says, “but that assumes I know what I’m doing when I do it.”  Quite seriously, he explains, “I may have missed a real opportunity to capitalize on my immunity when I was contacted by two of the big vaccine developers.”

“You’re kidding?” John says.

Telly shakes his head.  “At first I thought they wanted to buy some of my blood for testing.”  But, as he explains, they didn’t want to buy his blood.  “They wanted to buy the rights to my blood to stop me from coming up with my own home-brewed concoction and selling it to the public.  They didn’t want any more competition.”

“So you could have made money off of this by doing absolutely nothing,” John summarizes.

“Inspiring yet?” Telly says to me.  “Let’s say I wanted to leave open my options.    Besides, I have this great name if I do decide to market my own home brew: Touch of Telly.”

“Touch of Telly?” we all question.

“People would ask for touch of death if they thought it might save their life.”

As we near my house, the cat on my shoulder cocks his head and lifts an ear.  He hears something.  Soon, we all hear it, an incessant beeping sound.  We follow the sound as far as the sidewalk in front of Ed Filbert’s house.  There are no cars in the driveway.  His medical help has left, for good or just for the moment.  But there is a distinctly alarmed beeping sound coming from deep inside Ed’s house.  The kind of beeping you would expect from a monitor that is alarmed by the thing it is monitoring.

Patient Ed.

“That’s not good,” Telly says.  The three of us look around, but there is no professional help in sight. 

“I’m calling 911,” John says.

“I’ll run get Ally,” I say.  Not only is Ally a nurse, but she has the PEP to grapple with a virus.

“That will take time,” Telly thinks out loud.  “And seconds may count.  Crap.  Ya’ll stay here.”

Without further explanation, Telly goes to the Filberts’ front door and tries the handle.  It opens, as though he were expected.  Without mask or straw, he steps inside and shuts the door. 

“Didn’t you say twenty people caught the virus in that house?” John asks.

“I did.”

I look at John.  John looks at me, and then he looks at Toby.  Toby looks at John who looks at me.  I’m still looking at John.

At some point the beeping ends, but our six eyes are caught in a vicious staring knot.  After a real wrestling effort to disentangle ourselves, a white van with two nurses pulls into the drive.  At the same moment, Telly steps out of the Filbert house and, miraculously, the collective of two men and a cat disengage. 

“He’s upstairs,” Telly tells the nurses as they hurry past him into the house.  He shrugs and rejoins us at the sidewalk. 

“What happened in there?” I ask.  “Is Ed….”  I don’t want to say it.

“No.  Ed’s fine.  But he wasn’t breathing when I went in.  So I just rolled him onto his stomach, reset the machine, and whacked Ed on the back to reset Ed.”

“You saved his life,” John speaks the truth.

Telly makes a disgusted expression.  He has quite a colorful history with the neighborhood’s staunchest Republican.  None of it good. 

“On the wall over his bed is this framed piece of embroidery with a message that was pretty popular a few years ago.”

Not knowing where our friend is going with this, John and I almost look at each other to confirm our mutual confusion when, at the last second, we remember what happened the last time we did that.

“What would Jesus do?”

“Huh?”

“That was the message.  What would Jesus do?  Right over the head of the closest thing I’ve ever had to a real nemesis.”  Telly sighs heavily.  “Alexi kept a note card with that same message tucked into the side of our bathroom mirror.”  The widower of many years looks at us.  “My first day out of quarantine with a signed release to return to normal.  And this is what happens.”  He shakes his head.  “But with a message like that staring me right in the face, I didn’t see that I had a choice.”

No one points out that Telly made his decision to go into the covid trap before he saw the writing on the wall. 

“You did it,” John says. 

I second that.  “You did what Jesus would have done.”

Telly says his godly deed has left him feeling drained and parched.  He turns to me.  “Didn’t you say you were going to treat us to coffee?”

I nod and Toby motions for our friends to follow.  “This way.”

Toby rolls up his fur for the Touch of Telly vaccine.

the quarantine waltz

In the time of Telly’s quarantine, the space outside below the second-floor window of his granddaughter’s house has stood in for my screen porch as a place to come together.  Friends of his visit, standing in the side yard, looking up at the man in the window.  He likens it to a drive-thru for fast conversation.  The Stop & Chat, he calls it.  Toby and I have done our fair share of stopping and chatting.  My friend says he hasn’t socialized this much since the last funeral he attended. 

“But,” he says, “it’s not enough.  I don’t know if it’s because I can’t touch anyone…or if this virus is just getting into my brain and throwing switches and pulling wires.  But I don’t feel like my usual self.”

“You’re not wiping your nose,” I list for him.  “You haven’t lost your sense of taste.  But your wires are coming loose.  I don’t think I have heard that as one of the symptoms of the virus.”

But I am inclined to believe the old guy’s loose-wires diagnosis when he says he feels bad about the new scratches on Ed Filbert’s Cadillac, the same scratches caused by the new eight-year-old on the block.

“Since when do you have tender feelings for Ed?” I ask him.  “He’s that guy in the corner house you don’t like.  Remember?”

“Look, if Tabby wasn’t riding that bike, she wouldn’t have hit his car.”

“Twice,” I tell him.  “She hit his parked car twice in two days.  Twice, because Ed absolutely refuses to park in his driveway.  Why?  Nobody knows.  He doesn’t have a basketball goal on the side.  I’ve never seen him roller-blading in the drive.”

“I know.  I know.”  Telly says he knows.  “I think it worries Ed to back up that long car.  He’s so thick-neck’ed, he can’t turn to look behind him.” 

“Thick naked?”  I heard two distinct syllables in his use of the cervical predicate.

“Please don’t conjure that image of that person,” Telly says with a hand over his eyes.  “My point is…Crap!  Now I can’t get that image out of my head.”

I wait.

“If I hadn’t given the girl the bike,” he continues, “she wouldn’t have been riding it to run into Ed’s car.  And the only reason I had it to give to her is….”  He kind of peters out, glosses over an ancient history of illness and loss, and wraps it up with “It belonged to Alexi.”

Selfishly, I wonder if I have the energy for the conversation I think is about to dock.  

“I know.  And it was a wonderful gesture, letting Santa give Tabby your wife’s bicycle.  But what I’m hearing from you is that Alexi makes you care for Ed.”

The preposterousness of the idea makes him smile, at least as much as the thought of thick-necked naked Ed makes him shudder.

“I see your point.  I guess a better explanation would be that this old widower is losing it.”

“No.”  Toby and I shake our heads sympathetically.  “I’m sure that happened years ago.  This is something else.”

There is the type of conversation you have with the politically opposite family member you can’t divorce or impeach.  There are the varied and meaningful conversations you have with friends more simpatico.  And there are the conversations, word-laden or threadbare, that you have with those empowered to fill your heart.  It’s not the scope of their knowledge or their familiarity with a subject.  It’s who they are to you.  What part of you they touch.   

“Maybe I need a cat,” Telly says with an eye on Toby. 

“Now I know you’ve lost it.” 

Now Toby puts an eye on me.

“Listen to me,” Telly says.  “With a cat, I can have different types of conversations.  About anything I want.  You know, because, really, you speak for them.  You project their half of the conversation onto them.”

“Don’t listen to him Toby.”

“I try to do that with my sick son-in-law, but he resists.  So, I have these conversations with myself.”  Telly holds up his hand to stop any smartass commentary.  “Here, too, there is a manner of projection.  A conversation needs at least two sides.  But when the projected side speaks to me, it is Alexi’s voice I hear.  It’s been eleven years and I can still smell her skin.  Still see the quickness in her eyes.”  Another image momentarily blinds him.  “We used to dance.”

