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She wakes me with a wheezy whine and a well-placed paw, an insistent jab jab jab with a single toenail raked down the back of my neck. I roll, yawn, and squint at her.
"Where's your snooze button, dog?"
Her head tilts, a little gesture of "what?" coupled with a barely-audible trill that turns into a yodel.
"C'mon, baby," I say, and set the old bones in motion, rolling out of bed in much the way an old fire tower would collapse, rusty joints shrieking and buckling as the sturdy struts of its aging frame start rolling down a hillside, picking up speed in a silent film breakdown until it crashes into a heap at the bottom of the slope.
My feet crash to the floor, one after another. The dog dances, her too-long claws skittering on the floor and reminding me of another chore that lies ahead in the list of things to do.
"Let's get some breakfast, huh?"
I pull off Route 1 with a trunkload of Swedish housewares, bed linens, and sundries, a run for booty on the last day before I knuckle down for a stretch. The sky is lush and expansive, a perfect canvas for the last of a summer day that has inexplicably failed to be another in a seemingly interminable series of sweltering nightmares here below the Mason-Dixon. I've got the top down and my new glasses on, the reward of clarity neatly counterbalanced by the frustrations of artificial refraction, where the ground is always moving, shifting in subtle ways as I step forward.
In the clear twilight, the clouds are all strings and filaments, threads strung out on the loom where the world faces its weaver. I have a small, delicious milkshake wedged between the seats and a roast beef sandwich in a bag, waiting for a moment when I can find a place to pull over and eat. I am on the right way home, but I pull off the main road and disappear down the rabbit hole that leads down, down into the immense peaceful labyrinth of the agricultural research center.
The roads get smaller and older and the built landscape falls away, all the strip malls and gas stations and business parks and servicenters and everything, just wiped out in one perfect wash of green—first the trees in a band of woods along the creek, then the road dives into the unlimited farmland of the center, concealed so perfectly in all this modern mess.
I pass the last private house holding out in the middle of the center, cruise through the wheat fields where the landscape dips to meet a little creek, and the sky is turning colors, going from blue to blue to violet to gold. I turn on my headlights, which open like demure eyes showing surprise, and as I round a bend into a straight stretch where the old NASA antenna test range used to be, a pair a lights bob at the edge of the road.
The fox is delicate and sleek, his tail slung low and swinging gently in pace with his relaxed canter. He's in the other lane, coming my way, undisturbed by the sudden appearance of a little red roadster, and something in me slows as I watch him. I let off the gas and he does the same, and the two of us slow down, effortlessly shedding momentum, until we settle to a silent stop, right there in the middle of the way.
He looks up. There's something miraculous in these animals, something deep and vivid and present that spoke to us all those millennia ago, and they wrote themselves into all our histories, the trickster gods stealing the stars from the skies.
Hi there, guy.
I stay. He stays, too. The passage of time is overrated.
This is the inherent problem with how we live now, the lack of these meetings, and the way we fade away into the wash of blue-white glare from countless monitors. These moments start to fade, the sight of something so rare and fine without the mediation of cages or videotape, the thought that you could just reach out and stroke the fur along his back, and we become something lesser, poisoned by convenience.
This is your game, little guy.
In time, an ear flicks around with the perfect precision of a rotating radar dish, and something is on, something that requires eventual, if not immediate, attention. The fox strides into a new canter, but stays right in the lane, trotting away westward in the fading sunlight.
I put the car back into gear and go.
"Catch it!"
I throw the toy, which is nothing more than a thick rope, tied into a hard knot at each end. Daisy bounds off the bed and intercepts it neatly in mid-air, then brings it back, turning away with the ridiculously oversized toy in her mouth every time I reach out.
"Drop it!"
She's getting the idea on that one, on the meaning of that turn of phrase, but she's young and filled with contrarian teenage energy, ready for a fight for ownership of the toy, even when I really don't want it. I've got my headphones on, the big ones that look like tuna cans on my ears, and I'm enjoying a nice butt-moving groove to start off a morning of golden sun and cool, fragrant breezes drifting in through every window. I snatch the toy and run for it, with Daisy at my heels.
"Ha!"
There's a single cicada on my window screen.
I take a moment to sit there, right next to the window, just watching.
There's a click, a little squonky buzzzzzt, and he starts to sing there, calling out in the zzz-ZZZ-zzz of zipper love songs, so loud it's just impossible—so much sound coming out of something roughly the size of a peanut.
I think of TV Cowboy calling me in a panic in the middle of the emergence of Brood X back in '04.
"Joe, there's one of those things on my window screen! It's up here on the tenth floor!"
"It can't get in. Just enjoy it."
"You're an ass, man. It's making that noise!"
"Neat."
Perhaps I should have been a little more supportive, but it's a cicada for pete's sake, even if there's a great story behind why TV Cowboy was petrified of the little things.
