And Whatsoever Creepeth

I like being outside. The weather in my state usually facilitates this inclination on my part to an agreeable degree (pun intended). In the depths of summer, when the humidity can be cut with a knife and the bugs are out to play and temps don’t drop out of the seventies at night, I dream of the cold, clear nights when the frost sneaks out from between the trees and everything is chilled and beautiful amd silent. This past weekend, when the temps dropped into the teens and single digits and the nights were bone-achingly frigid, I dreamed of the pleasantly clement evenings when we sit on the screened-in porch and watch the sunset sky while fireflies squint and blink in the gloaming. After a scorching afternoon mowing the yard, I fantasize about Autumn days when my nose runs and my cheeks get rosy with the cold. After a frosty day raking up twigs, I think of the beauty of a warm night's stroll from downtown, the air filled with the aroma of jasmine and magnolia blossom. I’m pretty much never satisfied, but regardless of my mood, I still like to be outside in all kinds of weather. And I realize while I'm out there that I'm basically blundering through the nests and burrows and hives of creatures that call the outdoors their home.

I was taught at a young age to pay attention to this panoply of life and as much as I can, I try to honor its right to survive and be unbothered. Since I was little, the things going on in the outside world filled me with awe and respect. Nature in all her glory has something to show us in every season. The marvelous reality of nature's power and industry is all around us and it is worth paying attention to. We, too, are part of the web of nature and we ought to act accordingly, though we usually don’t.

As a homeowner, though, I have in some ways abandoned my childlike fascination because of an ongoing pitched battle between me and the many denizens of the realm outside my doors. It’s one thing to respect that life. It is another to let it in and have the run of the place. There’s nothing in the world more challenging than trying to maintain a healthy regard for this planet while also trying to keep those lifeforms from taking over our home and property. I try to maintain that balance, but it isn't easy.

Several years ago, during a coldsnap, I had a days-long battle with a tiny rodent that wanted to shack up in our pantry. I began noticing ‘signs’ of this invader and during my reconnaissance discovered that many of our winter stores had been chewed through and nibbled upon. I spent an entire weekend holed up in the pantry ferociously cleaning, sealing cracks, jamming holes with steel wool and putting things into less gnaw-able storage containers. We have two domestic felines, but they must have been on strike during this particular moment because they didn't lift a paw to help. As a result of their inaction, I felt a little less willing to be tolerant and forgiving to the invader and was not kind in my successful campaign to evict it.

As I wrote last year, we have also had bats come into the house. Bruce, the first visitor, was an accident and wanted out as much as we wanted him out. More recently, I had to duck and dive out of the way to avoid one of Bruce’s cousins who either flew into the house while the door was open or it got stuck down our chimney and was dislodged when I fired up our gas logs. 

Around this time of year, too, we get an influx of ladybug beetles. I’ve tried and tried to find out where they come in. I’m not sure if there is a small section of flashing that has been pulled away by the weather or inquisitive squirrels, but every time I go into our upstairs bedrooms, I’m swooped on by a squadron of tiny fellows in red with black polka dots. My step grandmother used to have this problem, but she would leave tiny thimbles full of sugar water for them. I’m not so inclined. I have no real issue with ladybugs, except I wish they’d find somewhere else to huddle during the winter months. 

Such is life in the South. Fruit flies in the Spring and Fall, regular flies swooping in when we let the dogs out during the summer; bees, water beetles, palmetto bugs, ants, spiders, those horrible jumping crickets that are part ninja, part nightmare fuel that gather in our basement; all are unwelcome but show up anyway. I spray the inside and outside perimeters and set up traps in the summer, kill countless crawlies all summer and fall. It doesn't seem to help. Their siege has an unlimited resource of living things to call upon and they are undaunted by their losses.

Outside, I battle the other kingdoms. Green and growing things are as pesty and persistent as the critters (if not more so). Stone walkways have to be continuously weeded. Grass grows faster the hotter and rainier it is. I’m at war with several species of ‘junk’ trees that just pop up wherever. Virginia creeper and English ivy keep me busy enough to retire and just fill my days with yanking down tendrils that have grown up the side of my house seemingly overnight. Fast-growing shoots of other varieties climb my trees, swell into my gardens and flowerbeds. I’ve repeatedly pulled up and yanked out every kind of privet imaginable; I’ve sprayed brush killer on poison ivy, cut back the weird thorny things that grow uninvited under our deck. This year, again, I'll have to pay the pressure washer guy to come out and kill the moss and algae that grows on the north-facing surfaces of our house. Mildew, fungi and other organisms that love the dark are yet another perpetual enemy I have to face down.