Just like that, he changes the subject and forces me to consider just how much my half of the conversation is projected by him.

“Are we talking about get-down kind of dance?”

He waves off the idea.  “Something slow…and meaningful.  There’s such a thing as dancing with your pelvis, and there’s dancing with your heart.  Alexi liked to waltz.  She liked how it looked in the movies, old ones before your time.  When she danced with me, her arms made me forget my worries.  When I looked in her eyes, she was the only woman in the world.”  He laughs at himself.  “I’m guilty of doing a little of that now.  Waltzing around the house while you-know-who is conked out, staring into Alexi’s eyes.  Silly of me.”

“Telly, that is the least silly thing you’ve said in our session today.”

“Session, is it?”  He raises his crazy brows.  “And just who should be billing whom?”

We laugh.  

After leaving Telly’s Stop & Chat, I find myself actually envying the old man and his projected dance partner.  Imaginary or not, his reaction is real.      

When I get home, I don’t even think about it.  I turn on my laptop and log into my online dating dashboard.  I stare at the list of names in my in-box.  Their profiles and winking emojis suggest different kinds of women.  But the kind of woman I want to see is not in the box.  I’m looking for the kind who walks on rainbows. 

Fortunately for me, I know her number.

With each ring, a thousand reasons to hang up occur to me.  I have avoided calling her for months because I didn’t want to squash my hope.  Brilliant strategy, I know.  There is only one reason to hang on.  And the one prevails.

When the ringing stops suddenly, I lose my place in my thoughts.

“Lo’och?”  The voice is so familiar and yet so unexpected it brings tears to my eyes.

“Teri Lin.”  God it feels good to say that name.   

“What is it?”  She sounds alarmed by the crack in my voice.

“Three aliens just showed up at my door and told me I need to get off this rock before life as we’ve known it this past year continues…and that I can only take one person with me.”

She doesn’t miss a beat.  “I’ve had my bags packed for weeks.”

I truly feel I have already lifted off and gone to Teri Lin.

“So why haven’t you and your aliens called sooner?” she asks. 

As they say in every interview these days: it’s an excellent question.  “I guess I figured you were busy dating all those guys you said you were meeting online.”

“I’ve only been dating one,” she says. 

One is bad, because one is serious.  At once, I regret not deleting her number from my contacts. 

“But I’m always looking for a reason to break up,” she says.  How unexpected it must have been for Moses to finally get an olive branch from his trusty dove.  Right now, it feels as though my dove has just returned and brought back with it the whole olive tree.  “He is frustrated because I won’t meet him in person.”

“Unless he’s from another planet, like my friendly alien abductors, he should know that this one is in the throes of a pandemic.”

“That’s the word I was looking for.  Throes.”  She laughs and I hear music.  “I hope when we finally see each other again, I will still look the same.”

“After this year, a year apart, you will never look the same.”

“I’ve gained weight,” she says in a confessional voice.

“I’ve amassed in my affections.”

“Loch, seriously.”

“Listen, you’re not the only one.  My right foot has never been this big.”

“Stop it,” she says, but her laughter tells me to Go, go, go.  “You and your foot.”

“Let’s turn our cameras on.  I’ll prove it.”

She hesitates.  “I didn’t know you were going to call.  I didn’t prepare for this.”

I don’t push it.  “Okay.  Talk is good.  Your words in your voice…that is what I miss.  The rest is just icing.”

If the next level of our conversation is restricted by a combination lock, I somehow speak all the right numbers.  At once, she appears on my screen. 

“Oh..my..God,” she says slowly and with wonder. 

Now it’s my turn to uh-oh.  “I guess I should have told you…I look a year older.”

“No’oooh.”  Tears roll down Teri Lin’s cheeks.  “I have missed your crazy hair.”

“Crazy?”  I’m trying not to get choked up.  “You couldn’t find another word?  Like handsome, sexy, brushed?”

“All of the above,” she says with a smile so big I can feel it crowding out the organs in my chest.

“Now, not that I care, but I don’t see an ounce of extra Teri Lin.  Is all your weight-gain below the ankles?  Maybe it’s just in one hand.”

“Trust me.  Extra Teri Lin is here.”

“I can’t wait to see her.”  And a thought occurs to me, a next-level thought.  “After nine months in lock-down, can you still sing?”

“Can I still sing?”  She tries to act indignant.  At least, I think she’s acting.  “That is all I have been doing for nine months.  Can I still sing?  I can sing anything,” she claims.  “Make up my own melody, my own introspective life-divining lyrics.  Can I still sing.”  While I make mental note of the button I have just discovered, the owner of the button narrows her eyes at the caller who dares to question can she sing.  “Just give me a beat.”

“I’ll give you three.”  I hold the phone away from my body and cup one hand over my mouth.  “Pkooh…czk-czk.  Pkooh…czk-czk…”

“I’m waiting.”  Her voice is singsongy. 

“This is it.  Pkooh…czk-czk.”

“Pooh…chick-chick?” she questions me.  “What…are you trying to clear your throat for both of us?”

“I’m beat-boxing in a three-four time signature.”  I raise a cynical eyebrow.  “Or is that outside your singing range?”

Oh, the buttons one should push only at a safe distance!

Still holding the phone away from me, I project Teri Lin’s waist under my right hand, her right hand in my phone-hand.  I don’t even have to explain myself as the picture on my phone begins to turn and gently bob.  She follows my lead, twenty miles away.

“Lah…la’la,” she sings, not with words but words’ element.  “La’la.  Lah lahh.”  She tries not to laugh.  “La’la….la’la…la’la….Lah lahh.  What are we doing?” she asks sweetly between the la’s.

“I don’t know,” I say, because I really don’t know.  But I must be doing it right, because Toby gives me a thumbs-up and motions for me to keep going.  “Just don’t stop.” 

Safe waltzing by phone.

post-Christmas post

The proud new owner of a mountain bike agreed she should have a helmet before she rode it again.  Accidents make a compelling case.  However, on Christmas Day, nothing was open.

The day after Christmas, no one had bike helmets in inventory.  Except this one guy.  A guy on Craig’s List.  I drove two hours to a small mill house with two impressive Harley motorcycles and a squadron of trail motorbikes parked on the lawn. 

“We bought it for our son,” the guy explains to me while his wife goes to get the helmet.  “But he outgrew it.”  I nod, sons will do that.

I look around me, outside, at kids pedaling their new bicycles, each of them wearing flashy plastic and foam protective gear.

“Here it is.”  His wife hands me what I drove two hours to find.

And this is not it. 

I mean, it’s a helmet.  It would be impossible to mistake it for anything but a helmet.  In fact, it reminds me of the helmet my father brought back from his stint in the army.  No flash.  No rainbows or flying ponies.  Not at all what I know is expected of me to bring back. 

But I did drive two hours. 

And all the stores were out. 

And the anxious new owner of a mountain bike isn’t going to wait forever.

So I pay for the helmet and put it on seat next to the cat.  Toby looks at me like I’m crazy.

“Do you want to be the one who keeps Tabby from riding her new bike?  Yeah.  I didn’t think so.”

When we get back to the house, Tabby and Ally are washing the bike for the third time that day.  “It’s about time,” Tabby says.

“Yeah,” Ally seconds her.  Ally made it clear earlier that she had other things she wanted to do on this rare day off. 

I reach for the helmet and put in the kid’s hands.

Her face lights up like….well, it lights up like yesterday.

“Ohhh, this is sooo coo’ool.”

