An Unhappy Devotion (Dedicated to Peter Schilling, Sr. and Jr.)

From a very early age Maraini had been singularly, almost frighteningly obsessed with divining all of the secrets of magic. He was fortunate in one particular regard: as a boy he had lived in a large industrial city in New Jersey, and located on the already beleaguered main street was a cramped and dusty old magic shop whose owner was only the second proprietor the establishment had known in its more than seventy years of operation.

This would have been somewhere around 1963, and the owner of the store was very old. His name was Gaylord Shattuck, and he had recently retired from the professional practice of magic and was devoting what was left of his life to writing a scrupulously researched history of the genesis and evolution of every trick and illusion known to him. Among his small and dwindling circle of confidantes, Shattuck would boast that - at least in the world of magic - there was now nothing he had seen that he did not understand or could not place in an historical context. When Maraini first set foot in the shop - still called Sharpovsky's Magic after the original owner, and still crowded with posters and other relics from its early years - he was ten years old, already a serious boy and a serious student of magic who had virtually memorized every book on the subject that he could find in his hometown library or at the New York Public Library, which he visited a half dozen times a year with his mother.

Gaylord Shattuck had seen youngsters parade in and out of the store for forty years; they paid the bills many months, and he had a rote patter that he used to sell them the basic gags, pocket tricks, and simple routines with which they could amuse their schoolmates. Maraini, at ten years old, was having none of Shattuck's auto-pilot shtick.

"I already know all that," the boy said, and Shattuck would later recall being struck by Maraini's peculiar focus. The boy didn't smile. He wasn't there to horse around. No, Shattuck said, this was a kid who was looking for the real thing, the best kept secrets and latest wrinkles. Shattuck, of course, had a long list of customers he had first encountered as children who later went on to distinguished careers in magic. A couple of them became minor legends, at least among other magicians. But he'd never had a kid as young as Maraini come through the door so clearly determined to break through every wall and build new, and higher, walls of his own.

Shattuck sold Maraini his first doves, then eventually let him through doors he'd opened for fewer than a dozen customers in his decades in business. The last time, the last door, Shattuck had immediately regretted. Maraini, who was by this time twelve years old and was already capable of performing the acts of men who had made a good living off magic and were now in the twilight of their careers, seemed utterly unimpressed, and had instinctively grasped the illusion from the set-up to the execution. At this point Shattuck pointed Maraini in the direction of another retired magician in Newark, a legendary eccentric who was rumored to have devoted the last decade to attempting something that had never been accomplished.

More than that no one had been able to discover or to coerce the old man to disclose. This man's name was Cabbott Sandor - the Great Sandor - and Maraini was said to have served a brief but fruitful apprenticeship with him. Sandor's memories of the boy - recorded when Maraini's career was still in its relative infancy - jibed almost exactly with Shattuck's. Against his parents' wishes, Maraini dropped out of high school at sixteen, and is said to have undertaken a long pilgrimage in Europe at around this same time. In Paris, in London, in Prague and Munich, in Madrid and a small village in Portugal, there were legendary magicians, most of them old, who recalled his visits and his impatient interrogations. He reportedly performed his act - excellent, highly skilled, but still relatively conventional - in public places and local theaters and nightclubs whenever he could persuade someone to give him an opening set, usually preceding some singer, comedian, or cabaret performance.

He traveled for varying lengths of time with itinerant circuses in Spain, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Maraini was still at this time a teenager, and no one who encountered him during this period recalls much about the boy beyond his severity and what someone once described as his "unhappy devotion to magic." He apparently had no close friends, no romantic relationships, and seemed to subsist on little beyond water. There are some who claim that Maraini developed a pernicious drug habit during this time in Europe, but there has been no evidence to support that claim.

A grainy photograph of him appeared in a cheap but influential magic newsletter in the early 1970s. The photo showed a tall, unsmiling, virtually emaciated young man staring into the camera with an expression that simultaneously conveyed boredom and malice. The headline above the brief article that accompanied this photograph read: "A potential legend, or a legend of potential?" The article documented Maraini's pilgrimages to the shops and homes of legendary and obscure magicians all over Europe. Around this same time Maraini stopped performing entirely, but he continued to travel and visit magicians, all of whom were said to be impressed with his intense curiosity and restlessness. Maraini, despite scant evidence that would support such claims, was persistently suspected of hatching something that would prove earthshaking in the world of magic.

Then, in 1975, another brief article - this one bearing Maraini's byline - appeared in an influential magic publication. It was unclear where exactly Maraini was at the time - India or Africa, people surmised - but he claimed in the magazine that he had been traveling with a "merchant of cobras," that he had assembled a collection of living scorpions, and that this merchant's company, he hoped, would facilitate the "procurement of an elephant or some even more spectacular beast."

The article also included this strange quote: "I've spent the last fifteen years looking for magic, and what I have found is an endless series of cheap puppet shows performed in cemeteries overrun with plastic flowers and slack-jawed zombies. Make no mistake: magic as you've known it is dead. A new magic will only be found in the oldest, most disreputable form of magic: miracles. That, then, is where I'm turning all my attention. Upward."

After this rare, uncharacteristic, and utterly inexplicable public pronouncement, Maraini was not heard from for over two years.

Years later reports would be pieced together regarding Maraini's activities and whereabouts during the two years he seemed to disappear entirely from the radar. Many of the sources of these reports were unreliable at best, or from notoriously disreputable sources at worst. There is no doubt, however, that he spent at least several weeks with an old, internationally known magician in Singapore. This man was a German ex-pat who had settled in Singapore in the early sixties, and he was regarded in the magic community as something of a crackpot, a man who had for the last thirty years refused to even acknowledge a magic community, or to claim membership or fraternity in anything that, in his own words, "continued to propagate the same old transparent frauds and patently bogus gee-whizzers that had reduced magicians the world over to a bunch of slick practitioners of the usual hocus-pocus hokum."

The man, whose name was Einer Schulz, professed that his one remaining hopeless goal in the time remaining to him was to obliterate every deck of cards on the planet. During his last known stint as a performing magician in Europe, Schulz was doing an act in which his hands were bound and he worked exclusively with his feet. It is also claimed that today's risk-taking, extreme marathon stunts of confinement, isolation, and deprivation had their origins in the mind of Schulz, who somewhat presciently saw that the future of magic, its next frontier, was not properly magic, but suffering.

At any rate, Schulz, who was as frequently despised as he was grudgingly admired by serious magicians and historians of magic, accepted Maraini as a visitor. The old man died before Maraini made his big splash, but he did recount some details of the younger magician's visit in a journal that surfaced after his death. In one entry he wrote that "the young man is strange, and may be crazy. Who am I to say? He's clearly looking for something, another dimension that I myself have not yet been able to conclusively conclude exists."

