I wasn’t raised to believe in none of that hippie dippie shit.  Recycling was as far as it went.  And treating our dogs humanely.  And occasionally hearing my mom sing “Give Peace a Chance,” except replacing “peace” with “peas” before serving them up for dinner.  A rifle rested next to my parents’ bed for the ease of shooting groundhogs from the bedroom window, and all the area school districts didn’t bother holding session on the first day of deer season for lack of attendance.  By the time I was in high school, my mother had burgered, steaked, sweet & soured, stir fried, chili-ed, and kabobbed venison with the mastery of Van Gogh– if Van Gogh only had one paintbrush.  And the paintbrush was made from dead deer.

I learned to be a closet tree hugger too late, and was harassed accordingly.  My Great Aunt Mildred loves to sum up my bleeding heart condition by telling every boy I bring home about the time my father shot the baby rabbits on the property, to which my 6-year-old self cried, “How would you feel if someone shot your babies?!”  My flare for the dramatic didn’t help my cause, and my pleas were ineffective.  So I stopped.  And then things got weird.

Maybe it was the over viewing of Pocahontas, being the youngest of four with siblings who equated the idea of playing with me to eating their brussel sprouts, and spending nearly every weekend at a cabin on 80 acres of land and not a TV for miles.  All that time in the woods can make any kid into a supernatural being who can communicate across time and space to the creatures that once inhabited the dead carcasses I came across.  And there were always dead carcasses.

If I had to live in a world where a deer head was being hauled back home in the same vehicle as my library books, hung on the same backyard maple branch I climbed, and put in my stomach in a matter of days, the least I could do is try and explain this very complicated matter to the glazed, unseeing brown eyes of the slain.

I began dutifully watching early in the process, as animals were hung by their necks and slit longways, seeing, as my dad affectionately calls them, “the gut bag of a deer” fall on the ground.  I pet their heads and asked them if they heard the one about the three guys who were going to the desert, touching their sides in hopes of still feeling them warm.  I waited by the window to see signs of the blaze orange coats coming back around lunch time, and met my dad in the back woods ready for service.  I learned to pierce the breast of a grouse without cutting the meat, and stick my fingers through to pull apart the feathered skin with a small popping sound, revealing the bright, shiny pink and white future New Year’s Eve dinner.  And before we threw the rest of the deflated bird, I would take its little head between my fingers and stroke its cheeks and tell her she did everything she could.  But I would never be part of the hunt.

There is a slight possibility I developed a teensy, unhealthy obsession with dead things, I’m sure my future therapist will tell me.

Something unmistakably otherworldly happened for me in those moments: getting to look at something so close, that was moments ago breathing and romping in the same woods I do, and have it not move or stare back or make me feel stupid for staring.  To get to cuddle the things you ordinarily can’t touch, or even look at, as long as I want.  And to believe that I was communicating in a language no one else could hear, and that these creatures were hearing it and appreciating it and taking it with them to the other side, where they’ll build an animal kingdom that I’ll find when I pass through, too, and they’ll greet me with high hooves and feathers and throw a raucous party where we all eat acorns that taste like butterscotch and speak the same language.

It’s easy to believe the best in creatures when they don’t talk back.

I gave up the ghosts, eventually.  I learned to shoot guns just like everyone else, added bacon to my burgers, and even feigned a brief interest in getting my hunting license.  It’s my heritage, after all.  It didn’t occur to me to become vegetarian until my mid twenties, and even then, it was for health over the love of animals.

Still, there is something about a dead robin on the sidewalk that will give me the same sad-happy nostalgia.  And just for good measure, I wish it well.  I would hate to neglect my future welcome wagon.

 

 

After the usual pleasantries with the local mortician at Marshall’s Funeral Home, updating him on my latest report card and confirming that art is still my favorite class, it was time to get to the business of stealing candy.

I spent much of my childhood in the funeral home.  Grandparents, great grandparents, Sunday school teachers, cousins, friends, people I’d never met: it was a rotation of faces in the same glossy box with the same bouquets and the same cast of characters on either side of the receiving line.  Old ladies clucked their tongues and old men shook their heads while my friends and I ran rampant in the cool downstairs basement, experimenting with powdered coffee creamer in our tea and spooking ourselves with the infant coffins kept in the back room we weren’t allowed in, but always found ourselves shooed out of.