Toby acknowledges that I have scored big time with the eight-year-old neighbor.  But have I scored with anyone else?

“You’re giving her that?” Ally says with clear disappointment in my judgement.  No score there.

Dan, Tabby’s dad, is leaning at the fence with his wife Alice.  “Let me see, sweetheart.”  His daughter dons the helmet and turns to show him.  “Uh….it’s….uh….well….”

No definitive score there.

Alice has already left the fence and slammed her kitchen door behind her.  That’s probably a no-score.

Ally calls her grandfather and lets him facetime with the new helmet. 

“Awesome!” Telly says.  “You got a bonafide biker’s helmet.  I like the skull and crossbones.”

“I know!” Tabby shouts loud enough to carry up the street without a phone.  The kid runs to get her new doll—the very same she tried to pawn off on her unsuspecting brother yesterday—and puts it in the basket of her bike. 

“Do you know what she calls it?” Ally says of the doll when we get in the car.  “Number Two.”

“The doll?”

“Yep.  Number Two.  Endearing, isn’t it?”

Toby hops in the back seat, and we follow the yellow mountain bike out and up the street.

“You’re letting that little girl wear a biker’s helmet,” Ally says to me. 

“You wanna take it away from her?  Yeah.  I didn’t think so.”  I tell her that if it can protect a kid on a motorbike, it should be able to protect another kid on a mountain bike.  “Look, it will help her carve out her own unique identity on the street.” 

As we watch, the young rider wobbles left and right.

“You know, we didn’t wear helmets when I was a kid,” Telly says from his remote place on the phone. 

“Heads were harder back then,” I tell him.

As we watch, Tabby hits the curb and flies off the bike, putting her biker’s helmet to task at once.  She hits her head hard against the sidewalk.

“Oh my God,” Ally cries. 

I stop the car and run with Ally to the scene of the fall.  Tabby is already on her feet, knocking her helmet like a person wondering who’s home. 

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“I’m a nurse,” Ally says.  “Are you okay?”

Like her okay means more than my okay because she’s a nurse.  

Ally puts her hand on the girl’s shoulder. 

“I’m EIGHT YEARS OLD already,” Tabby cries out like someone who has had to explain this to people ever since she was a child.  Ally steps back.  “I GOT THIS.  OKAY?”

Ally steps back further. 

Tabby, meanwhile, gets down on her hands and knees.  I just know she’s going to puke, when, instead, she butts the pavement with her head.  And then she does it again.  Repeatedly.

“Tabby, stop that.  What are you doing?”

“It works,” the kid says.  “The helmet really works.”

“Well, yeah.  But it’s not designed for pretend falls.  So stop doing that.”

We get back in the car.  We watch Tabby put Number Two in the basket and climb back into the saddle.

We follow the mountain bike at about five miles an hour as it hits trashcans and recycling bins on the edge of the road.  Tabby divides leaf piles.  She is indominable.  And then she hits a pothole and bounce right out of her seat and onto her bottom.

“Oh no,” Ally cries.

“Give her moment,” I suggest, in no hurry to incur the kid’s precocious wrath.  “There,” I say with relief.  “She?  She gave us a thumbs-up.”

“That girl’s got real grit,” Telly says, much impressed. 

“Did she really ask for a bike because her parents kept forgetting to pick her up from different places?” Ally asks.  “That is so sad.”

“But much to be admired in a youngster anxious to gain a little independence.”

“Grandfather,” Ally says to the phone.  “She’s eight years old.”

“How old do you think I was when I got my first job?” Telly asks.

“Hold that thought, Telly.  We’ve just had another spill.”

“What’s happening.  I can’t see anything.”

“That’s because you’re not here, Telly.  She’s laying there in the road.”

“Well, are you going to just let her lay there?” Telly asks incredulously.

Ally and I look at each other.  “Maybe just a little longer.”

“There,” Ally cries.  “She’s getting up.  There’s the thumb.”

“Okay, Telly.  We’re rolling again.”

We observe much of the same weaving and wobbling, the same hitting of objects set or parked at the road’s edge.  And then something we didn’t anticipate. 

“On no,” Ally says.  “A hill.” 

It’s not a big hill, as hills go.  But if you’re going down the hill, and you’re not accustomed to using your brakes, the hill can add up.   

“Thank God there is nothing in her way,” Ally says when she can see to the bottom.  But she is forgetting that the new biker doesn’t need something in her way for a reason to fall.

All it takes is little speed and a wobble.  And like that, she is down.

What follows is the hard part.

“Do you think she’s hurt?” Ally asks.

“You’re the nurse.  Maybe you should go check.”

“But do you think she’s really hurt?”  Spoken like a nurse who has learned after one close call.

We sit in the car.  Telly blurts out that he can’t see anything.  I tell him there’s nothing to see.  We’re in a tunnel.

“I think she’s hurt,” Ally says reluctantly.  “It’s been a while.  She’s not getting up.”  Ally rolls down her window and then she turns back to me.  “Do you think she’s hurt.”

While the adults in the car have not yet crossed the threshold between care for another and self-preservation, Toby leaps out the window and runs to Tabby.  The girl sits up and he climbs into her lap.  He lets her hold him while he purrs through the hurt and the tears.  When he has reached is own threshold, Toby steps back and lets the girl get up.  Tabby turns back and gives us a thumbs-up.  She resettles Number Two in the basket and puts one foot on a pedal.  However, before she can cast off again, Toby leaps up into the front basket with Number Two.

“Did you see that?” Ally says, much impressed with the Toby’s courage.

“Remember,” I tell her.  “We only have one life to lose.  He’s got nine.”  

Interestingly, with Toby at the prow, the girl’s undulating course from one side of the road to the other narrows to one bike’s width.  The wobble disappears.  She does sideswipe a kid on another bike, but that looked intentional. 

Our confidence gains a foothold in this initial road-test and Toby takes us back up Myrtle Drive to the road we live on. 

“We’re almost there,” I say excited.   

“Almost,” Ally says.  “But she’s heading right for that red car.”

That red car is Ed Filbert’s Cadillac, which he has chosen to park on the road that runs down the side of his house.  In fact, it was Tabby’s first-day collision with Ed’s parked Cadillac on the road in front of his house that prompted my quest today for the only available protective headwear. 

I regret not getting some protective fingernail-wear for the nail-biter riding shotgun next to me.  I warn Telly to brace himself.

“What!” he demands.  “I can’t see anything.”

WHAM! 

The accident is spectacular, tumbling Tabby, Toby and Number Two over handlebars and basket and—somehow—ejecting Ed out of his holiday slumber and right out of the house.  He is pulling his robe’s drawstring tight when he looks up to see his across-the-street-neighbor headbutting the hood of his pride and joy with her biker’s helmet.  Repeatedly.  We open our car doors.

“Dear God!” Ed cries.

“I know!” Tabby says as she stands up triumphantly on the polished red hood.  “It really works.  I could do this all day.”

“Ed’s clutching his chest,” I narrative for those of us not here to see. 

Telly, Ally and I are asking each other how distressed a contentious guy like Ed really needs to get before he needs help, when we see his shoulders drop and his face grow long. 

“He’s letting go of his chest,” I say.  “He’s padding down to the sidewalk where Toby is holding something in his mouth.  Ed’s leaning over, he’s taking the something out of Toby’s mouth.  Now he’s clutching his back.”

“What did he take out of Toby’s mouth?” Telly asks.

“One guess,” I tell him.

“A mouse?”

“No.  Number Two.”

“I thought I only had one guess.”

“Hush, you two,” Ally demands.

