Remarks Prepared For The Inaugural Launch Of The Mississippi Megalops: Cadmus, The Great Blooming Void, And The Last Performance Of A Celebrated Castrato

In 1929, fringe historian Rolston Geary wrote in his obscure masterpiece, Utsaht Ushipi ("River of Rats"): "The Mississippi of the latter half of the 19th century was an agent of profound and dubious change, a sort of liquid conveyor belt that ceaselessly carried all manner of vice, decadence, debased culture, and quackery north from places where such commodities had been hatched in a hothouse of guile and gullibility."

As the history I wish to recount today commences, our nation was just beginning its long recovery from the Civil War; it had been barely two months since General Robert E. Lee had presented the Confederacy's surrender at Appomattox. With the tenuous peace, the Mississippi River was a throbbing superhighway running up and down the heart of the country, and all manner of humanity was making its way north and west in search of a new start or simply returning home.

St. Louis was a bustling staging ground for refugees and pilgrims fleeing the ravages of the war. At the same time the northern reaches of the river had been a relatively placid refuge during the war years, and its populace had been for the most part distant spectators throughout the conflict, even as tens of thousands of Union soldiers had trained at Fort Snelling and fought at Gettysburg and other pivotal battles of the war.

In early May of 1865, the McKinley Morganfield, a steamboat making its maiden voyage, embarked from St. Louis bound for St. Paul. Among the passengers on the boat was a consumptive castrato from Italy, Marcello Salvatorri. Salvatorri was at the time one of a handful of surviving castrati in Europe --along with the legendary Alessandro Moreschi, Domenico Mustafa, and Girolamo Velvutti-- and was well past his prime. Once, though, he had been known as "The Angel of Perugia" and had been a minor celebrity in Europe, where in 18th century Italy one could still routinely find signs outside the offices of doctors bearing the words, Qui Si Castrano Ragazzi --"Here boys are castrated."

For at least a decade, however, Salvatorri's increasingly rare performances had been primarily spectacles of mere curiosity and even pity. A review of one of his last European performances had referred to his voice as "a ruin, the feeble skreeing of a doomed animal."

Salvatorri's trip to America --billed as the "The Grand Tour of a Celebrated Castrato"-- was sponsored by a utopian community on the outskirts of a disreputable hamlet then called Cadmus, which had been thrown up downstream from St. Paul in the early years of the Civil War.

Cadmus was home to an adjunct military garrison to nearby Fort Snelling, as well as a trading post, a collection of motley merchants, the hovels of river men, a handful of unruly saloons, a busy boat landing, and --on its eastern fringe-- the Reverend Hosiah Hungwell's visionary encampment, The Great Blooming Void. The Great Blooming Void was characterized by the relative youth of its members, and espoused a mish mash of spiritual, philosophical, and psychological notions that incorporated the most attenuated tenets of both romanticism and the Enlightenment. Hungwell's acolytes were an eccentric and eclectic group; some were attracted by the promise of naturism and free love, others by the group's avowed pacifism and the Reverend's queer brand of futurism; still others by the opportunities for artistic expression and philosophical and scientific inquiry.

Hungwell had invented a "Dream Cradle," and his adherents utilized several different variants of this invention to stimulate dreams and visions. Hungwell was said to spend upwards of 16 hours a day in his own, specially customized Cradle, and he emerged from one such session with a vision of creating a new renaissance of castrati in America, which he called "a species of pure artists and laborers, keepers of mankind's purest dreams." This vision became the Reverend's latest pet obsession, and he began to make plans to bring a castrato from Europe to perform at the Great Blooming Void's annual "Summer of Love" festival, with the goal of raising public awareness and support for his campaign.

Through eastern connections Hungwell managed to find his man, and to arrange his passage from Europe.

That spring, though, the village of Cadmus was dealing with an unprecedented infestation of rats. In late March the river had washed tens of thousands of rats downstream, and scores of these sodden vermin had managed to scramble ashore at the Cadmus boat landing and lay siege to the already squalid community.

One local diarist of the period wrote that "one cannot walk the streets unmolested by the creatures. It is not uncommon to encounter them in packs of several hundred, and they are aggressive and will swarm anything that sits still for too long."

There was not, alas, yet a printed organ for news in Cadmus, but one can find several brief dispatches from the St. Paul Sentinel's archives that make mention of the rat problem in Cadmus and fret about growing concerns that the capital city might itself be overrun as well.

In the first week of May, the Cadmus garrison commander, Erling Pike, in consultation with Governor Alexander Ramsey, took the unusual step of offering a bounty on rats; the bursar at the garrison was authorized to pay two cents for every dead rat. A giant pyre was built on the banks of the river, and for at least two weeks, according to the garrison's logbooks, there was a steady procession along the road to the fort, as residents hauled dead rats by the bag and barrow full. Once the bounty was paid, the rats were added to the pyre.

Rat catching mania had taken hold of Cadmus, and drunken, cudgel-wielding vermin vigilantes roamed the streets at all hours of the day and night, clubbing and stomping rats. Local urchins were, as might be imagined, also zealous participants in the slaughter of the rats.

A man named Gustave Moeller, a trapper and fisherman, lived in a heavily secured camp on the western edge of Cadmus, on a little hill overlooking the village. He did not consider himself foolhardy enough to join in the local rat frenzy. He did, though, regard himself as nothing if not an opportunist, and he captured a number of rats in live traps and constructed several large, hooded enclosures in which he systematically began to breed the creatures.

Also aboard the McKinley Morganfield as it began its maiden voyage out of St. Louis was Dr. Gabriel Kaplan, a graduate of the Harvard School of Dentistry, who was making his way west in search of adventure and dental emergencies. Kaplan was an inebriate and a hothead. He had lasted just six months in a Washington dental practice before fleeing that city after shooting a man over an ill-advised horse trade.

By most accounts, Kaplan was a thoroughly incompetent dentist, but in those days even a competent dentist needed to be prepared to defend himself. The tools and techniques of the trade were unsophisticated at best, and unhappy patients, who were often the victims of incredible and horrific incidents of malpractice, frequently resorted to violent acts of retribution.

Doc Holliday, the famed dentist, gambler, and gunslinger, was not an anomalous representative of his trade. On the frontier, it has been alleged, dentists routinely killed more men than federal marshals.

Meanwhile, the broke-down European gelding, Salvatorri, had been further debilitated by the long and arduous journey from Europe to St. Louis, and his condition aboard the Morganfield worsened.