Outside bugs keep me fighting in whole other campaigns. I’ve dealt with white-faced hornets in our magnolia trees: a particularly grouchy and painful armored warrior wasp species. Two years ago we had yellowjackets in the yard and in the creases of our house and in the railroad ties around some natural border by an old slate patio. Mosquitoes, biting flies, fleas, ticks, carpenter ants, snakes and you name it, I’ve had to deal with it. And we live in the suburbs. Our middle son and his wife live in the mountainous western part of the state and they have all these issues but at an arrestingly higher rate. During a recent visit at the holidays, the number of ladybugs glommed onto the inside of his garage door made the ladybugs at our house look like a leisurely day party by comparison. It's like this with everything else, too.

All of this is to be expected. No one who owns a home anywhere in the lower fifty will find any of this unusual. The bugs and critters and plant life may be different, but the conflict is the same. Desert dwellers have to worry about sidewinders and scorpions and cacti. People in the pacific northwest states like Montana, have to worry about grizzlies and moose and rutting elk. Growing up in Pennsylvania, we had extremely intemperate timber rattlers, forests of poison oak and cadres of unstable hillbillies living in tar-paper shacks devouring people's cats and dogs and possibly worse. Residents of Florida and Louisiana probably have to think about gators and other swamp-dwelling nightmares (not to mention psychotic, power-hungry right-wing governors). The planet is filled to brimming with every kind of “creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” and winter time is the only time we get even a slight break from all of the growing and fruitfully multiplying beasts and plants just outside our doors. 

While I’d love it if the temps stayed a little more to this side of the single digits, I know that within the next few months, about the time that we turn the clocks back, green things will grow again and tiny chthonian creatures will worm up out of the mud and wreak havoc on my peace of mind. Until we move somewhere there is permanent winter all year, that’s a problem we’re going to have. Even in those cold places, aspects of the outdoors will be too difficult to endure for comfort. A month solid of night time would be murder to our moods. No night during the summer would be enough to make me drop into tenebrous madness, seeking any darkness available to me. Therefore, we set ourselves up a kind of mental barrier in which we understand that, despite my best intentions and my hardest work to keep the life outside of our house (except the accepted ones—our dogs and cats and our family) some things are going to get in and the grass will always need to be mowed, so I'll be fighting on at least two fronts until we are moved fussing and swearing into assisted living and it becomes someone else’s problem.

Right now, we are dealing with the effects of a brutally cold arctic funnel or whatever, but at least there are no bugs. Later, when we are dealing with the bugs, we’ll look back with nostalgia to when it was too cold for all that creepeth upon the ground to survive, even though the pipes bursteth under the street.

That's a Lotto Money

At some point in all our lives, it can seem as though a true solution to whatever ails us in the moment would be a large cash infusion. Speaking purely in terms of financial stress, problems like excess debt, school loans, medical and dental bills, home and auto repairs, property taxes and just about anything else that keeps us up nights worrying about our bank statements can be solved by the deposit of a large sum of money into our accounts.  As a fantastical remedy to these ulcer-causing stresses, many of us dream of winning the lottery. Of those who partake in this fantasy, some few actually play the lottery by buying the tickets, but the point is nearly anyone you ask will nod with exuberance if you ask them if a lottery win would help. How could it not help? Rich people, poor people, middle class people (as if there was such a creature anymore) all would like a six-to-eight figure payout please and thank you.

I admit that it would be helpful to have that money overnight, as it were. There is a kind of financial fanhood in our country now where we idolize those who are super wealthy and place on them our respect merely because of their total worth. There is nothing truly moral about being rich anymore than there is with being a redhead. Also, most of the wealthiest people are only valued by their total assets rather than their in-the-moment liquidity. There might be billionaires wandering around out there, fewer than one tenth of one percent of the population, but they don't have rapid access to all that money. Much of it—most of it, actually—is tied up in investments or other long-term projects. These mega-rich individuals don't have the ability to access an ATM machine where they can draw out three million in cash. Nevertheless, to be thrust up into those dwindling parameters and find ourselves far closer to those tax brackets could seem ideal. The only way most of us will ever approach those echelons is by winning the lottery. Most of our parents do not own an emerald mine they can donate to us, but I do intend to ask my Pops, just in case.

Winning an obscene amount of money has its drawbacks, though. Especially for regular folks. Depending on how much I might win—assuming one could actually beat the galactic odds—the amount owed in taxes back to the local, state and federal entities who are now suddenly quite focused on our cash flow, would be about sixty percent of the total if we opted for the lump sum payout option of our winnings. In substance this means that if I won 500 million dollars, about three-hundred million would be headed right back into Uncle Sam's greedy claws. Of course, that seems like a lot until one calms down enough to realize that two-hundred million is far more money than I ever had or ever was likely ever to have.