As we watch, the old guy in a robe holding a doll pulls a face mask out of his pocket.    

“I believe this is yours,” Ed says—so completely out of character that I wonder if Toby has steered us into a parallel universe—and offers his hand to help the little lady down from his car.

Toby and Tabby roll.

he knows

Early Christmas morning, Telly calls me.  There’s no hello. 

“Give me a play-by-play description of events in the next yard.”

“Uh, Merry Christmas, Telly,” I say.

“Yeah, yeah.  Merry Christmas.  Now what’s the scene?”

“What.  Am I casing the joint for you?  Are you going to steal all the kids’ toys once things settle down?”

“I’m in quarantine,” he reminds me.  “You are my eyes and ears on the outside.  Just indulge me.”

The unseasonably warm weather prevails, and Tabby and her two-year-old brother Francis, a.k.a. Sir Francis—as his father Dan-the-Man tells it—are outside with the new Christmas presents. 

So.

“No chestnuts popping on an open fire here, too warm.  But just perfect to take your new plastic wagon-pull-thing out for a spin.  Sir Francis is pulling his wagon-thing in erratic lines back and forth across the yard.  If he could straighten it up a little bit, I could see him pulling a functional lawnmower-thing next Christmas morning. 

“And he’s padding around in in a Halloween costume.  I will assume it’s a Halloween costume.  I don’t recall a dinosaur in the manger scene.”

“What about the girl?” Telly asks impatiently. 

“If you are hoping to get an adult-size Christmas tree sweater with blinking lights like the one she gave Toby, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed.  Dan-the-Man’s wearing that gift.”

“Have you ever listened to a baseball game on the radio?” Telly asks.  “Have you ever noticed how all they ever talk about is the baseball game, not the color of the clouds over the scoreboard or the number of cars they can see in the parking lot.”

“I’ve never noticed that.  Why?”

It’s just too much fun not to rile up the old guy.  But I don’t push it.

“Okay, Tabby is standing perfectly still in the middle of the yard holding a doll by the hand.  I mean, the doll is literally hanging at the end of her arm.  She is watching her father follow the wagon-thing his dinosaur son is pulling around the yard.  Not a very compelling set of actions.  Let me see if I can see their parked cars.”

“Is that her doll?” Telly asks.

“Either that, or it’s her miniature younger sister who appears to have not one structural bone in her body.  I’m thinking someone left it under the tree for her overnight.”

“She doesn’t sound too happy about it,” Telly says rather excitedly.  I’m beginning to suspect an inner Grinch in my friend.

“Hold up,” I say.  “There could be a new development.  Tabby’s moving again.  She is about to intersect with Sir Francis and his wagon.  Her arm is out.  Maybe she’s going to hug him.  She’s stepping past him…I’m thinking no hug… and she’s dropping her doll into the wagon-thing as her father smiles down at her.  Now she’s watching them leave.  Now she’s turning to look at me while I narrate everything she is doing to a ninety-two-year-old man who is bored babysitting a sick Republican.”

Telly sighs.  “Now what is she doing?”

“Tabby,” I call over the fence.  “What are you doing?”

The kid narrows her eyes and pulls up a mask covered in candy canes.  She walks toward me and the cat, who is walking on top of the white picket fence.

“Who wants to know,” she says.

“Give her the phone,” Telly says. 

“What?”

“Give…her…the phone.”

I hand the girl my phone and she picks up where I left off.  “I don’t talk to strangers,” she says for an icebreaker.  But in about three seconds, her expression changes and she hangs up my phone.

“He said to tell you to take me to the outhouse,” Tabby says with a perfectly straight face.  “What’s an outhouse?”

“That’s what Telly calls the small in-laws suite behind his granddaughter’s big house.  We were there last night.”

After a few awkward seconds, the kid says, “Are you waiting for me to ask you to take me?”

“Yo, Dan,” I call out to the adult in the next yard.  “I’m kidnapping your daughter for a few minutes.”

My neighbor waves to me.  “As long as the ransom is within reason.”  Not where are you taking her?

Tabby lets herself out of the fenced yard and Toby and I walk her up the street where Telly’s granddaughter, Ally, is waiting outside for us in her work scrubs.  “I just got home,” she calls out as we approach.  “I didn’t even have time to change when my grandfather told me.”

“Told you what?” the three of us ask.

I see Telly standing in the glass storm door of Ally’s house.  He points toward the driveway and disappears.

“What’s going on?” I ask Ally.

“Follow me,” she says with a smile too topographically pronounced to be concealed by her mask.  She takes us around the side of the big house to the smaller in-laws house in the back.  “Wait here,” she says.  “I’ll go get it.”

“Get what?” the three of us ask.   

I look back to the kitchen door where Telly has stepped outside to watch.  I shrug my shoulders Why.  He motions for me to turn back around and pay attention.  When I do, I see Ally walking a killer mountain bike with a brilliant yellow paint job so bold it throws back every glint of light the sun can throw at it.

There is an honest-to-God gasp beside me.  Tabby’s mouth is hanging open.  She is poignantly aware just what doll-thing was left for her under her tree at her house.  Perhaps for this reason, she absolutely refuses to let go of the tears swelling in her eyes until she knows what is what.

“This old guy in a red suit left this bike before I could tell him I thought he had the wrong house,” Telly says behind us.  “What does the card say?”

Ally plucks a card-with-string tied to the handlebars and hands it to the girl, who reads it to us. 

“Tabby,” she says. 

At once, she opens the dam gates and those tears gush.

“That’s me.”  She can hardly get the words out of her mouth.  “But…but…”  Now come the buts of doubt.

Still speaking in a loud voice from the house, Telly says, “I know mountain bikes don’t usually have a basket in the front.  But what do I know.  And there are probably a few nicks and scuffs.”  He laughs a calculated laugh.  Of course there are nicks and scuffs.  The bike belonged to his deceased wife Alexi, the person he talks about more than anyone living.  “The guy in the red suit rode it around to make certain his elves turned all the nuts and bolts tight.  And, well, he kind of fell.  A few times.  He made me promise not to mention that little bit to anyone.  But you are not just anyone.” 

“He knew,” Tabby says to me.

“Telly knows a lot.”

“Santa!” she corrects me.  “He got my letter.  I just didn’t know this is what he had in mind.” 

Still in a state of shock, Tabby takes the bike from Ally, mouth open, eyes wide.  I can practically hear the song of angels coming out of her ears. 

I hold the bike steady for her while she climbs up to try it on for size.  “It’s a little big.”  She looks at the six inches between her feet and the pedals.

“Excuse me,” Telly continues to but in.  “I think most bicycle seats are mounted on a metal post that can be raised or lowered.  And if I’m not mistaken, the tool to do that is in my granddaughter’s hand.  Loch?”

I adjust the seat, with the new owner still on the seat.  She simply refuses to separate from the bike.  I tell her to lift up while I lower the seat.  “There,” I say, still holding the handlebar to keep her upright. 

“Look at these tires,” Tabby says with wonder.  “This is exactly what a monster truck would look like if it were a bike.”

“They’re supposed to be big, to help the rider tackle mountain terrain.  Unlike the truck version, they’re not made big for running over other bikes.  Although, I’m sure it could do that.”

“This is so cool,” she says.  Then, “Give me a push.”  

I don’t know why, but I hadn’t imagined us doing more than walking the bike back down the street like a pet on a leash.
“You heard her,” Telly yells out.

I take a few steps, pulling the bike with me at the seat, and let go. 

“Okay, turn,” I say.  “Tabby, there is a tree in front of you.  Tabby,” I shout.  “Turn.”