A physician in St. Louis had pronounced the castrato in very poor health, and opined that further travels were likely ill-advised. Nonetheless, the promoter who was accompanying him, a man from Boston by the name of Erich Blount, was determined to get his charge to Cadmus, and so Salvatorri was hauled aboard the steamship by crew members.

Less than a day into the journey Salvatorri developed a terrible toothache. The dentist, Gabriel Kaplan, who had spent his time aboard the boat playing cards and drinking to excess, was summoned. He refused to see the castrato until he was paid up front for his services. A disagreement ensued between the incompetent dentist and the unscrupulous promoter. Despite the promoter's claims (surely exaggerated) of the suffering patient's wide celebrity, Kaplan had no interest in providing pro bono services for Salvatorri. In fact, Kaplan argued, Blount’s claims were all the more reason he should be paid an inflated fee for services rendered.

Kaplan purportedly brandished his gun, placed the barrel squarely in the greasy middle of the promoter's forehead, and demanded payment. By this means, payment was secured, after which Kaplan proceeded to ply the diminished castrato with large quantities of whiskey and then remove the offending tooth and two others for good measure.

As the McKinley Morganfield steamed north toward Cadmus, Gustave Moeller's rat-breeding operation was exploding, and he began to make as many as five trips a day to the garrison, leading a horse-drawn wagon heaped with rats, many of them no more than a week or two old.

These visits immediately aroused suspicion; no one had seen Moeller in Cadmus proper recently, or could recall witnessing his participation in the public revels surrounding the wholesale slaughter of rats. There had also been, by the time Moeller began making his regular trips to the garrison, a marked and widely noted decrease in the local rat population. The rats, in fact, had become quite scarce, and the flow of bounty hunters to the garrison had slowed to a trickle.

Moeller was making a very good living off of his operation; indeed, after only three weeks he had already received more money from the allotted bounty funds than all of the other rat catchers combined.

A meeting was convened at the garrison, and someone eventually broached the previously unthinkable: was it possible this odd fellow was actually running some sort of rat production out of his fortified camp?  A delegation of soldiers was to be dispatched on a mission of discovery the following morning.

Moeller, however, had had for several days the sense that the jig was up. He had managed to stockpile a snug boodle of cash, and had long been planning to join the steady exodus of settlers headed west. No one seems to be quite certain what became of Moeller, but the details of the mission of discovery are noted in terse detail in the garrison's surviving logbooks: the next morning the delegation arrived at Moeller's compound to find the man gone. Worse yet, he had performed the dastardly deed of liberating his rats, and the soldiers were confronted by the ghastly spectacle of what appeared to be tens of thousands of rats, moving like a great river of vermin down the hill toward Cadmus.

The height of this new infestation occurred at almost precisely the same moment that the McKinley Morganfield was docking at the Cadmus landing. It was universally agreed that what was forever after known as "The Moeller Scourge" far exceeded the previous rat crisis. It was now decided that the bounty was clearly insufficient for addressing the problem. Furthermore, the ensuing public disorder was taxing a force of already beleaguered soldiers. This garrison served as a sort of invisible adjunct to nearby Fort Snelling. It was staffed mostly with older soldiers and assorted riff-raff that hadn't passed muster or been regarded as battle worthy. These men were responsible for little more than preserving some modicum of peace in Cadmus and the other outlier communities that had sprung up around the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. They were widely regarded as failures at even this, and their combination of indolence and indifference had cemented the reputation of Cadmus and other similar towns as rogue bastions that were as unruly as anyplace in the American west of the same period.

One of the remaining ranking commanders was an old man of a scientific bent. He recalled seeing the patent for an obscure invention from the factory of Eli Whitney. This contraption was a rat mower, and this officer, Fergus Something or Another, felt certain he could draw up and supervise the construction of something close enough to Whitney's design to be effective.

Working virtually around the clock with the company engineers and blacksmiths, Fergus Something or Another was confident he could produce a testable prototype in less than a week's time.

Cadmus, meanwhile, was awash in rats. The seriously ill castrato, Salvatorri, had been hauled ashore aboard a gurney and ferried through the river of rats to The Great Blooming Void encampment just east of the village. He had arrived in such dire condition --Gabriel Kaplan's butchery had led to an infection, not uncommon even in the most minor dental procedures of the time-- that he was immediately installed in the infirmary.

The gelding's afflictions were by this time so many, and his mental state so deranged, that Reverend Hungwell feared he would lose his prize specimen before he'd even had a chance to hear him sing a note. Salvatorri was feverish, delusional, hacking, and barely able to breathe through his monstrously swollen mouth and nose.

The date of his advertised performance was less than two weeks away.

Among the more curious members of The Great Blooming Void was a great, naked oaf who had come to the community from a respectable family in St. Louis. This young man was Bartlett Hearn, who had been christened Kraj Majales --"The King of May"-- by Rev. Hungwell. Hearn was a simpleton, "touched" in the parlance of the day, and from a very early age he had proved himself incapable of keeping his clothes on. After repeated incidents in school and the community, he had been pronounced a public nuisance and his father had sent him north to Hungwell, with the hope that The Great Blooming Void might at the very least provide his wayward son with some spiritual or moral grounding.

Bartlett Hearn was not yet 20 years old when he reached the utopian outpost near St. Paul. He was already said to be a strapping lad, larger, in fact, than anyone else in Cadmus. His simple, open personality and instinctive naturism immediately endeared him to Hungwell.

The huge and perpetually naked Majales took a keen interest in the debilitated eunuch, and the touched lad from St. Louis proved to be an instinctive, compassionate, and capable nurse.

Under the care of Majales, who was assisted in his ministrations by the infirmary staff and Hungwell himself, the castrato from Perugia rallied valiantly, and in one week's time he was able to stand and, with the support of the naked May King, take brief strolls.

A splendid start to summer in Cadmus --it was now early June-- no doubt proved salubrious to Salvatorri's spirits and health. A handful of the community's residents were Italians, and so were able to converse with the castrato and serve as translators for Majales and Hungwell. Though his health was improving by the day, Hungwell continued to fret about the voice of his visitor. Salvatorri spoke in a halting, raspy chirp that often confounded even his translators. Time and again he was asked if was able to sing, and each time he would shake his head sadly and insist that it was impossible.

"Impossible" was not a word that had any currency in the Reverend's worldview; its use, in fact, was expressly forbidden in the Great Blooming Void's covenant. Hungwell had Salvatorri administered a round-the-clock series of potions, elixirs, teas, lozenges, hot towels, steam treatments, and vigorous throat massages. He was also subjected to regular, intense sessions with the community's widely celebrated mesmerist.

Through it all, the King of May remained Salvatorri's constant companion.