Elsewhere he seems perplexed with Maraini's obsession with obtaining an elephant.

"I told him, of course, that Houdini had already, in New York in 1918, disappeared an elephant on stage at the Hippodrome," wrote Schulz. "An illusion Houdini learned or stole from Charles Merritt, the Yorkshire alcoholic hypnotist and  illusionist who had performed a similar stunt with a donkey. The fellow, who is almost alarmingly gaunt, brushed this off with disgust and the sputtering indignation that seems to be his primary mode of communication. 'That,' he said, 'was nothing but a cheap box-and-mirror trick, and an even cheaper stunt that fooled virtually no one. I want to really disappear an elephant, in an open space with no props or sets. I want the elephant to be gone.'

"After pondering this for some moments, during which the young man appeared to be festering with frustration, I ventured that - if I was understanding him correctly - what he proposed seemed like an impossibility, emphasizing that this was a word I had used and entertained rarely, and only with reluctance. Clearly angry, Maraini stalked away from me, and later spent part of the afternoon locked in a box with scorpions and cobras, an experience that late that evening he pronounced 'pointless. Boring for me, boring and likely traumatic for the creatures, and surely boring, however repellent, for any audience.'

"Several days later he sold his collection of cobras and scorpions, which I was led to believe he had hauled all over the world, to a man even I find unsettling who runs an animal market in a slum."

Schulz's last entry regarding Maraini's stay was perhaps enlightening: "To be a truly great and singular artist, a man must demonstrate some of the pathology of the criminal, and young Maraini clearly has all of the tell-tale signs. There is really no telling what the man might do, which makes him both tragic and enviable. All the same, I can't help feeling that I've heard the last of him."

Schulz's journals were dated Sept. 1976, and the man was dead by the end of the year, killed in mysterious circumstances by the husband of a palm reader. It is unclear where Maraini's travels took him next, but reports from those who supposedly encountered him at various points in his long journey - and these dispatches came from such disparate and far-flung locales that it is difficult to know what to believe - increasingly took on a starry-eyed, almost mystical tone. After his visit to Schulz there are no more accounts of Maraini practicing -at least publicly- anything that might have been construed as magic. Questions have also been raised regarding how his travels were financed, but much of the speculation - drug peddling, gun trafficking, begging - can likely be dismissed as idle rumors.

Then, in August of 1978, an advertisement appeared in several magic publications, placed by an apparent promoter no one had ever heard of, announcing Maraini's return to New York.

"It is Foolish to Promise Something That Has Never Been Seen Before, as there is both Precious Little and Plenty That Has Never Been Seen Before, Depending on Your Awareness and the Paucity of Your Experience and Imagination," the announcement read. "But As I Wish to Speak in a Debased Language You can Understand, and also Because I Mean the Phrase Literally, I intend to reveal to Interested Parties Something That Has Never Been Seen Before, and which I feel confident will Never Be Repeated. Free to the Public."

There was no other information beyond a date, a time, and a place: Central Park, the Great Lawn, September 7th, five p.m. This announcement occasioned a great deal of curiosity, among magic aficionados, certainly, but as Maraini had by this time become a legendary mystery, if nothing else, the story began to be pieced together and reported by the media. The New York Times ran a sketchy and - in all likelihood - largely apocryphal profile that made the man seem like a full-blown modern myth.

There was absolutely no indication of what the man  might do, and even speculation seemed pointless. The last anyone in New York had seen of Maraini he had been a precociously gifted teenager who had mastered  nothing beyond what might be called the basic repertoire. Everyone, of course, recalled his almost alarming seriousness, and his vague singularity of purpose and obvious ambition. But as a successful older magician, who had crossed paths with Maraini during the years before he embarked on his odyssey, told the reporter from  the Times, "He was a kid, and he was very good, but he had zero presentation skills, nothing in the way of patter, and, frankly, he was doing stuff that hundreds of other magicians in New York could do with more flair."

The Times article also included a few quotes from Maraini's father - something of a Holy Grail for Maraini obsessives, as the family had been  unyielding in their refusal to speak about their son and brother; they had, in fact, been entirely silent and invisible throughout Maraini's absence.

The crowd at Sharpovsky's magic shop in New Jersey had vague memories of both the mother and the father occasionally accompanying their son on his early trips to the store, but no one could recall their names. Over the years various attempts had been made to call every Maraini in the New York and New Jersey phone books, but none of the people contacted had ever heard of the magician. This part of the mystery was put to rest by the profile in the Times.

"My son's given name is Dario DeCarava," his father said. "I have no idea where it came from, but from the time he got interested in magic - and he was just a boy - he started referring to himself exclusively as Maraini."

It turned out that no one in the family had had any sort of contact with Maraini since early in his European pilgrimage. As for what his son might have in store for the curious come September 7th, the father said, "Your guess is as good as mine. In fact, your guess is probably better than mine. He was a mystery from the time he learned to speak."

Early on the morning of September 7th a large crowd began to gather on the Great Lawn. It was a perfect autumn day of the sort New York is famous for. There was a considerable presence of New York police officers, many of them on horseback. A large canvas tent was erected in the middle of the lawn, surrounded by several large trucks. The word made its way through the magic contingent - many members of which had traveled from far afield - that the set-up had occurred in the dead of night, and all the necessary permits and paperwork had been secured.

No one had yet seen Maraini, or seemed to have any idea when he might have arrived in the city, or from where. Later police estimates claimed that the eventual crowd gathered on the Great Lawn was in the neighborhood of 5000, although I would personally guess that it was much closer to 10,000. A series of barriers had been erected around the tent, creating an open space that was perhaps fifty yards in circumference. At exactly five p.m. a flap was pulled back from the tent and Maraini emerged - or at least it was assumed this was Maraini. No one was really in any essential way capable of recognizing him. The man who walked out into the clearing to address the crowd was tall, a bit stooped, and as thin as advertised. His hair was long and disheveled, and he was wearing a faded blue tee-shirt, bell bottom jeans, and  sandals, which he immediately removed and  tossed back in the direction of the tent.

He appeared to squint out at the crowd, shook his head - almost sadly, it seemed - and stepped hesitantly to the microphone, where he stood unmoving and unspeaking for several long moments. The crowd was remarkably silent. Eventually the flaps of the tent were rolled back and several people emerged leading a giraffe, which crept forward with lurching, tentative steps until it came to rest behind Maraini.

"This is an African giraffe," Maraini said, finally addressing his audience. "It has undertaken a long and arduous journey to be here today, and before this day is over it will have traveled an even longer and more amazing journey."