I sit back and I smile in the way you do when you can either smile or wince—the way you remember funny things that get lost when life turns sad—and listen to the cicada singing, hanging from my window screen and looking for a date, the way his species has done it for more years than I could ever imagine.
The aroma of my sandwich finally gets to me and I pull off in the abandoned parking lot, deep in the Center, where there used to be a path down to a pond, labeled carefully with signs explaining the plants and trees there. The path is overgrown now, and the signs are gone, victims of budget cuts and the paroxysm of governmental paranoia that killed off all the best little-known places to go, but the gravel parking lot is still there. I pull in and turn off my headlights, which flip down obediently into the smooth line of the hood.
I unwrap my sandwich and take a long drag off my milkshake, enjoying the sounds of birds and insects and the nearby highway, which sings its own song of progress, a drone of tires on asphalt that rises and falls like something natural because it is as natural as the rest of the world, despite our unyielding propaganda to the contrary. The roast beef is rich and tasty, with that tang of au jus that's like meat tea, perfectly set off by the right selection of spices, and it's perched in the cradle of a sub roll from H&S—all told, a cheap delight for an era of expensive everything.
While I'm sit there, I hear heavy footsteps behind me, and I freeze, with a mouthful of half-chewed meat. The grass bristles, then the gravel crunches, and the footsteps multiply, coming closer in the near-darkness.
As a lifelong Marylander, the old stupid stories come back to me, the hoary tales of goatman breathlessly told by any teenager who ever lived within the orbit of Prince George's County, and even though I'm a grown man, I have a moment of paralyzing doubt. After all, construction workers and the police reported seeing a sasquatch at the nearby megamall just a few year s back, and…
Shit, it's goatman and I'm in a convertible!
I look into the rear-view mirror, and something large, brown, and furry is moving behind me.
Goatman!
I actually feel hot breath on my neck and that's it. I holler like a little girl the second I hear the loud snort and turn to face a full-grown deer, standing placidly next to the car and regarding the whole scene with a kind of contented interest. Two others flank the car on the right side, I exhale and laugh, which only disturbs the group a little bit, and finish my sandwich while the trio wander around the parking lot, only leaving when my headlights flip back up as I get ready to continue on.
Kids these days.
The coyote runs past as TV Cowboy navigates the DC gridwork. It's not a dog, or a deer, and has that low, lean, wild look that you just don't find in domesticated animals.
"Wow, a coyote just ran past us!" I remarked.
"What?"
"A coyote. You didn't see that?"
"No. What are you talking about, now?"
"It was a coyote. There are coyotes all over Eastern cities these days. I think I read that there's a pack of them living in Rock Creek Park. They catch rats."
TV Cowboy just rolled his eyes. When we got back, I triumphantly thrust my laptop in his direction, with data to show that it was not, as usual, just me.
I turned up my music to that point where you can start to feel it, a little funk for a Sunday morning, and I bopped around the apartment in my headphones, just enjoying the groove. The dog followed me around, giving me that vaguely disapproving look that she always gives me when I've got my dancing shoes on, but I decided to bring her into the fun, so I grabbed her rope toy and took off for the back room with her at my heels.
I'd throw the toy so she could catch it, then approach her in that slow, taunting way that would get her in paws-out mode, squinting at me and then launching away in a giddy run. My place is just two rooms, so it's a limited game of chase, but she doesn't seem to care, and wags her tail hard enough that her whole body's swinging each way, with that absurd giant rope in her mouth.
I snatch it and toss it into the other room, and there's an immediate mechanical roar. Daisy charges back in, running between my legs, and looks up with her brows up.
That thing I don't like is making a noise!
With her hiding behind me, I find the rope toy next to the vacuum, which is running in place after I'd neatly hit the on-switch with my blind throw. With a toe, I click the switch again and the roar stops. Daisy trots over to make sure the big blue carcass isn't moving.
That oughta show you, stupid thing I don't like!
She wears me out, but something's got me laughing this morning, and we just stop for a second to sit, panting, on the sofa. I scratch her behind her ears and she rolls over, presenting her pink belly for a scritch. She's just so new and so energetic and fresh in the world, a little ball of curiosity and trouble, and for just a moment, I think of Rose and that day when she reached the end of the road, and I look back at Daisy, into those bright eyes, and it's just so wrong that one day, she'll be on that stainless steel table, all scruffy and worn out and tired, and it'll be the end of the line.
What are you thinking about?
Daisy tips her head, tucking her ludicrous ears back in a now familiar gesture of thoughtful surrender as I reach out to give her a scratch.
"Nothing, little girl," I say, as if I'm answering that imaginary question.
Her ears snap back to attention, and she hops down from the sofa, retrieves the rope toy, and brings it back to me.
"You're wearing me out, dog," I say, but I throw it anyway, and haul myself back off the couch for another trip around the apartment, and then another, and another, until it's time to settle down and wash the dishes.