As all this was going on, the rat population, fueled by the rising temperatures and rapidly emerging vegetation, was exploding unabated, and the rats had begun to show up at The Great Blooming Void compound in increasing numbers. The denizens of the commune were morally and constitutionally ill-equipped to deal with an infestation of rats. They were both peaceable folks and cowards, and as such were terrified of the rats and disinclined to kill them. It was almost as if Gustave Moeller's rats sensed they had found a sanctuary from the looming specter of the rat mower.

Reverend Hungwell was, of course, bedeviled and infuriated by the rat invasion, coming as it did less than one week from the announced Summer of Love festival and the performance of his celebrated European castrato. Invitations had been extended to many notables in the capital city, and Hungwell was determined that the festival would go off as planned.

He ordered all those members of The Great Blooming Void who were not engaged in nursing Salvatorri to participate in a rat round-up. The initial plan was to use brooms to drive the vermin into far-flung corners of the compound, where they could be swept into gunny sacks and crates, and relocated to a stretch of wilderness further east. This, of course, was simpleminded folly. The rats were too numerous, brazen, and fleet, and the gentle folk of The Great Blooming Void were too timorous.

Reports, meanwhile, arrived announcing that the rats had found their way into the community's food stores and --even worse news to Hungwell-- had breached the infirmary and were frightening the castrato.

What allegedly transpired next seems, frankly, to be little more than a fanciful bit of revisionist history or a trope from the purview of folklore. One of the more mysterious and eccentric members of The Great Blooming Void community was an androgynous dandy who called himself The Future Man. The Future Man, who would later relocate to New York and make a name for himself in social circles there, was a stoic enigma even to the other Great Blooming Voidians.

This character (who was widely regarded by many to be a member of the fairer sex) is said to have emerged from his tent at the height of the chaos. Wearing his trademark black cape and hat, and striding in leather boots with four-inch heels, he waded right into the frenzy of swarming rats, clapping his hands, stamping his feet rhythmically, and blowing a tin whistle. Here was a Pied Piper of Hamelin scenario, with the exception that in this instance the rats did not follow The Future Man out of the encampment, but rather fled before him, streaming in an almost orderly procession toward the gates.

In this fashion the mysterious rat herder worked methodically for several hours while the other stunned residents of the community looked on with startled amazement. It is said that Kraj Majales even led Marcello Salvatorri from his bed in the infirmary so that the castrato could witness the spectacle.

The fleeing rats headed up the road toward Cadmus, a route that took them directly past the garrison, outside of which Fergus Something or Another and a small group of soldiers and engineers were doing some last minute tinkering on the rat mower. As time constraints and access to materials had made it impossible to equip the rat mower with steam power, Fergus Something or Another had designed the contraption with two facing sideboard seats, each equipped with three sets of pedals. Six men would thus provide the power to turn the threshing blades, while a seventh man would steer the mower from a higher perch in back.

Seeing the river of rats moving down the road toward them, and seeing in this river of rats an opportunity to be seized, a garrison commander gave the order to attack. Eager volunteers sprang aboard the mower and pedaled furiously in the direction of the onslaught. On each pass through the swarming tide, the rat mower was proving to be devastatingly effective. The creatures were being mulched in huge numbers, and those that managed to escape the whirring blades were being stomped and clubbed by the crowd of soldiers and other spectators that had gathered to watch the spectacle. The river of rats became a river of blood.

A large contingent from The Great Blooming Void had assembled outside the compound to witness what was to them a thoroughly horrific tableau. Included in this contingent was the now emaciated castrato, who was perched on the shoulders of the May King.

And there, as he stared at the almost inconceivable barbarism that was unfolding before his eyes, the castrato found his voice. He began to emit a series of almost coloratura squeaks and screams, which the Reverend Hungwell described in his diaries as "glorious, pure, a bit ragged and ruined by time and trial, yet what damage there was in the eunuch's voice was but evidence of the great sacrifices art must make in the pursuit of beauty."

Seized with ecstasy by an occurrence he considered a miracle  that had surely been hatched in his Dream Cradle, Hungwell shooed his flock away from the carnage that was still unfolding, got them safely back inside The Great Blooming Void compound, and shut fast the gates. Addressing his adherents before they dispersed, he said, "We have witnessed a terrible atrocity, and seen evidence of man's boundless capacity for savagery. Yet in the midst of such a wrenching and diabolical spectacle we have been given a sure sign that the way of The Great Blooming Void is the right way, and humanity's best hope."

That night Hungwell and Kraj Majales sat at the bedside of the exhausted castrato into the early hours of the morning. Salvatorri was said to be once again deranged, and sweating profusely, but, while holding the hand of his naked and most faithful attendant, the King of May, he suddenly began to sing a version of "Ave Maria," his voice rising as he found his way into a tune he had performed hundreds of times before. People all over the camp were startled by the unreal sounds coming from the infirmary, and many made their way from their beds to stand outside and listen. Salvatorri's voice was a shell of its former glory, but Hungwell remembered it as "the sound of a long shattered peace being gradually, with each intake of breath, restored. It was almost as if we were hearing a man who was turning away from time itself and striding confidently, if full of sorrow, into the loving embrace of his Lord."

Salvatorri lapsed into unconsciousness shortly after his only American performance, and he was pronounced dead just as the June sun began its first incursion on The Great Blooming Void.

Inspired by the events of that long day and night, Reverend Hungwell and The Great Blooming Void formed The Rio de Ratones Poetry Society, and this group, which was to have a minor influence on American poetry of the post-war period, devoted itself to preserving the memory of the tragic Salvatorri and advocating for what Hungwell had called "great sacrifices in the name of art." The Rio de Ratones Poetry Society is little remembered today, but its motto, "To a new age of gods and monsters!" was appropriated by director James Whale for his 1935 horror classic, "The Bride of Frankenstein."

By 1880, Reverend Hungwell was dead and The Great Blooming Void had been driven from its property by the state of Minnesota, its residents dispersed to far-flung places. Hungwell's diaries, along with a handful of other accounts from the time, including the Cadmus garrison logbooks, survive in the Minnesota Historical Society's archives. The village of Cadmus burned to the ground in 1888.

The modest grave of the tragic Salvatorri –believed to be the only European castrato buried in American soil—can be found in the Pine Bend cemetery along the Minnesota River in Rosemount, just across highway 52 from the infernal sprawl of the notorious Koch refinery.

The photograph above, which shows a Dream Cradle in use at The Great Blooming Void, was taken by Oscar Gustav Rejlander.