The handlers released their reins and stepped back toward the tent. The giraffe lowered its head briefly and then raised it again and stood perfectly still.

"This giraffe is here in New York," Maraini said. "Surely as alien and unsettling a place as it has ever found itself."

Maraini's voice was utterly without inflection. He did not smile or move from the microphone.

"Like so many in the city it cannot begin to imagine what it is doing here, and also like so many in this merciless city, it would dearly love to be somewhere else, anywhere else."

At this point Maraini removed the microphone from the stand and turned to face the giraffe. He appeared to be staring into the giraffe's eyes, and the giraffe, unmoving except for ripples that ran up and down its long legs and steady waves that rolled across the velvet of its ribcage, returned Maraini's gaze.

"I cannot begin to express my gratitude to you, my patient friend," Maraini said. "But I thank you for everyone here. And now you are excused."

With that Maraini turned back toward the crowd and the giraffe instantaneously disappeared. A gasp went through the crowd, followed by a swelling murmur, and then a burst of wild applause. Maraini raised his hands and beckoned for silence. He now seemed to be glowering.

"There is nothing to cheer about," he said. "It is a disgraceful, an unpardonable, thing to make a giraffe disappear. Is it not, however, a wondrous thing when a giraffe appears, anywhere in the world, even here in Central Park?"

Maraini closed his eyes, clasped his hands together as if he were praying, and then once again turned his back to the crowd. He repeated the series of gestures. The crowd was almost completely silent, poised in a rare moment of communal breathlessness. The giraffe did not reappear, and by this point it was clear that something had gone wrong. A number of people emerged from the tent and appeared to be both conferring with Maraini and consoling him. Everyone stood around for what seemed a very long time, the noise of the crowd growing by the moment. Maraini paced around distractedly in front of the tent for fifteen or twenty minutes. He was clearly distraught, and several times shook off assistants who approached him with the apparent intent of offering comfort or advice. After perhaps 45 minutes passed Maraini approached  the microphone.

"Something has gone wrong," he said. "In this world, you will surely have noticed, something always goes wrong."

And then he turned away and disappeared back into the tent. The crowd milled around for a bit longer and then began to disperse. Some speculated that they had just witnessed a hoax, an elaborate publicity stunt. Others believed that they had been witnesses to a crime. Still others, myself included, had no idea what to think. That night's television news gave a good deal of coverage to the story. Maraini, it was said, was not available for comment.

Then, near the end of the newscast, the anchors broke from a story they were reporting to announce that Maraini had allegedly killed himself with a gunshot wound to the head in a Brooklyn warehouse. Unidentified police sources on the scene had provided a preliminary identification of the deceased, and official confirmation came later in the evening.

The next day we learned that Maraini had left instructions that he was to be buried in a pauper's cemetery on Hart Island. There would be no service. The burial occurred several days later, and there were witnesses, including the grave diggers, Maraini's family, and a few members of his traveling party. There was also a report from the mortician who prepared the body for burial.

The morning after Maraini was interred, the entire city was abuzz with the news that a giraffe had appeared, grazing on the Great Lawn of Central Park. Suspicions being immediately aroused, and based on a tip from what police called a reliable source, a request was filed for the exhumation of Maraini's grave, despite objections from his family. A party, including city officials, a few journalists, and Maraini's parents, made the trip to Hart Island. News reports described a grim affair. The disinterment took place in a cold, torrential downpour, and the gravediggers had difficulty locating the coffin and then extricating it. The grave had filled with water, creating a sucking mudhole.

When the casket was eventually hoisted from the hole in the ground it was removed to a storage shed for inspection, pried open, and discovered to be empty.

Two Little Stories About Religious Paranoia

The other night I dreamt I was in a boat floating in thick fog, talking to God.

Look, He says to me, I'm just hoping to catch a few fish. I didn't come down here to listen to you bitch.

I wouldn't think you'd need to fish, I said.

Very few people in this world need to fish, He said. But it just so happens I like to fish. I'm a sportsman, and though, yes, I could technically cheat --at this as well as at anything else I damn well please-- that's never been my style. I don't much go in for flashy stuff and intervention. The fish don't know who's on the other end of the line, and that's the way I like it. The truth is that if they did  know, it would only make it all the more difficult for me to catch them. Do you think for one minute that if those fish down there knew I was in this boat they would eagerly impale themselves on my hook just to make me happy? I can assure you they would not. Unless and until somebody wants or needs something virtually all of creation runs from me. Oh sure, there are nuts --there are always nuts-- but I think you know what I mean. You're all fish to me --understand, of course, that I'm now speaking metaphorically, but that's the way I've always thought of you-- and when I go fishing it's virtually always bad news for somebody. And I'm terribly sorry, my friend, but today that somebody is you.

And with that God pushed me out of the boat.

An Unfortunate Agreement

One night Ruckert dreamt that he had died and was standing in a long line outside the gates of Heaven. Some functionary was making his way along the queue with a clipboard, directing queries to the prospective entrants.

“Will there be dogs in Heaven?” Ruckert inquired of the man.

“Yes,” the man said, “but unfortunately not your dog. As you might recall, he killed a number of rabbits.”

The man offered Ruckert the option of spending eternity in hell with his dog, an offer that Ruckert accepted without hesitation, at which point he awoke in a cold sweat.

Despite the best and most rational counsel of his closest friends and therapist, Ruckert could not be dissuaded from  his conviction that this dream represented some sort of binding agreement.

From The Annals Of Exploration

I recall reading somewhere about a party of British adventurers who were mucking about in some primitive, forsaken  place. This was, if I'm not mistaken, some time relatively early in the 19th century. According to a handful of sketchy journals they left behind they'd had an arduous expedition and  had lost several members of their party to violence and various mysterious maladies.

Much of the time they spent navigating an unpredictable river and plodding through thick brush and rough, rocky terrain. I don't quite remember what they were looking for, but I'm certain it can be safely surmised that it was more or less something they hadn't seen before. Like many such explorers I'm supposing they were bored with domesticity and civilization, and hoped  that hardship and  peril would make them  men again.

They were also --once again, like many such characters-- blunderers, utterly ill-prepared and incompetent, certain that their firearms and education  (they were mostly well-to-do graduates of Oxford, I believe, with a handful of hardscrabble human mules to do their dirty work) made them superior to the vague task at hand.

Almost needless to say, they disappeared, as is so often the case with such foolhardy explorers. Many years later a party of anthropologists and botanists stumbled across a jungle clearing in that still inhospitable part of the world, a clearing where they discovered a neatly arranged collection of bleached skulls seemingly growing from the earth like jack-o-lanterns made of bone. Additional investigation revealed that the bodies belonging to these skulls had in fact been buried vertically, and presumably alive, up to their necks.