The bike is going so slowly, and the big wheels are so big and puffy, the kid just bounces off the tree and stops.

“Wow!”  Her face lights up.  “Let’s do that again.”

“This time,” I suggest, “why don’t we try to avoid anything standing in our way that is bigger than we are.”

We take our rodeo down the driveway to the street.  Telly reappears at the front door.  Ally holds the handlebar for Tabby until she is ready.  When Tabby nods, Ally lets go.  I walk with Tabby, again holding the bike by the scruff of its seat.  We take it up to a jog.  Ally and Toby run with us.  When we have enough momentum, I quietly release her.  Tabby doesn’t even know.

Ally is filming all of this on her phone to show Santa when she returns home.  I run beside Tabby and she looks at my arms swinging at either side.  “You’re not holding it,” she says, alarmed and exhilarated. 

“It’s all you, Tabby,” I tell her.  “You got this.  Right?”

The kid pedals harder. 

Ahead of us, I can see Dan and Alice with Sir Francis and the wagon-pull-thing on the far side of the street in front of their house.  They recognize the eight-year-cyclist in the distance.  Tabby crouches over the bike’s handlebars and bears down on her family.  As she gets closer to them, it isn’t clear to me she remembers what she is supposed to do when she encounters something bigger than her.   

As for her parents, they just stand there.  They’re not moving.  There is no evidence of concern on their faces, no recognition that harm may ride on their daughter’s shoulder today or that they may stand in harm’s way.  It matters not, their uninformed smiles suggest, if she approaches on foot, a mountain bike, or a ground-to-air missile.  This is their daughter.  She approaches.   

“Turn Tabby, turn,” I shout, uncertain who poses who the greater risk to whom.  Finally, at the last second, she does just that, turning right, missing mom and dad, and nailing the neighbor’s parked Cadillac on the side of the road.

“Tabby!”

“Sweetheart!”

Dan and Alice kick their parenting act into gear after witnessing their daughter somersault over her handlebars and the trunk of Ed Filbert’s car. 

They reach for their fallen daughter.

“BACK OFF!” Tabby cries with a hand up.  She winces as she scoots to the edge of the car and hops down.  “I am eight years old,” she declaims, “and I don’t even know how to ride a stupid bike.  I am so behind my peers because NO ONE would get the ONE THING I have been asking for since I outgrew my Big Wheel like forEVER ago.”

Dan and Alice step back with Sir Francis who clearly knew better in the first place.

The girl picks up her bike, just as Ed Filbert comes running out of his house in his robe.  “What’s going on here?”

“What’s going on?” Tabby echoes and turns on the street’s most contentious resident.  “SOMEONE parked their STUPID CAR on the street when their driveway is WIDE OPEN.”

I’ve told myself before, I like that kid.  I’m just glad she’s not mine.

Effectively shut down before he can work up his signature indignation, Ed backs up with Tabby’s parents.  The girl walks her bike back to Toby and me.  Her candy cane mask is crushed, and there is a smidge of blood below the nose bump.  She approaches me, completely disregarding everything the CDC has been shouting from the pulpit for the last nine months, and walks into my arms.

“You okay?” I ask her and look up at Ally who is still filming.  There is at least one person in quarantine who will want to see every gritty detail. 

“Yeah.”  She says softly and pulls back to look right in Santa’s eye.  “Even though I’m pretty new at this, the bike rides perfect, like maybe someone already taught it how to be ridden.”  There is a twinkle in her eye, and I realize now, for all her tough talk of letters and trust-worthy toymakers, the girl knows exactly where this monster gift came from, even if she doesn’t understand why.  “This is the best Christmas ever.”

What do you mean I have the wrong house? No! No! No!

this side of Christmas

Quarantining with covid, it turns out, looks a lot like isolating from covid.

Lots of me-time.  Lots and lots of it.

And with all that time, you become a world observer, stuck at the window or in front of the jumbotron over the mantel.  What you observe is a proliferation of sides: the covid believers and the conspiracy adherents, those who protect themselves in the mask and those who protect their rights from the mask, savvy entrepreneurs riding the virus boom and those evicted when the boom drops. 

Telly confirms it is no different in the household he commandeered to protect his granddaughter Ally from her covid-infected husband.   

“Scottie and I are opposite each other on so many issues,” he says from the second-story window in the hallway, “I practically have to pull back to the scale of ‘the greater humanity’ to get us on the same team.”  He shakes his head.  “You would think in a household of two, you would find more commonality.  At least we share Ally.” 

After Telly locked out of the house the greatest common denominator between him and his son-in-law, Ally (the common denominator) was unwilling to involve the police to regain entry to her own house, for fear of her grandfather being incarcerated for taking her husband hostage.  She finally agreed to swap living quarters temporarily if her grandfather promised to give her updates on him and Scott whenever she asked. 

“Now, I love the kid but she’s wearing me out,” Telly complains above our heads.  It’s uncommonly warm, this day before Christmas.  So he is able to keep the window open for our little visit.  “Every hour and into the night.  My granddaughter’s concern borders on mania.”

“She’s just worried about the two men in her life,” I tell him.  “Maybe that would go away if she had a cat.”  I reference the cat in my lap.  “Cats are great for worrying about.”  Toby turns where he sits, modeling a seasonal sweater that makes him look like a miniature green conifer with LED lights.  When Tabby, my eight-year-old neighbor, saw me leaving the house with the cat, she ran after me to put the sweater on him.  Then she followed.

“She can have my little brother,” Tabby says and giggles.  The girl is on a first-name basis with her parents, which still seems a little odd to me.  It is, I have learned, definitely odd to her parents.  “I doubt Dan and Alice would care much.”  She doesn’t giggle this time.

“I like dogs,” Big Jeff says and holds his up dog Micro.  “I like little dogs.”

“All dogs are little next to you,” Telly says.

Big Jeff laughs.  Tabby giggles.  Toby grooms.

Ally, on the other hand, maintains a steady level of irritation.  “I’m right here,” she snaps.  “You’re all talking about me as if I weren’t right here with you.”

Right here is a circle of chairs culled from a few back yards and placed under the window Telly is leaning from.   

“You don’t look so good,” Ally says to the face in the window.

“You mean I look ninety-two years old?”

“See?” she appeals to the circle.  “This is what I have to deal with.  Grandfather, I’m just thinking, this is day four and most people start having symptoms by now.”

“You’re assuming I’m infected.”

“Yes, I’m assuming!  You stopped wearing your mask the moment you locked me out.  Do you have a death wish?” 

“I am fine.  If I have it, I’m asymptomatic.  Okay?  That person you married, on the other hand, is improving a little each day.  Right?” he calls, presumably to the patient in the house.  “It’s our hourly report, Scottie.  Say something I can pass along to everyone.  Oh, okay.  Scottie says he’s going to retire his MAGA hat and learn to love everyone.”

We can hear a man in the throes of phlegm struggling to speak.

Telly laughs.  “That guy tears me up.”

“Grandfather, please don’t taunt him.”  Ally has confided in me that she is afraid her very blue grandfather may be trying to deprogram her exceptionally red husband.  “I love Scott,” she tells me.  “Red warts and all.”

“You know,” Big Jeff wonders out loud.  “I think I could like a cat.”  He looks from Toby to the little dog in his lap.  “They’re both cute and furry.  Cats are about the same size as a small dog.”

“That’s kind of what I told our patient,” Telly says.  “I pointed out to him that most Democrats look and act a lot like most Republicans.  Unfortunately, those that blur the line rarely make the news.”