(NOTE: I would be remiss in not acknowledging my indebtedness to John S. Beckmann's splendid "On Castration in the Name of Art" for a good deal of information on the life of Marcello Salvatorri, the decline of the castrati in the late 19th century, and a few stolen phrases.)

My Back Pages: D.W.Z. (July 15, 1933-August 14, 2002)

Those days were an iron wagon loaded with rocks that we dragged through muddy fields with our teeth.

You were a magnificent burning boat that would not sink.

We were as prepared as anyone could be who was facing a long night like that. We had, at any rate, been preparing for it for decades. There had been tests --test after test, many of them grueling and sprung on us almost completely unawares-- and drills and close calls and false alarms.

We were all familiar --achingly familiar-- with that urgent walk through the darkness and humidity of nights just like that one, from which we'd finally emerge, perpetually stunned and blinking, into those long hallways of brutal light and blinding white walls, into the maze of that place, a maze that seemed constantly to be shifting and expanding and spiraling ever higher.

On nights like that, that building, that complex, would feel as vast and silent as a library in the worst and most inscrutable sort of nightmare, yet there were reminders everywhere of what the place was up to and how crowded it was with battered pilgrims in all manner of distress.

It was always astonishing to me how a place so full of suffering could be so hushed. The rising and falling of helicopters was a dull thrumming that you felt mostly in your feet. The hallways were zealously lacquered to such a sheen that you'd find yourself almost tip-toeing like a cat burglar to avoid the squeak of rubber or the clatter of heels.

Sometimes, like that night, that morning, it felt like a holy place. There were saints everywhere, plaster mostly, with disturbingly abject or imploring looks on their faces. The image of Jesus strung up on the cross repeated itself again and again; again and again you encountered the grief of Mary.

Most of the sufferers, hidden away behind white doors with whispering pneumatic releases, were in the hands of the most reprehensibly competent sort of unbelievers.

That night, that morning, you were somewhere in that maze, wired and plumbed like a man who was going to be electrocuted and saved in the same instant.

We knew when we once again retraced our steps that morning that this time we would not be coming back for you. We knew that you were ready –even if we were not—for a long journey, a journey for which you would require no shoes, no wallet or driver's license, no comb, razor, or shaving cream, none of the things, in fact, that we would carry away with us in plastic bags.

You and I had driven across the country together, east and west, and across Canada. We once drove a thousand miles with an eight-track of Lou Reed's The Blue Mask stuck in the deck and endlessly looping, and the entire time I waited for a protest from you that never came. We'd sat in the bleachers at spring training ballparks. You were always so happy, so eager, so utterly prepared to be amazed.

Now that's a pretty swing.

That is one beautiful bird.

Isn't that something?

We stood together one night on a dark beach in Florida, where astronauts had recently been blown from the sky. We saw the lights of boats in the distance, trolling still for wreckage. You shook your head and said, "It's hard to even imagine," but you were already a marked man, and the way you said it I could tell that it wasn't, in fact, so hard for you to imagine at all.

If you could see me now --and I like to think that you can-- you'd know that I've already lost so much of what you gave me.

And you'd know --I know you know-- that I'm going to get it all back.

I hope that your voyage, wherever it has taken you and whatever it has entailed, has been as eventful and full of wonder as the life you lived, and that the muffled clanging of that battered bell you lugged around, rattling behind your ribcage all those years, is now just a receding memory. I like to imagine you've seen some astonishing things, and that you are living now in some version of one of the old comfortable stories that you believed in so passionately.

It gives me pleasure to think that you are at peace, and even greater pleasure to know that you lived, so fiercely, so gently, and that you were mine and ours, and that I belong to you still, and always.

By the time you were my age you had four children and a literally broken heart.

You did what you could.

You taught wonder.

I used to sense you coiled like a discus hurler behind every one of my best intentions.

Your blood was the blood that called me back to this world each time I crawled away disgusted.

Yours were the words of forgiveness I was always surprised to find crouched at the back of my tongue. The tenderness, unexpected, that seized me when I was in the presence of suffering or helplessness, that also was you feeling through me.

My biggest dreams were yours.

You pointed out the stars, and taught me to appreciate the gorgeous example of upholstery that is a baseball mitt. The short trigger, the hatred of condescension, the intolerance of cruelty, your compassion and affection for the little guy and the underdog, all those things you gave me.

You could not, unfortunately, give me your unbridled optimism, your undying faith in human goodness, your stiff upper lip, or your genuine willingness to just let the world be the world.

But your capacity for love, your sense of loyalty, your appreciation for a good road trip, the easy way you laughed, and your eagerness to play the fool --What can I say? I am your boy.

You showed me again and again how to live.

So often lately I've sat up in the middle of the night, half expecting you to knock on my door.

Twilight: Now That My Ladder's Gone

When he finally cut the tree swing down he was 86 years old. Before undertaking the task he spent an hour or so at his kitchen table trying to figure out how long it had hung there.

Close to 60 years, he figured. He hadn't replaced the rope or wooden seat in at least 25 years. It was dangerous, or so the city told him.

The swing hung from a huge maple tree that dominated the corner lot adjoining the house he had lived in since 1946. That full lot was worth a great deal of money, and he was taxed on it, but it had provided a buffer of sorts and had also served as a playground for several generations of neighborhood kids.

The neighborhood had gotten a good deal fancier in recent decades; a lot of the old pre- and postwar homes had been torn down to make way for bigger, more modern houses that he tended to regard as monstrosities. The new people in the neighborhood were often zealots about property values. They didn't like the airport noise. They didn't like the traffic, and had succeeded in getting speed bumps put in up and down the street. He had also gotten a fair amount of grief about the upkeep of his house and yard, and the lot in particular had been an ongoing bone of contention. He didn't spend much time out there and it had gotten a bit overgrown, which was just fine with him. The people from the city, though, had several times ordered him to clean it up, and were now threatening to do it themselves and send him the bill.

Two of his four children --all of whom had sailed into summer gloamings on that swing-- were now dead, as was his wife of 51 years.

Long after his children had grown up and moved out into the world --none of them had stuck around, and he had not raised them to do so-- other neighborhood kids had continued to use his lot for games of Kick the Can, Dodgeball, or catch. Inevitably, they would get around to swinging. All of this pleased him.

There was a long stretch where the neighborhood got old, just as he had. For almost a decade his block seemed to be home to no children at all. Recently, however, with the influx of young couples, the kids had come back, and his yard --and the swing in particular-- was a temptation. He'd recently seen a couple of young teenagers swinging out there in the darkness on one of the first truly lovely summer evenings. He'd sat on his back porch and listened. They were obviously good kids, trying out romance. He'd seen it dozens of times.