When these pathetic souls were excavated  it was discovered that they were still wearing their tattered clothing, and one of their number was yet clutching in what was left of his right hand a scrap of moldering cloth on which was scrawled in fading script the words: "We have had the misfortune of encountering a party of white men."

The Mountain

The mountain told the crow he was lonely.

"If you would use your wings to fly away, even if only for a short time, you would surely not feel so lonely," the crow said.

"But I don't have wings," the mountain said. "I cannot fly away. And even if I could fly away, I could not do so. Where I am is what I am."

"Nonsense," the crow said, and lifted off and soared away across the valley.

The mountain was not a majestic specimen. It was, in fact, a humble mountain, covered with trees almost all the way to its highest point and surrounded by other mountains from which it was virtually indistinguishable. There was a good deal of mountain competition for a hundred miles in every direction. To the north of the lonely, humble mountain there was a range of truly majestic mountains, rock-faced and snow-capped, that were said to be visible from the smaller mountains on all sides.

The lonely mountain could not see these majestic mountains. He was severely myopic and knew of the majestic mountains only from descriptions he had heard from the birds, and from the occasional comments of admiration he heard from the rare hikers who climbed through the trees --'climbed' was perhaps not wholly accurate; people could walk at a leisurely pace to the top of the lonely, humble mountain-- to stand or sit for a moment at the small cluster of rocks that constituted its modest summit. No one who ever came to the lonely, humble mountain ever addressed a word to him. No one had ever asked his permission to cut down his trees, to build fires from his wood, or to fish in his brooks. For hundreds of years he had been conversant with no one but the occasional bird. Some of them, from their perspective high up in the sky, could at least see that he was there, distinct; could see that though he was covered with trees and bushes and flowers and rocks, and that though there were springs and brooks and all manner of animals living on him, he was the mountain, the village in which all these other things resided.

After the mountain had made his confession to the crow other birds began to visit and hector him with the same advice: "Fly away! Fly away!"

The crow must have gossiped that the mountain was lonely. The crow was loud, and loose lipped, and the mountain knew that he never should have confided in him. All that summer the birds came flitting and swooping and soaring in from the north, south, east, and west. "Tsk-tsk, lonely," they would cry. "Tsk-tsk, lonely. Fly away! Fly away!"

Most of the birds the mountain had ever known were foolish. Only the owls were wise, and they seldom deigned to talk to him. He had lived longer than all the foolish birds combined, and he had heard them coming and going for hundreds of years. Of course they were not lonely. They were not anchored to the earth and nearly blind. They built nests and had children and traveled great distances and visited other mountains and forests and lands. The mountain had heard their stories, and once upon a time they had thrilled him.

One day near the end of the summer, on an afternoon when the mountain could once again sense the changing of the seasons and could feel the planet churning beneath him, a hawk paid him a visit.

"I hear you are lonely," the hawk said.

"It is true, yes," the mountain said. "I am lonely. It is lonely to be an old mountain."

"Why do you not fly away?" the hawk asked.

The mountain sighed. "Because I do not have wings," he said. "It would be impossible for me to fly away. And where I am is what I am."

The hawk seemed to consider this for a moment.

"But of course you have wings," he said. "I have seen them. I have been snatching mice from the feathers of your wings for years. And what you are you will be wherever you go."

"Nonsense," the mountain said. "I am a mountain, and if I were to leave I would cease to be a mountain."

"Your problem, old Mr. Mountain," the hawk said, "is that you are stubborn and blind. It is no wonder you are lonely." And with that the hawk hurled itself into the air and was carried away on the wind.

Autumn crept over the mountain and darkness came early and the nights grew longer and colder. Soon the snow would begin to fall and the mountain would be silent and more alone than ever. Winters were hard on the old mountain. They nibbled away at him year by year, and when spring once again came around there would be new cracks and less of him than there had been the year before.

Increasingly, when the first snow came the old mountain would close his eyes and sleep fitfully until he heard the first tentative arrival of the birds and the running of the brooks carrying away the last of the melting snow. One evening in late autumn he was already dreaming of that day when he was startled awake by the sound of migrating geese, crossing the sky above him in great numbers.

As he listened to their exuberant, long familiar traveling songs, the old mountain felt something moving within him, a rustle that built rapidly to a roar --the crashing of trees and rocks, thunderous, terrifying, a noise that gradually subsided and was replaced by what sounded like nothing so much as a huge, rhythmic heart beating furiously and almost weightlessly within him. And then the startled old mountain suddenly felt himself rising in a swirling blizzard of dirt and pebbles and dead leaves.

With dreaming wonder, the mountain watched the earth gradually recede as he climbed higher and higher into the clear night sky, alternately gliding and gyring, carried up and away --or so it did indeed seem-- by a giant pair of dusty wings. And when he cast one last look backwards and downwards he saw that the mountain that had been for so many years home to his lonely heart was still there, reposed in the moonlight and waiting for the arrival of another long winter.

My Memories Of Tchaikovsky

It's no secret that people of great achievement are often abject curiosities and spectacular failures as human beings, and this was certainly true of Tchaikovsky, who lived in my hometown when I was growing up.

I can't truly claim that it was my privilege to know the man, or even that to know him would have been, in fact, any kind of privilege at all. (My understanding is that this was decidedly not the case.) But I certainly remember the old man, and recall seeing his stooped and wretched specter stumbling along the sidewalks of my neighborhood.

People around town knew Tchaikovsky, of course, or certainly were aware of his strange presence. Few, however, apparently realized that he was writing music. Most folks remember him as a stunningly bad amateur painter whose crude oils of birds --robins, almost exclusively-- were entered in the art show at the county fair each summer.

Somewhere I have a snapshot of the garish tattoo of a naked clown bleeding from his eyes that Tchaikovsky had etched into one of his forearms. I can't recall how I came by this photograph, to be honest with you, but it remains among my most prized possessions, and countless scholars have tried to buy it from me over the years.

There was always a great deal of speculation that Tchaikovsky was consumptive, or infected with venereal disease. There did, certainly, appear to be something wrong with him. There were clearly health issues of one sort or another, most obviously a painful-looking skin condition. He also had dodgy hygiene, and always seemed to be in need of a new pair of shoes.

Late in his life Tchaikovsky wore a beat-to-shit pair of purple moon boots, no matter the season. This was after moon boots had long since gone out of fashion, and I suppose he picked them up on one of his regular visits to the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store, where he was also said (this was in the newspaper after his death) to be an indiscriminate hoarder of "potboilers and paperback westerns."