My father led the protocol of laughter.  When we were inevitably suspended from the basement on account of mischief, he wrangled us to the corner of the viewing room where the floral stench was at its minimum, and transformed a gaggle of uncomfortably dressed kids into an espionage unit.  We were sent on missions to ensure that the corpse wasn’t moving, bending our faces, one at a time, close to the chemically bloated skin and pancake make up, and reporting back.  We were ordered to avoid the decorative vases, on account of them being “the last guy’s funeral” (note: this instigated my early wish to be cremated after death, accidentally left in other people’s funerals, and ultimately shot up in a firecracker).  Most importantly, however, we were sent to find every candy dish in the joint, inconspicuously empty the contents, and bring our booty back to my father.  He would pay us our share, and place the rest in his own pockets.  The striped peppermints and green anise sugar drops would reward each completed tasks for the next two days, through hours of visitation and weepy services and American flag laden coffins being walked away by old men in pointed hats and church basement casseroles and hymns that are older than the dead themselves.

These are the best parts I took from a string of unfortunate events, the quartz from pallets, the diamonds from roughs, treasures from trash, and all the other things we say about making good from bad situations.  These are the memories that also caused me to falsely inform the other half of my band, Scott, that I’m “really good at funerals” as we traveled at 80 mph from Nashville to Chattanooga to attend the funeral of our pal– a fellow musician friend we’d known for three short years.  When you’re a traveling band like we are, you make these “road friends,” who become your real friends, who house you when you pass through, and who you return the favor to when they are in your town, and who you share these evening-long experiences of music and drinking on each other’s porches, who you make promises with to meet up halfway when touring subsides and you have just one free afternoon to be “real time” friends outside of late night shows.  These are the people with whom you are your most hopeful: your best self.  And you love them like you wish you loved your family.

This year, I learned that we, as artists and travelers, are in the business of watching our friends die.  We are swept from each city, leaving pieces of ourselves behind with a return address.  And then we wait at home with our selves all scattered about and hope, for once, that this delivery will never be made.  But it is– it always is– because we are also in the business of having our hearts broken.

On this April Monday, the package came as a phone call.

“We lost Josh,” our friend Scotty said. “He, um… did it himself.”

You see, we are in this business by birth and by choice.  The business of loving bigger and writing it out for the rest of the world.  And sometimes this long range of emotion is confusing, because our co-workers in this field sometimes fall victim to the work itself.  And then we all lose.  And we, the carriers, must then take on that fallen one’s load, too.  And we must, for a time, blame ourselves for not helping to carry it earlier.

Because we are not in the business of pretending it is none of our damn business.

It was two nights before I slept.  The first night was impossible.  The nagging feeling that I should wait… I lit a Mary candle to keep me company, and we waited together.  We sometimes faded, seeing Josh behind my eyelids.  But then Mary and I also saw him in her flickering– in my chair.  By my door.

My friend Bryan, who I am convinced I need to start paying to listen to me, told me I accidentally held Shivah– waiting with the body so the soul knows even during its transition that it is not alone– and that he is loved.

What I believed was this: what if he wants to come home again and finds us only sleeping?  Who will be there to tell him to stay?  Who will be there to tell him it’s okay and we love him and we want him here with us?

Shivah, maybe.  Or maybe the hope that a mistake can be reversed.  Maybe all that checking to make sure the body wasn’t moving those years ago gave me too much hope.

The next night, there was a sunset.  I could spend time explaining its likeness to a Saharan haze and a Neptune moon and a dragon’s fiery eye with feathery scales, but in hindsight, it was likely just a sunset.  And I am not a believer in sunsets, anymore.  Not like I was– when a twilight sky was the palm of god’s hand opening to me.  I gave up on my belief in sunsets sometime when I gave up my belief in cable television.

But I believed in this one.  I believed that if Josh had waited just one more day, this one would’ve had the power to keep him living.

I told him so.

Somewhere, I think he agreed.