The swing didn't sound right, though; he heard sounds that were unfamiliar and worrisome: a steady whining from the ropes and a metronomic creak from the branch to which the swing was attached. It sounded like it was finally fixing to go, and that night he fretted that someone would get hurt.

The next day he went out in the afternoon --it was hot, and threatening rain-- and cut the swing down. He hoped the gesture wouldn't be interpreted as mean spirited, and wished he could explain to someone that it was one of the most painful and regrettable things he'd ever done. As he disassembled his extension ladder, a process that took a great deal of time and effort, it occurred to him that he would likely never have occasion to use the thing again. His whole life he'd been secretly pleased by his absolute lack of hesitation when ascending a ladder.

Last Dance

I used to see this handsome, elderly couple around my neighborhood. They took walks together, often holding hands, and it always struck me as curious that they were both wearing large, old-school headphones.

Then one evening my dog Wendell and I arrived at the stoplight on Lyndale and 43rd as they were waiting to cross. I noticed that both of their sets of earphones were connected to the single iPod the man held in his right hand, and upon closer inspection I saw that they had a nifty jack of some sort that made this possible.

I was curious, so I gestured to the iPod and asked where they had purchased the headphone jack. The man had to remove the headphones from one ear and ask me to repeat the question.

"Oh, this," he said, and held up the jack with its dangling cords so I could take a closer look. "Pretty slick, huh? It's from Radio Shack."

By this time the woman had removed her headphones as well. She also expressed the opinion, in virtually the same words, that the gizmo was pretty slick. They seemed flattered by my curiosity, so I asked them what they were listening to. The man examined the iPod closely. "Ella Fitzgerald is playing right now," he said. "We just have our favorites on there."

"Oldies," the woman said, and laughed.

"Yes," the man said. "Serious oldies. Our son gave us this for Christmas a couple years ago and put the music on there for us."

"Neither of us, of course, has absolutely any idea how the thing works," the woman said. "But it's like a tiny jukebox. We only have...what, honey? How many songs are on there?"

The man again scrutinized the iPod. "Eighty-nine songs," he said. "More than enough. We usually hear ten or so when we go for our walks."

"They're all good songs," the woman said. "And it's set up so they play in a random order and you don't hear the same songs over and over."

"Sometimes you do," the man said. "It can be fickle. But, yes, the songs are all pretty sturdy. We've been hearing them most of our lives, so I guess if we were going to get sick of them we would have by now."

"No, they're all good songs," the woman again insisted. "Perfect for walking. We were talking about the fall colors yesterday and then, just like that, 'Autumn Leaves' popped up."

"Jo Stafford," the man said.

"Yes, that's right." They were both grinning, and the woman had a wonderful habit of poking her husband in the ribs with her right index finger whenever she said something.

"You should have one," the woman said, and gestured to my own iPod.

I shrugged. "I guess I'd have to find a partner in crime," I said.

"Never hurts to be prepared," the man said.

This was last fall, and we bumped into each other quite a few times after that and always greeted each other like old friends.

Then we had a long, hard winter, and I didn't see them around on any of my abbreviated walks with my dog.

The last couple weeks I've seen the man walking alone on a couple occasions, but always at a distance that for some shameful reason I felt grateful for.

Earlier this evening we ran into each other less than two blocks from our original meeting place. I greeted the man --awkwardly, I'm sure-- at a stop sign, and, removing his headphones, he said, "Well, hello. We meet again." His smile was unspeakably sad.

He reached down to address my dog and give him a scratch. When he stood back up he was wearing his best stoic mask. "I lost my wife in February," he said.

It was like a punch I was expecting, and I managed to tell him how sorry I was and how grateful I was that I'd had a chance to meet his lovely wife. He patted me on the shoulder and said, "Well, it was very quick. I'll always be grateful for that."

This, as you might imagine, was an exceedingly awkward and painful encounter, and neither of us could seem to find any more words. He was headed south on Bryant and I was continuing west toward the lake.

"It was awfully good to see you," I said. "And, again, I'm so sorry."

He thanked me, and then, just as we were preparing to part ways, he fished his iPod from his pocket and held it out to me. He had that same wrenching smile on his face. The dangling headphone jack was still plugged in and one socket, of course, was now empty.

"I still expect to round a corner and see her coming toward me down the block," he said, and looked away.

We both stood there in silence for what seemed like an unbearable length of time.

He finally patted me on the shoulder again. "Take care of yourself," he said. "I hope you find a perfect partner in crime."

"I'll keep looking," I said.

And then my dog and I made our way slowly along, through swarm after swarm of happy congregants gathered around backyard barbecue grills, on picnic blankets at the park, or just strolling in laughing packs at the lake. It would be pointless to deny that it was a lovely day.

Fantasy, Fantasy, Fantasy: One More Once Upon A Time

One year when I was young there was for a very brief time a girl who lived alone with her mother in a trailer at the edge of town. They were recent arrivals.

The girl was a loner at school, and held herself close, a new kid trying to be hard enough to survive. She had started attending classes after the Christmas break, and it was a terrible age to get thrown into the middle of a small town school.

One night I was walking out along the railroad tracks, as I often did after my family had eaten dinner and everyone else was settling in to stare at the television. It was early summer. School would be out in a week. As I was kicking rocks down the tracks I encountered this girl along the creek, at the edge of a field of prairie grasses that were just starting to green. She was catching fireflies and grasshoppers.

I watched her for a time from the railroad trestle, fascinated by her stillness, and then by the grace with which she would suddenly pounce. I walked down the bank below the trestle and approached her in the gloaming. If she was at all startled to see me there, she never let on. We had never so much as exchanged a word in school. She glanced at me briefly and then turned away and pounced once again into the grass.

When she came back up she looked me right in the eyes and said, "Do you remember your first memory?"

I thought this was an interesting question. I was 14 years old and it had never occurred to me before. "I think it was teething," I said. "I just remember being miserable and rubbing my gums with my knuckles and my mom put something on my gums with a Q-Tip and it felt so good and I slept."

"Wow," she said. "That seems like a really early memory. How old were you?"

I shrugged. "It doesn't seem like that long ago, really."

"I guess not," she said, and then held up her Mason jar, clutched in both hands, right to my face. "These," she said. "That's what I remember. Sitting at my bedroom window at night and listening to the strange sounds in the fields and seeing the fireflies floating in the darkness. I thought it was a dream." She studied the jar and then smiled. "Maybe it was a dream. Maybe it is. But I love this dream."