Every afternoon he would emerge from his rented room at the Ace Hotel over on the east side by the railroad yard, and he and Friedrich Engels, another Ace resident and local curiosity, would stumble around  the sidewalks of downtown engaged in heated conversation that often resulted in minor dust-ups and spitting matches. Kids used to regularly throw rocks at them.

I can also tell you that Tchaikovsky rolled his own cigarettes (Drum), and spent a great deal of time drinking coffee and banging away at the Cannonball Run pinball machine at a local pizza parlor. He was once arrested for shoplifting a porno mag from Nemitz’s (I can remember my father sitting at the dinner table and chuckling over the Daily Herald’s description of the stolen merchandise as “a gentlemen’s magazine of undetermined value.”).

Whenever we'd see him out and about, my mother would always say, "That poor man doesn't know whether he's coming or going."

"I could help him out with that," my father would say. "He's going."

The old mutterer had one sister still in town, but she was said to find him repellent, and more than once sought a restraining order against him on the grounds that he creeped her out –that, at least, was my mother’s version, which she had received secondhand from a courthouse clerk who was part of a group my mother belonged to that made quilts (with Bible verses pinned to them) for Africans.

Tchaikovsky occasionally played chess at the public library with the conductor of the high school orchestra, and somehow managed to talk this man into performing some of his compositions at the annual spring orchestra concert. Nothing much was made of his music at the time, however, and when Tchaikovsky died he was largely friendless and wholly uncelebrated.

Even to this day there are people in my old hometown who will insist that the music now attributed to Tchaikovsky was, in fact, composed by some other person, or persons. 

Repeated attempts to raise money to erect a statue in his honor outside the library have been unsuccessful.

The International Repository Of Regrets

Since he lost his job as an aviation mechanic in the late 1980s, Riggs has been a clerk at the International Repository of Regrets. He hasn't had a good night's sleep in almost ten years.

The Repository, housed in a World War Two-era train depot, is a vast place of bad light and spooky, institutional acoustics. Even in the middle of the night --especially in the middle of the night-- it is always crowded, and the mood there is generally sour and joyless. The crowd is polyglottal, often dizzyingly so.

Some of the people who stand in the long lines are dead, shuffling in place in stepped-down shoes, often clutching photographs –or entire albums of photographs-- to their breasts. Many of the waiting have grown hoarse from a lifetime of rehearsing and fine-tuning their regrets. For the most part, they throw their cigarette butts and the wrappers from the vending machines on the scarred concrete floor.

The International Repository of Regrets is now little but a purely bureaucratic facility, and offers nothing in the way of dispensation, absolution, or second chances. Even as a repository it has long since surrendered any claims of utility.

These days, whatever regrets are unburdened there are merely scribbled haphazardly in the margins of ancient, crowded ledgers, wherever there is room. All attempts at maintaining accurate chronological records have been abandoned.

They will soon enough run out of room entirely, at which point the clerks in their teller's cages will be forced to simply sit and listen, reduced to the role of secular priests, mostly disinterested and concerned not at all with salvation or even compassion.

By now, Riggs had pretty much heard it all before, from the truly criminal to the almost unpardonably banal.

Even so, these latter confessions were the things that continued to haunt him, revealing as they did the cumulative, lingering damage that could result from even the smallest childhood disappointments. For instance, there was, in the wee hours of one long night, the old woman who had stood in line for days to tell Riggs of the heartbreak she had suffered owing to the fact that allergies had made it impossible for her to ever hug a dog. Or the younger man, deceased by the time he made his way to Riggs’ window, who was grief stricken over his lifelong inability to throw a baseball to his father's satisfaction.

Riggs had also encountered individuals --there had been at least a dozen-- whose chief regret in life was one particularly bad haircut.

And so, so many people had stood before Riggs and poured out their regret over elaborately planned surprise parties that had been disastrous or poorly attended.

Most distressingly and unsurprisingly, love --faithless love, tragic love, and love gone wrong, gone cold, or gone missing-- continued to be the reason the overwhelming majority of the broken and beleaguered clientele made the difficult pilgrimage to the International Repository of Regrets. Day after day and night after night Riggs listened to these stories. Unlike some of the other, older clerks, he was incapable of not listening. Sometimes he found himself jotting notes on scraps of paper he carried in his pockets for just this purpose. Personal note taking was strictly forbidden, and the regrets that were offered up at the Repository were never supposed to leave the facility.

Yet Riggs did take these notes. He took them down and he took them home, and he would spend some time studying and mulling them each day at the end of his shift. And then he would put them away in a box he kept under his bed, a box in which he had for 32 years kept a collection of notes and faded greeting cards –old birthday, anniversary, and Valentine cards—that were all addressed to him and signed in the same unmistakable hand.

And every day Riggs went to work and kept his vigil, even as he was slowly, slowly, slowly losing hope that eventually the familiar, beautiful, and sad face he had been waiting for all those years was one evening going to appear before him, and offer up the words that would set him free.

From An Obituary In The Forest Lake Times: Perpetuating One More Old, Cruel Stereotype

...You will be like a man compelled to spend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so that future seafarers shall know he once existed.
      --Schopenhauer,  “On Ethics.”

This was the life of the small town spinster librarian: a clock that clanged on the half hour every day for over 50 years. The city's siren swelling in the streets each afternoon at exactly 12 o'clock, and again to signal the ten p.m. curfew --as if people couldn't tell time or didn't have clocks to do it for them. A dysfunctional milkman, desperate, facing extinction, and the butt of a thousand old jokes, sweating his hard sell door-to-door. A moldering Main Street full of nothing but empty storefronts and dreams that began to fade the moment they took bloom. A few dreary taverns she had never visited, but whose clientele and climate she could well imagine, given her unfortunate familiarity with the squalid habits of so many of her fellow townspeople. A dozen rusty grain elevators and a scar of ragged railroad tracks that passed for industry, and a rusty water tower that served as a local landmark and should have had some sort of pointed apology painted across its facade.

The librarian had always felt as if the whole town was beneath her, almost literally so. She would never make house with a bumbling local; this determination had been hardwired in her heart back in her schoolgirl days. She would look with nothing but scorn upon the flock of poor bachelors who gathered each afternoon and evening in the library's front parlor, making stammering conversation and rustling through the collection of inferior magazines and newspapers.

The local weekly wasn't worth the nearly transparent paper it was printed on, and was produced by end-of-the-road or entry-level journalists playing at the saddest sort of dead-end reportage: school board meetings, piddling zoning controversies, wedding and anniversary announcements, school lunch menus, senior citizen center craft sales, high school football, and obituaries. There had always been plenty of obituaries--the local funeral home was the newest building in town, and was illuminated like a casino all through the night-- but anymore even the number of dead people was diminishing by the day.