“I like Republicans too,” Big Jeff says.

“You are a Republican,” Telly says.

“We’re very likeable people.”

Toby raises one paw and makes a likeable head-petting motion toward Jeff’s dog.  Little Micro proceeds to wet his owner’s lap.

“Oh GEE,” Big Jeff says and stands up.  “Every time he gets outside his comfort zone!”

“He is right on your lap,” Telly points out.  “The cat’s six feet away.  How small is his zone?” 

For those of us who are not Jeff, it is strangely satisfying, after months at home, to partake of any entertainment that is not on the television.  For Tabby, it is downright hilarious because it hits right at home.

“That’s just like Sir Francis,” she says.  The remark is just jarring enough to turn the conversation.

“The navel officer?” someone asks.

“The philosopher?”

“The plumber?”

“My brother,” she says, just amazed how poorly grown-ups are at guessing.  “He pees at lot.”

“He’s just two,” I hasten to explain Sir Francis’ prolific output.

Big Jeff says he’s going to take Micro home and change.  “A fondness for dry pants is another thing I suspect Republicans and Democrats share.” 

“Thanks for stopping by,” Telly shouts.  “And Merry Christmas.”

Tabby looks reminded of something and tells us she probably needs to leave too.  “I told Dan and Alice that EVERYONE has to be in bed tonight by eight o’clock.”  She reproduces for us the same stern expression I am assuming she gave the family she isolates with.  “In bed by eight, they have told me my whole life or you might not get what you wished for Christmas.”

Ally smiles real big and asks the girl if her parents know what her gift wish is.

“No,” Tabby says.  “Another thing they tell me is be careful about who I trust with personal information.  I figure wishes are personal information.”  We nod in agreement.  “So, I mailed a letter to Santa and told him I need a bicycle.”

“You need a bicycle?”

“Sometimes Alice forgets to pick me up.”

After Tabby leaves, Telly says, “Poor kid.  Sounds like she’s having to grow up pretty young.”

Ally says she probably needs to get ready for work.  “I’ll be back before the morning, but...”  She stops and stares at the LED lights on Toby’s Christmas sweater.  She stares until the tears remind her to blink.  “Sorry,” she says and wipes her face on her arm.  “This is just not the Christmas I was expecting.”  She shrugs.  “I guess I’ll leave and let you two talk about me in private.  Tell Scott I’ll be checking in,” she calls above her.

“He already knows,” her grandfather says lovingly.

When she is gone, I ask Telly if he is really feeling okay, or if that’s just what he’s telling Ally.

He thumps his chest with a fist.  “I feel as strong as a ninety-two-year-old ox.  And it makes me wonder about all the reporting we hear on the virus.”

“Don’t tell me you think it’s a hoax.  The proof is right there in the house with you.”

“No.  It’s not that.  Scottie is definitely infected.  The thing is, he takes so many vitamins and supplements no germ or virus should be able to survive in his environment.  Shoot, I’m ninety-two years old.  To be more at-risk of dying from the virus, you practically need to be dead with the virus.  How do I not have it?”

“Maybe you’re not giving it a chance,” I say sarcastically.

“The incubation period is greater than four days, but I really thought that by now I would at least have a runny nose.  I still have a full box of tissue by my bed.  Unopened.”

“It sounds like you’re complaining.”

“What I’m saying is, I don’t feel a thing.  Except—”  He stops to check behind him.

“Except what?”  Now he’s got me worried. 

“Loch…I’m tired of the sides.”  For the first time in four days, the old guy looks like he might be coming down with something.  “If I try to have a conversation with Scottie—you know, to help pass the time—all he does is contradict every statement I make.  I even agreed to watch Fox News with him and stick with the script.  But same thing.”  He leans against the windowsill. 

“You do sort of have a history with him.”

“I know.  And right now, there are new sides for Ally and me.  I’m the at-risk and she’s the professional healthcare giver.  And it makes her absolutely deaf to anything I say as her grandfather.  If I ask her about work, she asks for my temperature.

“Now, I can talk with Big Jeff.  That guy can talk about anything without taking offense.  I love that about him.  But I can’t tell you how many of our conversations were ended abruptly when someone had to go change into some more dry.” 

I laugh, expecting Telly to laugh with me.  But when he frowns, another side is drawn. 

“I can’t even enjoy my games on TV anymore because it’s all about taking sides.  It doesn’t work without sides.”

There is no one else in the zone from the second-floor window to the circle of chairs.  Just Telly, the cat and I.

“I miss coming down to your house and talking without sides getting in the way of meaningful talk.  Even stupid talk.  The three of us are real good at that.”

Toby smiles to be counted.

“That day is coming,” I tell him.  “Until it does, Rapunzel, Toby and I know where your tower window is.”

He laughs.  “I appreciate you stopping by, but you should probably head home, too.  It’s getting cooler.”  Even so, the old guy doesn’t look ready to be left alone.  “Before you go,” he howevers, “maybe you could do me a favor.  I shouldn’t need a reminder to tell me what day of the year this is.  But let me see that Christmas cat one more time.”

I hold Toby up, high over my head, and he poses cat-fully in his Christmas tree sweater.

“That is the most ridiculous…most beautiful thing I can see from this window.”  He sniffs. 

“In that case—” 

I remove the sweater, much to Toby’s relief, and hang it on a branch leaning over the circle of chairs.  Then I hit the switch for the LED light show to begin.

“That’s nice.”  He sighs on high.  “Merry Christmas Toby…Loch.”

“Merry Christmas, Telly.”

Putting your best Christmas side forward.

seasonal ghosts

On a typical Thanksgiving, family descends on my parents’ house for turkey and dressing, pies and casseroles, pickled peaches, strong coffee and the annual viewing of a particular movie classic, A Christmas Carol.  Watching the black and white version with Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge has become as much a part of our holiday tradition as outlet malls the day-after.  This year is a little different.

With Covid infections spiking, Thanksgiving this year was pretty much a Zoom.  Family members dropped off their specialty dishes with my mother who repackaged two-dozen foil-covered lunches and, together with my dad, delivered two-dozen Thanksgiving-on-wheels meals.

And that was that. 

If anyone wanted to carry on the Dicken’s tradition, they were on their own. 

By one o’clock, Toby and I were literally staggering under the influence of turkey and tryptophan.  My sole object of interest was my Royale Deluxe recliner (the Hibernator II), which I took back—way back—to its optimal sleep-accommodating setting.  Toby recognized where I was going with this and climbed on board just in time for a spectacular doze-off.

Next thing I know, Toby and I are floating in the air next to this guy who looks like a cross between Andre the Giant (wrestling legend known for his terrific size) and a red-headed Santa (another legend known for his list-making).  He announces grandly, “I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.” 

Toby scoffs. 

“Seriously?” our ghost says.

“It’s not that we doubt you,” I explain.  “It’s just we don’t believe.  Not without compelling evidence.  Now, if you have a few ghosts of reindeer past with you…”

“Hmph.”  Now he’s scoffing the scoff.  Then he says, “That’s a mighty fine Royale Deluxe Hibernator II you’re floating in.” 

Toby and I look at each other.

“How did he know it’s a Hibernator…II.”

“Because three years ago, someone wanted to one-up his father who had a Hibernator I.”

OMG!  And just like that, Toby and I believe…that he is either who he says he is, or perhaps the ghost one of the higher-ups at the Royale Deluxe manufacturing plant. 

“Now that everyone believes everyone,” he says, “I want to take you on a little trip, and I won’t take no for an answer.” 

In the absence of no, I guess, we’re in.