I asked her what she was going to do with her jar.

"I can show you," she said. "But I won't show you unless you tell me your full name and promise not to be a creep about anything."

I told her my name and said I would try not to be a creep about anything.

"I guess that's good enough," she said. "If it's weird, though, that's your problem."

We walked along the creek together, back toward the lights of town. The yard light outside her trailer was the first light in the distance. It was a double-wide trailer, and was one of those trailers that had fake shutters and siding and was trying hard to look like a real house. There were also flower boxes, I remember that. There was no car in the driveway. I asked where her mother was.

"She works the night shift at Tyson's," she said. "Chickens are wrecking her hands."

The girl led me into the dark trailer, and down a short, narrow hallway to her bedroom.

"I'm not trying anything," she said, "but we can't have any lights."

I stood at the doorway of her bedroom until I felt her hand gently push me between my shoulders and heard her voice behind me: "Go on in. I'm not going to kill you."

I went in and shut the door. She told me to sit on the bed. I sat on the bed. Light from outside crept in through the curtains on the window. The curtains had an embroidered heart in the middle, and inside the heart a girl and a boy were facing each other and bowing at the waist, awkwardly, leaning their heads in for a kiss. The real girl noticed me studying the curtains, laughed, and glided over to the window.

"Loves me," she said, and then pulled the curtains apart. Just like that the girl and the boy were separated, the heart divided, the kiss interrupted. "Loves me not. My mom found those at a garage sale and thought they were funny."

She turned away from the window and crouched next to a doll house in the corner. "My grandfather made this doll house for me for Christmas one year," she said. "But I've never put any dolls in there. It would just seem too sad. They would be trapped, and I would feel stupid trying to pretend they were alive."

I watched as she lowered the jar through the open side of the doll house roof. She removed the lid and shook the contents loose, and then, in one lunging motion, sat down next to me on the bed, the empty jar cradled in her hands.

"Just wait," she said. "And be very quiet."

Nothing seemed to happen for several moments, but then I saw the first firefly flicker in the living room of the doll house, and then another, and another in an upstairs bedroom. Pretty soon they started to float lazily out the windows and up through the roof and into the air around us, spark after spark flaring in the dark bedroom of the girl whose name I still did not know. And then, slowly, the grasshoppers started up their washboard chorus.

I looked at the girl. She was bent over, the jar gripped now between her knees; her eyes were darting around and watching the fireflies and she had a look of pure joy on her face. It was almost like I wasn't there.

I won't go into the complicated reasons why, but improbable as it may sound --and be-- it was 30 years before I had another encounter with that girl and eventually learned her name. In the intervening years I came to understand that this world tends to traffic in complications and improbabilities both wondrous and cruel, but even now, when I see the woman that girl became, and remember the girl that woman once was, I feel like I am once again 14 years old and breathless and trapped in one magical moment of a past that seemed to promise nothing but enchantment and dreams.

No Imagination Was Stretched In The Course Of This Production

I need a reason to do things. I need a reason to do this. I do not presently have a reason do either things or this.

I would like to apologize to a lot of people for my recent lock down and lockout. I really do love the people I would like to apologize to, and do not understand my behavior any more than anyone else does, presuming anyone has even tried to understand my behavior, and I would ask that you please not waste a single moment trying to understand my behavior.

Life should be easy. Or at least that's what I've been told by one of the wisest people on the planet. That I haven't found it particularly easy is entirely my problem.

I am hiding in plain sight, which was always, by the way, what I surmised Osama bin Laden was up to. In what I'm going to foolishly call "today's world," there is no place where it is easier to simply disappear than in the middle of a big city. Unlike Osama bin Laden, though, my final days are not being played out as just another notorious, hunted celebrity cultivating invisibility in a multi-million-dollar mansion. Mine is a relatively modest, if impossibly cluttered, hideout, and of absolutely no interest to Navy Seals, or even my neighbors (other than on those increasingly frequent occasions when they make it known that they wish I would take in my mail).

I often have reason to ask myself what it is I think I am disappearing into, and the only satisfactory answer I can come up with is "this," by which I mean a wider and more general, unsatisfactory, and ever darker this than this particular unsatisfactory this.

I'm not sure if the emphases is required in both those instances of this, but I'm going to choose to err on the side of the emphatic. At any rate, it's not a considerably wider this, not by any stretch of the imagination. The imagination, I'm afraid, has been stretched as far as it can be stretched, yet it is now no larger than a bath rug. There has unquestionably been alarming shrinkage, which would mean that "not by any stretch of the imagination" would be, at least in this instance, an entirely accurate phrase.

There has been no stretching of the imagination.

I have come to believe quite strongly that a man should save his words, even as I continue to squander several thousand of them a day.

For what should the words be saved?

(Shrugs). I guess for when they might find themselves necessary.

But surely 'this,' if I'm understanding you correctly, would not be an instance of "when they might find themselves necessary."

Perhaps not, but in the middle of a wholly unnecessary sentence the words might suddenly, as if by magic, find themselves necessary. That is one of the great puzzles of composition.

A puzzle is it?

Well, there may well be a better word that did not immediately come to mind when I attempted to describe what I called "the great puzzle of composition." I might even call it a mystery or a challenge; seldom, however, would I anymore refer to it as a pleasure. I also might not (speaking here in the "by and large" sense) even call it --it being this-- composition. Others have already played with the idea of "decomposition" but that, like much else, seems unspeakably tired to me. I have no further use for mere games, even when all that is left seems like nothing but a mere game whose rules I have never learned to understand.

This is about words, but also about something else I don't wish to try to put my finger on right now: history and personal experience have taught us that everything and nothing is irreplaceable. Particularly when there is so little left that you want and so much that you miss one moment, and so little left that you miss and so much that you want the next.

I. I. I. I. I. I. I. 

The idiot thing we call "progress" is an eclipse, permanent and permuting. It makes it impossible to breathe in or properly inhabit the past, and handicapping the future in such darkness is handicapping in the most literal sense. There's only now, as the poets and mystics and other hare-brained basket cases are so fond of reminding us, but you can't even see what might be happening in that mysterious and impossible place when it's always so fucking dark.

That's a garbage metaphor, I know, but I mean something like it all the same. And an eclipse is just really, really boring after a while.

As you were, but not as were you.

Without The Rest

I would lie to you if I could...

If silence is revealing,
what does it reveal?
The little that is left,
that is outside, that is
the world? No two silences,
you suppose, are alike,
beyond every silence
there is always something
you think it's fair to call sound.

Does that mean it's not silence,
that nothing is? To be honest,
you don't care. People who use
the word destiny are seldom
to be trusted, just as people
who write books are
seldom to be trusted.