Every night the spinster librarian carried home thick novels, read herself to sleep, and regretted everything other than the fact that she had been taught to read.

One day late in her life she would have the realization that her father was to be the only true gentleman she would ever meet, and the only man who would ever hold her in his arms.

Before she’d even reached fifty she had made arrangements to be buried in Boston, a place she had never so much as visited. This was the only wish she ever publicly expressed, as well as the only wish she was ever granted.

A Catalog of Simple Wishes For The New Year

To enter each day expectant, and bow down to my dog with gratitude.

To leap and blow bubbles and reach instinctively for every bright, raging color in the crayon box.

To creep like an ecstatic cat burglar through every day and fling myself at the world.

To want more.

To whoop and bellow and grip the grass with my toes.

To look forward, and lunge.

To stomp through the calendar, oblivious, and to kill no clock that I don’t intend to eat with genuine relish.

To sense the planet moving beneath my feet, and to understand  that that motion represents both a state of urgency and an obligation.

To laugh until I cry uncle.

To want more.

To emerge from every dark place upright, unharmed, and blinking in the sunlight.

To imagine entire new constellations of planets, vast galaxies teeming with possibility.

To create a world of my own that allows me to live comfortably in the world I did not create.

To surround myself with the things I have saved from a lifetime of excavation and exploration, every one of which is a personal version of Proust’s madeleine.

To keep playing Twister with words until I find the right way to say the things I want and need to say.

To have pure, idiot wonder and faith in the limitless miracles of my body.

To want more.

To trust fully the things on which I can depend.

To be more dependable to the people on whom I depend.

To harbor none but exaggerated fears and the smallest of dissolving terrors.

To be hungry for nothing but something to eat.

To be forever trusting in the arms of mercy.

To get up when I fall.

To stand and run and never crawl again.

To recognize that I have been blessed beyond measure, and to accept my blessings as the expected, everyday miracles that they are.

To give thanks, nonetheless.

To want more.

To keep my heart open.

To listen.

To talk to strangers.

To stop what I’m doing –wherever I am—and take a good look around.

To reach out, to raise my voice.

To change my mind.

To know that I’ve done what I could.

To know that I want to do still more.

To settle down at the end of the day with good music and my inventory of pleasures and memories.

To give myself away until I’m empty and exhausted and left with nothing but the last radiant embers of satisfaction and contentment.

To believe that if this is it, it was not just enough, but more than enough.

To sleep and --not merely perchance-- to dream.

To have sweet dreams.

To want more.

To get up and try it all again.

Watching The Dailies From A Railroad Trestle In Vermont

A creeping reel of film
stretched across the valley
between the shrouded hills,
a pastoral interlude before things
get lively and it heads through
town, the river both the film itself
and the screen on which it is projected.

Watching at dusk from the theater
of the trestle, the town huddled
on the banks shimmers across the screen.
The streetlamps, the slashing lights of
cars on the river road, the lights
in the windows of the hulking old
buildings, the steam from the paper mill.

Or at high noon, color and light
and evident shapes and motion,
floating clouds and a bright,
shattered sun transmuted time and
again in a quaking hall of mirrors.
Yet another dream shot for the ancient
cinematographer, the supreme panoramist.

He likes to keep his show rolling,
and loaded with literal sub-texts,
hidden backstories and tragic plot lines
stashed in the memory of moving water
and the murk beneath the surface.
A shame you can’t rewind the film
a hundred or even five hundred years.

If you wanted to, though, you could follow
its languid story all the way to its closing credits,
to the moon-tossed archives of the sea,
repository of a million dreams etched on
living water. This day will be there
soon, dissolving into fragments and,
finally, particles of pure and living light.

Sometimes, far out at sea, the ocean
will still screen jumbled festivals of the
old films it has acquired, and sailors
will be struck mute with wonder, forever
changed by they things they have seen.

A Gift That Sets The Stars Free

One night long ago in a once-upon-a-time world there was a little lost dog in a faraway forest. The dog was alone and hungry, and it was a bitter winter. The dog was settling into the den he had burrowed for himself in the snow around the roots of a tree, and as he curled up in the darkness he heard the distant shimmer of bells and, a moment later, voices carrying in the cold night air, a great many voices joined in some happy song. The dog had never known anyone to pass through the faraway forest, not once in his lost time in that lonely place had he heard voices like these, or the beautiful and wondrous stamping of bells.

The little dog crept to the edge of his den and sniffed, peering, in the direction of the music. A moment later, light from the many torches of the travelers swept creeping shadows into the clearing outside the den, then chased completely the darkness before them and  became full, hissing light. The dog watched in wonder as the brightly clad travelers –laughing and singing—paraded into view, enveloped in a moving cloud of steam and smoke.

There were tiny acrobats and a tall, thin fellow toddling on stilts and several laughing jugglers. There were five shy horses pulling bright clattering wagons, and interspersed amongst the parade were dozens of chattering clowns. At the very end of this colorful parade, lagging almost outside the very last of the torchlight, there was a small, limping clown, leading an old and slow donkey. As the dog crept from his hiding place, the happy songs and jangling bells of the travelers were already fading away into the distance and the darkness of the faraway forest. 

The dog trotted along after the parade and soon found himself beside the limping clown and the old donkey. When finally the sad-faced clown became aware of the dog’s presence, a look of surprise and happiness came over his face and he let out a cry that startled the little dog. The clown crouched in the snow alongside the donkey and clapped his hands and called out, and when the dog came into the clown’s arms the little clown began to laugh and the small, laughing clown held the dog in his arms, rocking him gently and murmuring. 

The clown –murmuring and giggling happily all the while—carried the dog in his arms as they brought up the rear of the noisy and colorful and clanking parade. 

They traveled that night until the torches had all burned down to darkness, and then they stopped and set up their camp along a frozen river. It had grown cold, and the travelers bundled together under their blankets beside roaring fires, with the horses and the donkey huddled stamping and steaming just outside the circle of jugglers, acrobats, and clowns. 

The clown had swaddled the lost dog in an old wool blanket, and he held the dog in his arms and rocked him as the others told stories and laughed and gradually drifted into silence and sleep. 

The clown’s name was Munch, or so he was known to his fellow travelers, and now he whispered to the dog in his arms, “I shall call you Beauteous Munch.” Together they sat up until the bonfire had faded to embers, and together they saw a sky above them where there were millions upon millions of bright stars. The clown sang quiet songs and interrupted himself at one point to say, “Look, Beauteous Munch, there goes a shooting star!  Sweet dreams, my little wish.”