And we watched the sky creature’s eye sink low into sleep together.

The next day, I knew he was gone.  I thought about the lone vulture I had seen late Monday afternoon.  The bird who, Bryan says, stands for us in the gaps of life and death.  The only one capable of digesting the stickiness that comes with the unforeseen end of things.

I’m still looking for the buried treasure in all of it.  I, with an overflowing room full of people, bawled our way through a funeral, with not a peppermint candy in sight.  And we are now in the business of seeking a cure for what happened.  To write more.  To listen harder.  To love bigger.  And to meet up halfway like we said we would sooner rather than later.

 

A tiny, ramshackle structure consisting of five pallets is miraculously still standing after twenty years in the northern woods of Western Pennsylvania.  When you follow the trail it rests beside to its end, you will discover two more identical misshapes down by the stream at the bottom of the mountain.  The stream will lead you to the Allegheny River, but the boxes will lead you to the faded cave paintings of four kids who spent much of their childhood fighting for imaginary territories, and much of their adult life arguing about who won.

But those are the stories that happened after the story.  Those are the stories that have been retold from too many parts of the country over too many years, so the echos have not yet met up to confirm or deny what is true and what is wishful boasting.  And you will have no luck gathering those four in one room to eat a meal they can agree on, let alone to get facts straight.  So the pre-story is that one resourceful father took his youngest daughter down the opposite side of the mountain, closest to civilization, to see about the pallets.

History as I remember it says that the pallets were abandoned from long ago, and my dad stumbled on them with some sort of omniscient woodsman know-how.  The reality may be that he had left them a couple short years before, and was simply reclaiming them for their new purpose.  But, as this is my corner of literary fabric, and I am nestled in middle Tennessee with no Western Pennsylvanian critic for miles, we will presume it happened that the pallets were abandoned from an unknown source, the weather was temperate but cloudy, and we drove down in my dad’s hand-me-down red pick up truck with the white cap on it to find the rare and useful wooden slabs to build three forts for three kids who were already aging beyond reconciliation.

I’ve never been particularly useful in these situations with my dad, but I am always particularly fond of them.  As I waddled in my duck boots, trying mostly to get out of the way, unhelpfully pointing at which pallets looked most prime for our new forts, it happened.  The bottom pallet was removed, and the ground below was sunken, like a small meteor had planted itself.  And it was still glowing.  I stared at the ground with my thoughts caught on the back of my tongue, and waited with the wide brown eyes of my mother staring down at this inexplicable phenomenon for my father to exclaim to me that we have stumbled on something sacred.  That we need to drive to town immediately to call scientists and the US government.  Or that we need to hurry back to gather all the burlap sacks we can find (of which we had none), and gather this beautiful, archaic garden of jewels and hide it, dispensing it only gradually throughout the years for things like college educations and castles in Ireland, so that no one will suspect that we have just become the wealthiest family alive.  Or that we need to strip to our skivvies and rain dance around the masterpiece the earth has created or thank our stars that someone has so foolishly left what could be the next chapter in world history here!  At the edge of our property!  I needed him to exclaim “Finders keepers, Mallory!  We are rich with ancient secrets!”

But my dad did none of that.  Taking note of my recent, wide-eyed paralysis, my dad calmly walked to the edge of the indentation and whispered, “Well would you look at that.”  He leaned down slowly, for magic’s sake, and pulled up one of the glistening pieces of our future, turned it twice in his hand for dramatic effect, and dutifully placed it in my own 8-year-old hand.

“Quartz,” he said.  “It’s pretty, isn’t it?”

The rest of the day was spent nailing these treasure pallets together under a pregnant sky, which eventually burst into the casual cold drizzle that unifies Western Pennsylvanians as a people– the Other Season that occurs when it’s not The Heat or The Damn Cold.  It was gently explained to me that the quartz really had no value, but in my childhood responsibility of cleaning up the messes grown-ups make and seizing opportunities they always miss, I grabbed a few of the rocks and placed them strategically around my new fort, my cupboard in the cabin, and my bedside table at home, two hours south of where they were found.

When the scientists or kings or pirates or witches come looking, my parents will thank me.