You found a pair of wings on the sidewalk
today, wings utterly abstracted
--or subtracted-- and perfectly preserved.
Everything that would constitute the rest
was gone, and without the rest,
of course, a pair of wings is useless.
They were built for the sky.

You might expect a crime scene
to be messy, but this was as neat
as a crime scene could be, really.
Whatever had deemed the wings
useless had taken the time to eat
or make off with everything else.

That the criminal had left the best part
as evidence almost seemed like a
taunt, an insult to the most stubborn
dreams and metaphors of the human
imagination. Isn't that what the true
criminal does, though? Says Let's see
where what's left will get you? Destroys
the heart and head and says Good luck
getting your dreams aloft now,
destroyed bird, sad little man.
Look at the sky and the
trees and the moon and feel
nothing but hobbled longing.

If you think it is distressing
to awaken from a dream of flying
to discover that you have no wings,
imagine how it must feel to awaken
from such a dream to discover
a pair of bloodied wings tucked
under your pillow and rustling
like something that still has
dim memories of flight.

You live now on the floor of the world,
and the sky is so distant, and gray.
You get used to it, but you still
can't stop dreaming of flying away,
even as you sense that you are
never again going to find anything
to do with those wings, even as
night falls, and keeps on falling,
and outside your windows the air is
ceaselessly stirred by the frantic
beating of black wings, huge
and dusty and terrifying, the usual
wee hours massing of the bleak birds
biding their time, but unquestionably
anxious to finally pick you clean.

The Devil In The Wetsuit And Steel-Toed Boots

In the movie I'm making with my dog --"Satan and the Sacred Bone"-- the Devil wears steel-toed boots and a wetsuit. His horns have been cut off, so that he can try to disguise himself as a normal man going about the world, but if you look closely you can still see the nubs where they used to be.

The Devil wears a wetsuit because he's kind of a Poseidon sort of devil, and the portal to Hell is located at the bottom of a deep, dark lake. Since we don't have much of a special effects budget and I wanted the Devil to be able to make dramatic entrances, I came up with the idea of having him emerge from a lake in the moonlight. There happens to be a lake near my home. I think it's going to work out slick.

The first guy I got to play the Devil looked too fat in the wetsuit. He wasn't a particularly fat guy in real life, but a wetsuit is unforgiving in that regard, and I thought it was important that the Devil be lean.

The second guy was really good in rehearsals, but after four days he started to have reservations. He said it was because he was a Born Again Christian, which may or may not have been true. He smoked a lot of pot for a Born Again Christian.

So, anyway, we're already on our third Devil. This one has appeared in a Car Soup commercial and also as Tevya in a local community college production of "Fiddler on the Roof." He's been lobbying hard for the Devil to have a love interest, and feels strongly that there should be at least one scene where his character gets to (as he put it) "do his old lady like a dog." He argued that this would be a subtle bit of symbolism or metaphor or some such nonsense. Though I'm pretty sure the motivation behind all of this business is purely selfish --I have serious doubts about whether this fellow has even slept with a woman-- he continues to insist that the Devil needs to be portrayed as "insatiably horny" in order to demonstrate his power, virility, and otherworldly appetites.

Since I'm not keen on trying to find a fourth Devil, I put an ad on Craigslist, but have thus far received only two replies, both from clearly underage girls with questionable motives. Nonetheless, the third Devil liked the looks of both of these candidates and suggested I immediately take them on --one as the Devil's paramour, the other as an understudy and potential body double. Afraid as I was of losing yet another Devil, I was even more wary of being caught up in some sort of sting operation and so thanked the young women for their time and assured the third Devil that I would continue to pursue other options.

Anyway, weather permitting, we are slated to film our first scenes tomorrow. The premise of "Satan and the Sacred Bone" is that the Devil has risen from the deep, dark lake in the moonlight and is stalking my dog through the Enchanted Dog Forest. The Devil is trying to capture my dog --and in the process steal his soul-- because my dog is a High Priest in the Brotherhood of the Sacred Bone, a holy order of dogs devoted to preserving the history and rituals of a bone that is alleged to be a surviving relic from the sacrificial altar of Abraham.

The Devil believes my dog knows where the Sacred Bone is being kept, and he intends to pry this information out of him at any and all cost.

At some point in its long odyssey through history and time, it is said, the Sacred Bone was once in the possession of John the Baptist. Then, for several hundred years, it was displayed in a monastery in France, and used in the annual Blessing of the Animals. Like so many other precious relics and works of art, the Sacred Bone disappeared during the Nazi invasion of France.

For almost three decades the Sacred Bone was presumed destroyed or lost forever, until a Dutch newspaper reported, in 1976, that a rich and unscrupulous art collector and breeder of dachshunds in Austria had the bone in his possession. Through diplomatic and legal channels this collector was eventually persuaded to turn the Sacred Bone over to authorities in Geneva, where an international tribunal attempted to sort through claims from a host of nations seeking title to the bone. It was generally believed that the Sacred Bone was most likely  going to end up in Jerusalem, but a group of armed and well-trained commandos of mysterious affiliation broke into the Swiss compound where the relic was being held, made off with the Sacred Bone, and left behind a long and rambling note detailing plans to return the object to its "rightful custodians," the Brotherhood of the Sacred Bone, a loosely knit secret society made up entirely of dogs.

In the intervening years, information regarding the Brotherhood and the whereabouts of the Sacred Bone has been exceedingly hard to come by, but it is rumored that the Sacred Bone is possessed of extraordinary protective and healing spiritual powers, and is thus of keen interest to the Devil.

That's the backstory of "Satan and the Sacred Bone." I've persuaded my neighbor, Lonnie, who has a rich baritone and has done a few radio advertisements for a local bank, to provide a voice-over narrative of this saga as the opening scene unfolds. We've already recorded it (I encouraged him to try his best to muster a James Mason impersonation), and I think it sounds fabulous. Chilling, really.

I'm still trying to raise enough cash to finish this project --I've already invested more than $250 of my own money (actually money borrowed from my sister)-- and am encouraging people who might be willing to help out to chip in over at Kickstarter. Anyone who gives more than $10 gets a speaking part in the film. So far we've raised $48, but there's still a long way to go.

I'll try to keep you posted here, so stay tuned.

My iPod died today, by the way, and a "For Lease" sign went up at the Odd Fellows Hall over in St. Paul, so I'm feeling even more super bummed out than usual. Also I ate a jar of salsa for dinner. Just FYI.