And that night, as he lay curled up beneath the blankets with the little clown, Beauteous Munch was warm and slept without shivering for the first time since the long ago day when he had first found himself lost in the faraway forest.

There had been a time when Beauteous Munch was a puppy living contentedly with his mother and his brothers and sisters in a wooden box in a small town. One day a man and woman had come to take him away to live with them in their house. They were loud and unhappy people, and try as he might Beauteous Munch could not make them any less unhappy. The old man was impatient with Beauteous Munch and shouted at him often.

All day Beauteous Munch would sit at the window staring out at the children playing in the street and passing by his house. Then one day when the nights were beginning to get cold, the man put Beauteous Munch outside. It was raining very hard, and cry as he might and scratch at the door as he did, Beauteous Munch could not get the old man or woman to open the door for him so he could come in out of the rain. Beauteous Munch sat on the steps of the house for a long time that night, until he saw the lamp in the front room extinguished and it was dark up and down the street and the rain was beginning to turn to snow. That was the night Beauteous Munch wandered away and eventually found himself lost in the faraway forest.

That first night away from his home Beauteous Munch tried to sleep, but he was wet and cold and lonely. He missed his long ago once-upon-a-time life. He peered up through the big, wet snowflakes that were cart-wheeling out of the sky and he found a star there barely twinkling, a little star that looked lost and distant and alone. And as Beauteous Munch closed his eyes he wished upon that lost and distant star, wished that somewhere there was another wish lost and longing for a dog, and that attached to that wish was someone special with quiet magic in his hands and a soft voice and a smile that could wag a dog’s tail.

That same night, far away from the faraway forest, Munch the clown was bundled up in a blanket next to his donkey, listening to the laughter and the songs of his traveling companions. He was stout and not as graceful as the others, nor as skilled. Even as a clown his only real role was to lead the donkey and the horses around the ring, and to assist some of the performers with their stunts. He could not sing, and because he spoke with a slight stutter he was the quietest of the troupe, and tended to settle by himself into the background, talking quietly with the donkey and the horses. 

The little clown looked up into the sky and wished upon a distant star; he closed his eyes and showed his crooked teeth to the moon and offered only the simplest and most humble of wishes: Please, he whispered, Something Nice.  Something happy.  A small, happy thing.

 And so it was that on the first night he spent with Beauteous Munch, the little clown saw the beautiful shooting star tumble all the way down the sky and he thought to himself, So that is what happens when two wishes collide with one another: An old star is freed from the heavens and falls into a distant sea where it becomes a thousand bright and glimmering fishes. A wish come true is a gift that sets the stars free.

And that is the story of how Beauteous Munch came to live with Munch the clown. Together they learned many tremendous and difficult tricks; the little clown taught Beauteous Munch  to ride on the old donkey’s back and walk across a rope and leap through the tiniest of hoops, and all the signs the performers took around and posted in the towns and villages now said “BEAUTEOUS MUNCH –WONDERFUL SHOW DOG!” He was very popular indeed, and people would come from far and wide to see the amazing clown and his astonishing dog.

On clear nights, as Beauteous Munch and his friend the clown tuckled up and drifted off to sleep, they would stare into the sky above them and watch with drowsy wonder as star after star tumbled through the darkness and somewhere, they knew, a wish had come true.

Fall On Your Knees

It was a quiet horse, the color of gray corduroy, or those elephant slabs of damp clay wrapped in cellophane. They delivered the horse to the pasture out back of my trailer, and it had taken four men to coax her from the truck. She didn’t kick or fuss, but simply refused to budge. I’d paid 100 dollars for the horse to save it from being put down. My old girlfriend had a pathological weakness for downtrodden animals of all kinds.

One of the delivery fellows kept referring to the horse as ‘daft,’ which I thought was an unusual word choice for a young man who couldn’t have been more than 25 years of age. I didn’t think the horse was daft, at any rate, just depressed. She tended to stand in one place out in the pasture, with her head down, and I very seldom saw her eat.

I’d never in my life spent Christmas alone. The day before Christmas Eve I’d driven into the nearest decent-sized city, a college town of maybe 70,000 people, just under a half hour’s drive from my trailer. The city was crowded with last minute shoppers from the small towns that were clustered in the long valleys throughout the mountains. I’d stopped at some cheap steak chain for lunch, and later splurged on a bunch of new CDs for myself and nearly fifty bucks worth of treats for my dog. Heavy snow was falling even as I made my way back out of town, and by the time I pulled into the half-mile gravel road that led to my trailer visibility had been reduced to next to nothing.

    

I stumbled through the blowing snow to the door of the trailer. My dog, a mongrel so strained as to look exotic, was waiting for me in a state of pitched agitation, and I opened the door and watched the dog disappear into the whiteout beyond the trailer.

    

That night I drank enough to feel genuinely sorry for myself, and almost managed to talk myself into flying out the next day to spend Christmas with my sister’s family in Colorado. 

    

The next morning, Christmas Eve, I woke up on the couch, as hungover as I’d been in years.The trailer was completely drifted in, and the wind was still tossing snow around and obscuring the range down the valley to the north. I’d left every light on in the trailer. The only radio station I could pick up in the valley was wheedling with Christmas carols, the signal drifting in and out –some choir somewhere, with a big echo effect that suggested a live feed from a cathedral.  I was determined to drink down some Alka-Seltzer and go back to bed, but I realized with a start that my dog was still someplace out in the storm. It was rare that I would allow the dog to spend the night outside in any weather.

I went to the door and called out into the blowing snow. There was no response, and I still could not even make out the gray horse in the pasture less than 100 yards away. I pulled on a pair of boots, parka, mittens, and a hat with earflaps, and ventured out into the drifts. My truck was almost completely buried. I tried to call out into the snow for the dog, but my voice was swallowed in the swirling wind. Wading knee- and sometimes hip-deep through the drifts I made my way around the side of the trailer and managed somehow to locate one of the fence posts from the horse pasture. I couldn’t see much, or far, but there was no sign of either the dog or the horse.

    

I crawled back into bed, bundled myself in blankets, and tried to take a nap. My head was throbbing, and as I lay there I kept imagining that I heard the dog barking somewhere out in the storm. I actually got up and went to the door twice, but there was no sign of the dog and no sound other than the howling of the wind. Even as I slept fitfully I was aware of my heart pinging in my chest like a sonar in an abandoned submarine.