Off we fly, through time and space, to this house the spitting image of my parents’ house when I was a kid.  We slip in without an invite and just float above the dinner table where family is gathered for the holiday.  Everyone’s eating turkey, shoulder-to-shoulder. 

“Remember when no one had to wear a mask,” the ghost says, floating majestically with his red cloak blooming open below him. 

Toby’s leans over the arm of the RDH II and swats at forks and spoons laden with food he can’t possibly snatch.

“This is a memory,” I remind him.  “This was another year.  We’re not really here.”  And just like that, he snatches the dollop of broccoli casserole poised on my aunt’s fork.  

She looks up.  “What in the hell…”

Apparently, expression of said crude incredulity is a cue for future eavesdroppers, and we are out of there, once again traversing time and holidays until we land at the same house several years later.

“Try not to interact with the past this time,” the Ghost says.  “I didn’t even have a chance last time to touch on any of my talking-points.”

Still floating, we are directly over a table of loved ones who think nothing of accepting the piece of pumpkin pie someone has just sneezed on.  How I long for the dismissability of pre-covid aerosols. 

Once again, however, our cover is blown by my interacting cat.  The casserole he snatched from several years ago is now a rancid goo on his paw.  He gives it a good booger-shake and flings it expertly back—remarkably—on the same aunt’s fork. 

But before anyone can give us our cue, there is a knock on the door.  Our host to the past looks startled and says we should go.

“Are you expecting someone this year you don’t want to meet?” Toby asks. 

I am floored.  Not only can my cat talk, he has called out the Ghost of the Past about something he might not want to face in that past. 

I ask Toby if he can say the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.

It’s a silly thing to ask, but it gets attention. 

Everyone seated below us looks up.  That’s when someone says the big guy floating over their head is wearing nothing under his blooming cloak.

“What in the hell…” Toby says. 

Poof! 

We’re back in my den, still in the RD Hibernator II.  It was all a dream.  But we are not alone.  Something more than casseroles-past has followed us out of the dream, into the year 2020.  And it is knocking on my front door like a census taker who takes orders from no one.     

Toby and I go to the door and open it.  There is a scream.  A manly, seasonal scream.  But a scream, nonetheless, justified by the visage standing on my front stoop. 

I am quite familiar with the Dickens chronology of haunting visits, and we have clearly skipped over a ghost or two to discover a horrific figure in full compliance with Dr. Fauci’s covid fashion tips.  The ghost before us now is wearing pale blue surgical scrubs, a full-head respirator with darkened visor and making creepy Darth Vader gasps. 

“Oh spirit,” I utter.  “I fear you most of all.”

The thing steps forward and Toby and I jump back and meow like a couple of banshees. 

In classic Future spirit non-talk, the figure points to a picture pinned to its chest.  It looks almost like a wanted-poster.  A cute wanted-poster.  And rather familiar.  I look closer. 

“Ally?”  It’s a picture of Telly’s granddaughter…how she would look in baby blue scrubs and crocs if she weren’t wearing a scary respirator.  I have heard of hospital doctors, cloaked in full protective gear, wearing pictures of themselves to prove their human identity to their infected patients.  “Is that you?”

When Ally removes her helmet there are tears on her cheeks. 

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“It’s Grandfather.”  She chokes up.

“Telly?”

“Scottie…”

“Your husband is your grandfather?”

“No!” she cries like a diner whose broccoli casserole has been spirited away from her fork.  “My husband—Scottie—tested positive for covid.”

Suddenly, the scrubs Ally would typically wear in the OR where she works, now make sense.  With an infected husband in the house, it’s Casual Scrubs Day, 24/7.

“I told Grandfather and he locked me out of my own house.”

“Now…you’re talking about Telly the Grandfather…Right?”

“Loch, you’ve got to help me talk some sense into him.”

“Of course,” I tell her.  “First…”

She helps Toby and me down from the table.  I grab a couple of masks and tell Toby to suit up.

“So why did he lock you out?” I ask her as we walk up the street to her house.  “And why is he in your house if Scott is infected?  Given his age, Telly would be considered at high-risk of infection.”

“He IS at high risk.  But he said he’s lived his life and that it’s okay if he dies.  He says he doesn’t want me to get sick.”

“What about Scott?”

“Grandfather said he’s the best one to play nursemaid to Scott.  Not me, the actual licensed nurse.” 

“Telly is going to nurse Scott?” 

“Yes,” Ally says miserably.  “I know.”

She knows that the two men’s relationship is acutely defined by how far from each other they stand politically. 

“But I believe in silver linings,” she says.  “If they don’t die from covid—or each other—maybe this will be the bonding experience for them I’ve prayed for.”

That seems as likely as a Biden/Trump ticket in 2024.

“I think maybe the stress of the last eight months—and my three years of marriage—have finally gotten to him.”

“Telly, or Scott?”

“Seriously?” Ally huffs. 

“There he is,” I announce, glad for the distraction.  We look across the front yard to the house where Telly is waving behind a glass storm door.  We go to front steps.   

“Hey there, Loch….Toby,” he says congenially.  “Granddaughter.”  His eyes are focused, his grooming as up-to-date as a cat’s.  There is no salient evidence yet that anyone has lost his marbles.  “I’d offer you some coffee, but there’s been a bit of a covid spill inside.”

“Telly, what’s this I hear about you locking Ally out of the house?”

He nods.  “I locked Ally out of her house.”

“Well…why?”

“It’s for her own good.”  He points upstairs above him.  “You-know-who has come down with you-know-what-19 and it’s not pretty.  Plus, its highly contagious.”  Now he’s shaking his head.  “I’m not willing to take that risk.”

“But you are taking a risk by being in the house with him,” Ally yells at him through the door.  “I know how to treat this.  You don’t.  I have the PPE.  You’re not even wearing a mask.”  Ally is practically beside herself, next to Toby and me.

He pshaw’s her.  “At my age, I pick up a cold just by reading about it.  If I don’t already have the virus, it’s a matter of divine intervention.”  He shrugs.  “Look, I’ve lived my life.  My hope for future family is bound up in you.”

“Scott too,” she sulks.

“Sure, we’ll include Scottie for now.”

“Grandfather,” she cries fearfully.

“Call me old-fashion.  But I believe in silver linings.”  Telly continues to dig a hole between him and his granddaughter, a real chasm at this point.

“Anyhow,” he tells her, “I’m not letting you in.  I left my in-laws suite in the back yard unlocked.  So you have a place to sleep and bathe.  I’ll take care of the raspy one.  You know, I was a medic in the war.”

Ally gives me a look.  It’s a look I know well from the Ghost of Marriage Past.  It’s a look that begs me to do something.

“Loch, do something.” 

And now, as then, I’m not convinced that either of us really knows what that something would look like.

“Telly,” I begin.  I wait for the words of a brilliant argument, for why he should open the door, to come into my head. 

“Lo’ och?” Ally prods me.

Still waiting.

Finally.

“Do you want me to bring you some left-over turkey and dressing?”

Ally stomps her foot and gives me another look that means I better not ‘do something’ ever again.

Telly smiles at me with nothing in his face of tryptophan or a cognitive marble drop.  His actions are a little over-the-top, but it’s not inconceivable that a call from the local police or health department could rein him in.  But he’s just looking out for the beloved Democrat in his life, even if it means sacrificing for the Republican who married her.

“Loch, that would be lovely.  Don’t take offense, though, if I ask you to leave it on the welcome mat and step away so I can retrieve it without worrying about my granddaughter storming the house.”