Exuviae: What I've Got

I went for a walk in a large cemetery near my house today and saw a tombstone that broke my heart. At this point it's just the smashing of atoms, but the smashing of atoms is still a form of breakage.

On the tombstone there was a color photograph of a woman somehow etched or embossed right in the middle of all the cold, hard facts. I instantly recognized this woman as a regular customer at my old used bookstore, and recalled her as an impressive reader.

She always came into the store smelling like woodsmoke and hay, and often had bits of hay tangled in her unruly blonde hair. In the winter she wore a beat-up black Carhartt jacket that was covered with dog hair. She would park her red pickup truck right outside the store, and there were usually two dogs peering out of the truck. They weren't the sort of dogs that made a fuss; you could tell they were used to sitting around and waiting.

I once told the woman that she was welcome to bring the dogs into the store.

"Oh, no," she said. "You'd regret that. They're unruly, and one of them has an appetite for books that I haven't been able to break him of. That's pretty much why you never get any of your books back."

I could never tell if she was shy or just stoic, but she wasn't much for conversation. I did eventually learn that she trained and boarded horses somewhere out near Lakeville, which meant that she made quite a trek to my store a couple times a week. I assumed she must have had other business in the city, but I was nonetheless always grateful to see her.

As I said, her reading habits were impressive. Prodigious, really, and she would buy some seriously challenging stuff. Musil's The Man Without Qualities, is one title I remember. She'd buy things like that, but she also had an appetite for true crime paperbacks. Lots of serial killer stuff. In the years I spent in that store she was easily one of the most interesting and mysterious customers.

Anyway, it was jarring to stumble across her grave, and I stood there for quite some time looking at her photo and remembering her. I was surprised by how many specific titles I could recall selling to her: Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, which I hadn't yet read; Nabokov's Ada and Pnin; a fat collection of Icelandic Sagas; Lydia Davis's Break It Down; an account of the Lobster Boy's murder that I had overpriced because I didn't really want to sell it.

I eventually found myself addressing her portrait.

"Hello," I said. "Do you remember me? I used to sell you books. You were one hell of a reader. What happened to you? What happened to your dogs? I used to sometimes imagine one of them eating The Man Without Qualities and it always made me happy."

She had died on August 9, 2009. She would have been one year younger than I am.

At the bottom of the tombstone, in ornate cursive, were the words, "Forever in Bluejeans."

That, I think, was the part that really got the atom smasher roaring.

In An Abandoned Airport, Waiting For A Flight To A Country That No Longer Exists

(Last two photos of my fine boy Wendell and me courtesy of Carrie Elizabeth Thompson)

The grip is mute and merciless.

Every night about this time my dog gets this look, and what the look unquestionably says is, "What's going on, fella? What are you up to here?"

Because he knows, he senses, that something is definitely up. We have crossed far into the something-is-definitely-up stage here. "Up," of course, being in this instance something of an ironic usage.

Que sera sera.

Once you have let them cinch you up and put the battery cables on your head, once you allow them to convulse you and then wheel you out lock-jawed and choking and struggling, terrified, to zero in on anything that might qualify as a memory, even a bad one, once you reach that point I guess all bets are off. Who knows what you've lost forever? You can't even be sure who you were before that moment, but eventually you start seeing puzzling shadows on the wall, and weird, out-of-focus snapshots that seem to be projected upside down on the back of your skull and which may or may not be scenes from what used to be your life, and you don't want to talk about those troubling images because they seem like hallucinations and there is no way you could describe them or the cold, terrifying, and hopeless way they make you feel.

Take that.

Donegal would always say, So, this is the world, is it? And for even a sorry fool like you Christ carried his cross. A far-fetched business all around, but there you have it, lad, and what are you going to do with such a marvelous bit of information as that?

I didn't know. I still don't know.

I did, however, talk with my dog for 45 minutes about Easter and what it purportedly means to the world and how some of the central components of its narrative have crept into our own shared rituals and the things we want to believe. I want very much for my dog to believe in angels, so I have tried to believe in them as well.

The next day I took my dog to the veterinarian to make sure everything was in order. It was a cold, gray morning, very early by my standards, and during the time I was in the office two old dogs were brought in to be euthanized, which shook me greatly. In the first instance an older man came in alone, announced to the woman at the counter, "I have a dog in the car that needs to be put to sleep," retreated for a moment, and returned with a large dog in his arms. The man was alone, and expressionless. He might have been dropping off his car to have his tires rotated.

Surely, I thought, he could not possibly be as cold hearted as he seemed. He and the dog were ushered into a back room, the door was closed, and I never saw either the man or dog again.

A few minutes later a party of four --an elderly couple and a younger couple, perhaps in their thirties-- brought in a dog that looked like it could have been a litter mate of the previous dog. The younger of the two men had this dog in his arms. The dog was alert and appeared perfectly contented. I did not overhear the exchange at the counter, but all four of these people were clearly grief stricken and huddled together the way humans always huddle together whenever something unbearable is happening or about to happen. Unless, of course, they don't have anyone to huddle together with, and then they huddle alone. Only the man with the dog in his arms was not weeping. The older man appeared to be the most distraught of the group, and was trembling so badly that he asked the older woman --his wife, presumably-- to sign some papers. Shortly thereafter they were ushered into a room in the back.

I'll admit it: I found myself reaching for a box of tissue and trying to press tears back into my eyes.

When one of the young attendants finally called out my dog's name I had to resist the urge to flee. The woman gave Wendell a pat and asked his age. "He is almost three," I said.

"Oh!" she said. "Still just a puppy!"

This was an obvious bit of strained optimism on a bleak morning, but I was grateful for it all the same. Surely the woman had looked at my dog's files and seen that he was actually almost nine years old, but --bless her heart-- she never let on.

That's mostly a lie. Pretty much everything was. I mean, seriously, pretty much everything.

Did you ever read that one book when you were a kid? I could never believe that a train was capable of positive thinking.

I used to be like that determined train in the book, though. I used to really be wild about things. All sorts of things. I could barely contain my wildness. Not so much anymore.

Here's the sort of thing I'll find myself thinking these days, God help me: Somebody really has to take some photos of me naked before I'm dead. What sort of man has such thoughts? A lonely man. A man who feels he is dying and wants desperately, once and for all, to stand naked before the world? I put the question mark there because it really is a sort of question, or at least a guess, which is a sort of question impersonating an answer. There is also, of course, the purely corroborative motive: some concrete proof that I have a body, that the man I see in the mirror exists, that I am not, in fact, invisible.

Too late, though.

I carried all those fucking rocks and planted a garden and then I abandoned it.