I’d traveled so far from the person I had once been that the people I’d allowed myself to be close to, as well as those to whom I was conjoined by blood, had become mostly uncomfortable strangers to me. I had drifted out of touch. I had no axe to grind, no extravagant grievance or baggage, and it now seemed sad and even a bit shameful to think that my mother did not even know where I was now living or how to get in touch with me. I hadn’t spoken with her in over ten months. When my girlfriend had grown tired of the west and had moved back to Boston –it had been almost two years—I’d given up the apartment in Bozeman and taken the trailer in the valley. I was supposed to be finishing a set of illustrations for a children’s book, but hadn’t made any progress in weeks.

    

I’d been traveling further into loneliness and its odd, romanticized solace and pleasures. My girlfriend had been in possession of a more polished set of social instincts. She’d been an English professor at a local college, and liked to host small gatherings, enjoyed going out for dinner and shopping. Left to my own devices I seldom did anything that might be considered social. I had made few real friends in the years I’d been living in the west, and still hadn’t even bothered to have the trailer wired for a telephone. The dog was a perfect companion: a good listener, an enforcer of routine and a reasonable order in each day. It was also patient, even-tempered, and eager to please –absolutely companionable. That Man’s Best Friend business really was not overstating, not in this instance. It was unconscionable that I’d allowed myself to get so drunk that I’d left the dog outside in a raging blizzard all night. The poor animal could have strayed miles in search of shelter by this time. 

The odd thing about the whole affair was that I’d seldom even gone into town without taking the dog along. I’d been made careless by melancholy and drink, and I would chew myself up forever with grief if anything had happened to him. As I lay there drifting miserably along the blurriest edges of sleep and hangover, I imagined being hounded to the end of my days by the ghost of that dog. In the two preceding years the only real highlights of the holiday season had been the long walks down the valley we had taken together on Christmas Eve.

          

I finally bundled myself up again and ventured out in what was left of the afternoon daylight to look for the dog. The storm had apparently lifted or moved on; I could see the last of the clouds departing down the valley. The odd and alarming new development was that not only was my dog missing, but there was no sign of the gray horse anywhere in the pasture. The sky had cleared to the point that I could see the entirety of the horse’s fenced enclosure, and the horse was nowhere to be seen. I waddled along the drifts that were built up along the fence line and inspected the gate. It was not only firmly latched, but drifted completely shut.  I walked the length of the road to my trailer, all the way out to where it intersected the main gravel road that led out to the state highway. I saw no evidence of any traffic whatsoever, no animal or vehicle tracks other than those from my own truck the previous evening, and even those were mostly obscured.

    

I managed to get the truck started and backed out to the turnaround.  From there the four-wheel drive got me through the drifted snow out to the gravel county road, which was in pretty good shape.  From there to the blacktop state highway, a distance of just under two miles, I saw no signs of either the dog or the horse. Once I hit the stop sign at the highway I decided to make another trip into town. I had no idea what I expected to accomplish there on Christmas Eve; it was almost five o’clock and already getting dark. The highway had been plowed and road conditions were fine. There were still Christmas carols looping on the radio station, and I made up my mind to attend Christmas Eve services at some church in town. I hadn’t been in a church in a half dozen years, at least, but I had fond memories of the holiday services from my childhood, and felt very much like a man who needed somehow to be forgiven. If God was ever going to grab me, I’d never felt so susceptible. 

    

In town I found a phone book and tried to call the local animal shelter, but got the answering machine and a deadpan voice wishing me a merry Christmas and encouraging me to neuter my dog. I walked around downtown checking telephone poles and bulletin boards where I thought I might find notices of lost and found animals, but turned up nothing that fit the description of my dog. In the empty Greyhound station I picked up a copy of the local newspaper and found an advertisement for Christmas Eve services at area churches. There was a six o’clock service at a big Lutheran church right in town, so I left my truck on the street and went off in search of the place. 

    

The service was packed with families, and there were dozens of scrubbed and squirming children. I had a tough time staying awake through some of the readings and much of the sermon, but I nonetheless felt somehow better for having gone. My heart felt lighter and heavier at the same time, a strangely emotional state that I have always associated with the holidays. As I walked back to my truck I was greeted warmly by at least a half dozen strangers. I remembered my late father coming in from a last-minute errand on Christmas eve long ago; the old man was rosy-cheeked, half in the bag, and happy as a clam. He was a man who loved special occasions, and as he came in with his arms loaded with shopping bags he had bellowed, “The whole damn town is lousy with Christmas spirit!”

    

All the way out to the trailer I tried to repair the years in my mind, to line up memories and freeze them in a place where there had still seemed to be so much time, all the time that had since carried me past dark off-ramps, dimly-lit intersections, and all the forks where I had chosen –or, unconsciously, not chosen—the direction that had led me to this road along which I was now driving. I’d basically always let each day shove me wherever it wanted, and when it stopped shoving I stayed put. I missed the old man, a guy who’d been a shover, a dictator in the best and most intoxicating way; he’d always gone his own way and dragged others along who were helpless to resist him, right to the end. After he died my mother had admitted that she’d been little more than one more of his tag-alongs. “He told me he was going to marry me,” she said, “and I believed him.”

    

Back at the trailer I stood out in the middle of the drifted-in driveway and called out to the dog.  The sky had been blown entirely clear of clouds. I stood and watched a jet make its way right through Orion’s belt in the east. It was already close to nine o’clock, and I went back into the trailer, mixed myself a glass of eggnog, and managed to nod off on the couch for a time. At some point I was awakened by what I thought were bells. I sat up in the dark and listened. All was silent, and then I heard voices. I pulled on my boots and stepped outside the trailer. It was a gorgeous night. I could see the Christmas lights twinkling from my neighbor’s yard across the valley. The trees at the farthest edge of my fence line seemed to be nested with glowing corposants. I walked around the trailer and there, a hundred yards away in the pasture, was my dog, sitting attentively before the gray horse.

    

The horse was standing perhaps three feet from the dog, and her big head was hanging directly above the dog’s, and their joint breathing had created a surreal little pocket of steam in which they seemed frozen. It was an absolutely clear night, eerily quiet. The horse appeared to be conversing with the dog, and as I approached the fence I swore I heard the words –clear as they could possibly be: “And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy.’” The dog emitted what sounded like a hoarse, incredulous chuckle. From across the valley I heard once again the ringing of bells. Stars were stretched out above me, precise, detailed constellations, the clear, dusty clutter of the Milky Way. I was astonished to see fireworks bloom suddenly above the valley in the distance, and was inexplicably moved to see the dog and the horse raise their heads in unison to marvel at the display. 

    

I let out a belly laugh that snapped out into the cold air and was quickly swallowed up, and at that precise moment my dog turned and saw me. As he came bounding in my direction I fell to my knees in the snow, opened my arms wide, and braced for the impact.