"Where's your snooze button, dog?"
Her head tilts, a little gesture of "what?" coupled with a barely-audible trill that turns into a yodel.
"C'mon, baby," I say, and set the old bones in motion, rolling out of bed in much the way an old fire tower would collapse, rusty joints shrieking and buckling as the sturdy struts of its aging frame start rolling down a hillside, picking up speed in a silent film breakdown until it crashes into a heap at the bottom of the slope.
My feet crash to the floor, one after another. The dog dances, her too-long claws skittering on the floor and reminding me of another chore that lies ahead in the list of things to do.
"Let's get some breakfast, huh?"
I pull off Route 1 with a trunkload of Swedish housewares, bed linens, and sundries, a run for booty on the last day before I knuckle down for a stretch. The sky is lush and expansive, a perfect canvas for the last of a summer day that has inexplicably failed to be another in a seemingly interminable series of sweltering nightmares here below the Mason-Dixon. I've got the top down and my new glasses on, the reward of clarity neatly counterbalanced by the frustrations of artificial refraction, where the ground is always moving, shifting in subtle ways as I step forward.
In the clear twilight, the clouds are all strings and filaments, threads strung out on the loom where the world faces its weaver. I have a small, delicious milkshake wedged between the seats and a roast beef sandwich in a bag, waiting for a moment when I can find a place to pull over and eat. I am on the right way home, but I pull off the main road and disappear down the rabbit hole that leads down, down into the immense peaceful labyrinth of the agricultural research center.
The roads get smaller and older and the built landscape falls away, all the strip malls and gas stations and business parks and servicenters and everything, just wiped out in one perfect wash of green—first the trees in a band of woods along the creek, then the road dives into the unlimited farmland of the center, concealed so perfectly in all this modern mess.
I pass the last private house holding out in the middle of the center, cruise through the wheat fields where the landscape dips to meet a little creek, and the sky is turning colors, going from blue to blue to violet to gold. I turn on my headlights, which open like demure eyes showing surprise, and as I round a bend into a straight stretch where the old NASA antenna test range used to be, a pair a lights bob at the edge of the road.
The fox is delicate and sleek, his tail slung low and swinging gently in pace with his relaxed canter. He's in the other lane, coming my way, undisturbed by the sudden appearance of a little red roadster, and something in me slows as I watch him. I let off the gas and he does the same, and the two of us slow down, effortlessly shedding momentum, until we settle to a silent stop, right there in the middle of the way.
He looks up. There's something miraculous in these animals, something deep and vivid and present that spoke to us all those millennia ago, and they wrote themselves into all our histories, the trickster gods stealing the stars from the skies.
Hi there, guy.
I stay. He stays, too. The passage of time is overrated.
This is the inherent problem with how we live now, the lack of these meetings, and the way we fade away into the wash of blue-white glare from countless monitors. These moments start to fade, the sight of something so rare and fine without the mediation of cages or videotape, the thought that you could just reach out and stroke the fur along his back, and we become something lesser, poisoned by convenience.
This is your game, little guy.
In time, an ear flicks around with the perfect precision of a rotating radar dish, and something is on, something that requires eventual, if not immediate, attention. The fox strides into a new canter, but stays right in the lane, trotting away westward in the fading sunlight.
I put the car back into gear and go.
"Catch it!"
I throw the toy, which is nothing more than a thick rope, tied into a hard knot at each end. Daisy bounds off the bed and intercepts it neatly in mid-air, then brings it back, turning away with the ridiculously oversized toy in her mouth every time I reach out.
"Drop it!"
She's getting the idea on that one, on the meaning of that turn of phrase, but she's young and filled with contrarian teenage energy, ready for a fight for ownership of the toy, even when I really don't want it. I've got my headphones on, the big ones that look like tuna cans on my ears, and I'm enjoying a nice butt-moving groove to start off a morning of golden sun and cool, fragrant breezes drifting in through every window. I snatch the toy and run for it, with Daisy at my heels.
"Ha!"
There's a single cicada on my window screen.
I take a moment to sit there, right next to the window, just watching.
There's a click, a little squonky buzzzzzt, and he starts to sing there, calling out in the zzz-ZZZ-zzz of zipper love songs, so loud it's just impossible—so much sound coming out of something roughly the size of a peanut.
I think of TV Cowboy calling me in a panic in the middle of the emergence of Brood X back in '04.
"Joe, there's one of those things on my window screen! It's up here on the tenth floor!"
"It can't get in. Just enjoy it."
"You're an ass, man. It's making that noise!"
"Neat."
Perhaps I should have been a little more supportive, but it's a cicada for pete's sake, even if there's a great story behind why TV Cowboy was petrified of the little things.