“I have enough for two,” I say to Ally, hoping she will recognize a peace offering. 

Her hard glare melts and she kicks the ground.  “I guess,” she says, and mopes with me and the cat back to our house.

Hurtling through space and time to holidays past in the Royale Deluxe Hibernator II.

hello, goodbye

I’m looking back at my front yard from the sidewalk, watching the cat do his best to cut a swath through the tall grass. I’m trying to decide which disaster area needs attention first.  Really, I’m looking for a good distraction from the pending election.  Every call, every email and every post is an expression of outrage about something one side of the country has done to the other.  I tell myself there are no sides.  We are one country.  But nobody is saying or tweeting that.

“Hey, Loch,” Tabby, my precocious eight-year-old neighbor calls out as she gets closer.  She pulls up a rainbow-colored mask. “Whatcha doing?”

“Just standing around wondering what I’m going to do next.  Have you ever wondered that?”

“Yeah.  I just asked Dan if he could help me with my homework.  He said I should ask Alice.”

“Did you ask your mom?  I mean, Alice?”

“She’s the one who told me to ask Dan.”

“I used to be pretty good at homework.  What questions do you have?”

“Oh.  I already did it yesterday.”  She laughs in way that tells me she’s not looking for me to laugh with her. She leans over and picks up Toby, who looks exhausted from his short foray into the jungle.

So.  Tabby and I are standing together like the masked neighbors we are, looking for a good distraction when I see a red car approaching from the far end of the block.  The car gets close and stops, and the mother of all distractions steps out.

“Kim?”

“Lochypoo!” she cries. 

“Okay, not in front of the kid,” I ask as she puts her arms around me and turns me into a hug. “Or the cat.”

“What.  I can’t call you Lochypoo in front of people?”

“I’ve told you before.”

Tabby grins at me and rolls her eyes.

“Kim this is Tabby.  Tabby, Kim. Toby, you remember Kim.”

My neighbor looks amused, but she raises her hand and waves.

“It is so good to see you,” I tell my friend. 

“I’m sure.”

“I spoke with your sister the other day and she said you were in the hospital.”

“Yeah.  Heart attack.”

“Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“See how funny she is?” I say to Tabby.  “First a stroke.  Now this.  That’s two times a miracle.  And now you’re out.”

Kim holds up a third finger for this latest miracle.  “Yes, sir.  I had to break out of that place.  Full of sick people.”

“And you’re driving again.”

“You’re so good at pointing out the obvious.  This is a time of change,” she says.  “A time to turn back the clocks and distance ourselves from the virus, a time to drive ourselves to the poles and set the country’s agenda for the next four years, a time to let go.”

“Hold on.  That last item doesn’t exactly go with the others.”  But Kim’s face is one of absolute patience.

“There is something very liberating about a heart attack.  It puts all your fears on the table,” she says and holds up a flat palm, “and just blows them away.”  I can smell something sweet and wistful in her breath.   

“That almost sounds worse than the heart attack.  If you took away all my fears, what would be left?”

“Perfect vision.”

I look to my eight-year-old neighbor to see if she is following any of this.

“People say what a horrible year 2020 is.”  Kim shakes her head.  “This is the year we are given a unique chance to see what we want and what we are made of.  All our fears are on the table.”

“Your apocalyptic homily is a day late.  The trick-or-treaters were on the sweet beat last night.”

“Ha ha,” she ha’s sarcastically.  “I’m trying to tell you good news.  What happens at the polls, whatever it is, will be good.”

“You know, there is a compelling argument to be made that our country is a democracy in name only.”

“Listen to me.  Regardless if your candidate wins, our political goals have to be long-term.  You can’t change society overnight.  It takes people a while to cool down, acclimate and accept what, in the beginning, they fought so hard against.”

“You drove all the way down here to tell me this?”

She shrugs.  “I worry about you and your anxiety.  It shows right through your mask.”

I turn to the kid and the cat.  “Nothing gets through the N95.”

“BUT,” Kim transitions hard.  “Your anxiety about the election and the health of the country is a symptom of fear.  That fear is on the table.”

“It would be nice to push myself away from that table.  You used to share that fear with me.  You know, we have always shared a similar political ideology, we’ve always liked the same books and authors, had similar experiences in teaching.  Really, Kim, you and I are so much alike.”

Kim laughs hard.  “Oh, Lochypoo!  No white man should ever tell a black woman that he and she are so much alike.”

“Okay.  Tell me how I’m wrong.  Aside from the obvious.”

“You are wrong,” she says and blows again over her palm, “because my table is cleared.”

“How did you do that.  You know, in case I want to be more like you again.”

“I’m sorry.  I can’t tell you that.  I can’t even tell my very intelligent son.  Both of you.  You have to figure it out.  I just hope it doesn’t take you a stroke and a heart attack.”

“I gotta tell you, though, you haven’t looked this good, this vibrant, in years.”

She laughs like I haven’t heard from her in years.

“There’s another reason I came here.  You never know what a person is thinking or going through.  For the same reason, you don’t know how much your simple text of confidence might mean to them.  Or your ending a phone call with a little love.”

“Please tell me I did that a few times.”

She peers right through my N95.  “I was on my way to a doctor’s appointment the other day when I had this sharp pain in my chest and I thought, better call Lochypoo.”

“Is that a normal reaction for you?”

“It was this time, because I wanted you to know what our friendship has meant to me.”

At once, I feel a pang of guilt.  “I’m sorry I screened your last two calls.”

“Two?  Try five.”

“Kim!”  I beg her to understand.  “Our calls are like a Baptist church service.  You can’t knock them out in a few minutes.  It takes time, and I’ve just been short on time, lately.  Do you forgive me?”

“Do you see me right in front of you?”

“I see her,” I say to Tabby.  “You see her, don’t you?”

“That’s why I’m doing this in person.  I don’t have time for all that any more.”

“All….what?”

“Misunderstandings, fears, cellphones with caller-ID, distance, time.”

“You know, I remember telling you that if you pulled through this, I would work you into one of my blog posts.”

“I remember.  What was that…a threat?”

“I was trying to give you incentive.”

“I’m kidding.  It’s sweet, but I don’t need an interpretation of my face and body in one of your silly pictures.  No insult, but I doubt your paintbrush can handle my serious curves.”

“Okay.  No silly picture.”

She steps forward and we hold each other for a long time.  “Okay,” she says and steps back abruptly.  “Another thing I didn’t come here to do is cry.  You remember what I said.”

“You’re leaving already? You just got here.”

“No more epic sermons. I love you,” she says.

“Love you, too.” 

“See?” she says and smiles as though she just answered one of life’s burning questions.

My cellphone rings.  Before I can pull it out of my pocket, Kim pulls away from the curb.  Her car stops at the corner. She is just starting her turn when I see who is calling.  Kim’s sister.

“Loch?” she says, and I can hear in the way she says my name that this is not going to be a Lochypoo call.

“Kim died last night at 1 am.”

The red trunk of Kim’s car is just falling under the incline of the corner property. 

“Died?”

“I’m sorry.”  Her sad words stutter as though she is trying out a new language.  “I’ll call later with the details.”

Everything changes, calling my attention to a certain tabletop.

“You look sad,” Tabby tells me.

“That person who was just here…”

She looks confused.  “Who?”

“The woman who was just talking with you and me.  That person who was larger than life.”

Tabby laughs at me.  “You’re funny.  But I get it.  I do that all the time.”

“You do what all the time.”

Now she looks at me as though I’m testing her.  “Talk to people who are not there.  Sometimes they say more to me than the people who are there.”

Kim was here.