I sit back and I smile in the way you do when you can either smile or wince—the way you remember funny things that get lost when life turns sad—and listen to the cicada singing, hanging from my window screen and looking for a date, the way his species has done it for more years than I could ever imagine.
The aroma of my sandwich finally gets to me and I pull off in the abandoned parking lot, deep in the Center, where there used to be a path down to a pond, labeled carefully with signs explaining the plants and trees there. The path is overgrown now, and the signs are gone, victims of budget cuts and the paroxysm of governmental paranoia that killed off all the best little-known places to go, but the gravel parking lot is still there. I pull in and turn off my headlights, which flip down obediently into the smooth line of the hood.
I unwrap my sandwich and take a long drag off my milkshake, enjoying the sounds of birds and insects and the nearby highway, which sings its own song of progress, a drone of tires on asphalt that rises and falls like something natural because it is as natural as the rest of the world, despite our unyielding propaganda to the contrary. The roast beef is rich and tasty, with that tang of au jus that's like meat tea, perfectly set off by the right selection of spices, and it's perched in the cradle of a sub roll from H&S—all told, a cheap delight for an era of expensive everything.
While I'm sit there, I hear heavy footsteps behind me, and I freeze, with a mouthful of half-chewed meat. The grass bristles, then the gravel crunches, and the footsteps multiply, coming closer in the near-darkness.
As a lifelong Marylander, the old stupid stories come back to me, the hoary tales of goatman breathlessly told by any teenager who ever lived within the orbit of Prince George's County, and even though I'm a grown man, I have a moment of paralyzing doubt. After all, construction workers and the police reported seeing a sasquatch at the nearby megamall just a few year s back, and…
Shit, it's goatman and I'm in a convertible!
I look into the rear-view mirror, and something large, brown, and furry is moving behind me.
Goatman!
I actually feel hot breath on my neck and that's it. I holler like a little girl the second I hear the loud snort and turn to face a full-grown deer, standing placidly next to the car and regarding the whole scene with a kind of contented interest. Two others flank the car on the right side, I exhale and laugh, which only disturbs the group a little bit, and finish my sandwich while the trio wander around the parking lot, only leaving when my headlights flip back up as I get ready to continue on.
Kids these days.
The coyote runs past as TV Cowboy navigates the DC gridwork. It's not a dog, or a deer, and has that low, lean, wild look that you just don't find in domesticated animals.
"Wow, a coyote just ran past us!" I remarked.
"What?"
"A coyote. You didn't see that?"
"No. What are you talking about, now?"
"It was a coyote. There are coyotes all over Eastern cities these days. I think I read that there's a pack of them living in Rock Creek Park. They catch rats."
TV Cowboy just rolled his eyes. When we got back, I triumphantly thrust my laptop in his direction, with data to show that it was not, as usual, just me.
I turned up my music to that point where you can start to feel it, a little funk for a Sunday morning, and I bopped around the apartment in my headphones, just enjoying the groove. The dog followed me around, giving me that vaguely disapproving look that she always gives me when I've got my dancing shoes on, but I decided to bring her into the fun, so I grabbed her rope toy and took off for the back room with her at my heels.
I'd throw the toy so she could catch it, then approach her in that slow, taunting way that would get her in paws-out mode, squinting at me and then launching away in a giddy run. My place is just two rooms, so it's a limited game of chase, but she doesn't seem to care, and wags her tail hard enough that her whole body's swinging each way, with that absurd giant rope in her mouth.
I snatch it and toss it into the other room, and there's an immediate mechanical roar. Daisy charges back in, running between my legs, and looks up with her brows up.
That thing I don't like is making a noise!
With her hiding behind me, I find the rope toy next to the vacuum, which is running in place after I'd neatly hit the on-switch with my blind throw. With a toe, I click the switch again and the roar stops. Daisy trots over to make sure the big blue carcass isn't moving.
That oughta show you, stupid thing I don't like!
She wears me out, but something's got me laughing this morning, and we just stop for a second to sit, panting, on the sofa. I scratch her behind her ears and she rolls over, presenting her pink belly for a scritch. She's just so new and so energetic and fresh in the world, a little ball of curiosity and trouble, and for just a moment, I think of Rose and that day when she reached the end of the road, and I look back at Daisy, into those bright eyes, and it's just so wrong that one day, she'll be on that stainless steel table, all scruffy and worn out and tired, and it'll be the end of the line.
What are you thinking about?
Daisy tips her head, tucking her ludicrous ears back in a now familiar gesture of thoughtful surrender as I reach out to give her a scratch.
"Nothing, little girl," I say, as if I'm answering that imaginary question.
Her ears snap back to attention, and she hops down from the sofa, retrieves the rope toy, and brings it back to me.
"You're wearing me out, dog," I say, but I throw it anyway, and haul myself back off the couch for another trip around the apartment, and then another, and another, until it's time to settle down and wash the dishes.