Assuming one proves the statisticians wrong, there are usually two options for how the winnings will be dispersed. The first, as discussed already, is the lump sum. The other is a kind of ongoing payout of weekly checks for vast sums of money for life. Someone once told me he felt he could more reasonably manage his new gigantic income if he simply got direct deposits from the lottery each week, thus slowly building that wealth over time. Plus, he noted, the taxes would be lower. I didn't have the experience I have now of being a homeowner, but with a couple decades under my belt, I now understand the folly in this option.

Payments for life is one of those tricky phrases intended to sound much better than it is. Assuming one wins that 200 million above, and assuming one lives for say, thirty years, that’s a weekly payout of just over one hundred thousand dollars per week; way more than anything I could ever hope to make while not being the CEO of a major corporation (also very unlikely). My luck, having chosen this option out of some momentary idiocy, I would probably be squished by a random falling object plummeting to earth out of low orbit on the very next day after winning. My payout would last a day. Uncle Sam gets to keep the rest, I guess. Secondly, the total taxes over the course of those thirty years, should I live long enough to get the whole amount, would be closer to three quarters of the total rather than sixty percent. It’s possible that I could live, but I’ve already beat the odds at winning the lottery, so why risk the other statistical improbabilities? If you win the lottery, assume you will be attacked by a shark, struck by lightning and develop a long-lasting pen-pal correspondence with Vladimir Putin exchanging deep personal feelings and tips for how to make the best borscht.

Despite how nice it is to fantasize about winning the lottery, there are serious real-world problems with a sudden and massive influx of money. The largest of these problems isn't the sudden wealth, but the attention one will get. Lottery officials are required to announce winners to papers and news organizations via press release in almost every state. A large sum win may even make it to the national news. For me, when a person in Wichita wins a bazillion bucks, it's just a name and a slight pang of jealousy for a person in a place I know nothing about. To someone who has lived and worked locally for decades in the same place, to win that much money is to have a target placed on one's back.

That thought fills me with dread. We know literally hundreds of people because of where we live and work in our town. Many of them are no more than just a smiling wave and nod but each of them would suddenly become a potential friend if we got very rich very fast. The doorbell would have to be disengaged. We'd have to move somewhere remote and barren of people like Antarctica (well, we could probably afford it). Word travels fast in a small town. There would be no escape from ‘friends’ asking for money with every kind of sad story and lament imaginable. Some of those stories might be true, some not, but I’m not in the business of knowing the difference outside of our family and very close friends, so the prospect of suddenly being expected to dole out cash winnings is unpleasant.

I fully empathize with anyone who legitimately needs help. Owing money can be a painful thing. In their shoes, I might ask a newly minted millionaire for some cash, too, in that circumstance, especially if someone in my family was quite sick. The problem I would have is with the temptation to help. Worse than knowing that someone has that kind of money is knowing that they are willing to share. If I helped one friend in need and not another, we might have serious issues. 

There would also be the safety concerns. A woman in the 1990s won a comparatively small lottery amount and found that an unbalanced coworker had slashed her tires, killed her cat, tried to kidnap her mother from an assisted living facility and made badly faked pictures of her in a compromising position with her supervisor all to extort several thousand of her meager few hundred thousand dollar winnings to pay off a gambling debt. This is only one of thousands of stories of people who, finding their dreams coming true, were later found dead or kidnapped or had children and pets threatened or harmed. Right now, if we want to, we can walk downtown and get a bite to eat or just stroll leisurely through the leafy neighborhoods surrounding our own. Having the world know we’re suddenly super rich would be deeply forbidding. We'd have to have a security detail. No more strolls. No more going outside at all. Trips would have to be rare and only after months of planning. Forget running to the store to get alfredo sauce. We'd have to hire shoppers, people to impersonate us, doughty former marines to go with us anywhere and add an alarm system and network of cameras all over our house and property. The thought is not a pleasant one.

None of this even considers the fact that, suddenly, one has lots and lots of money that has in no way been earned. That's a problem in itself for most regular people. Large sums of money are like galactic distances. We can talk about them all day and never really have any sense of what their values truly are. Two-hundred million dollars is a lot of cash. To be in possession of that amount basically overnight proves too massive a change for most people. Psychologically and emotionally speaking, suddenly being rich might actually be quite devastating to a grounded, rational, typically functioning human being. How many people do you know that are typically functioning or well-balanced?

Stories abound of men and women who won lots of money and then quickly went around the bend and became candidates for committal. Some rapidly spend all their cash on frivolous items; sports cars and helicopters; jets and massive yachts. Some decide to have a whopping party, spend hundreds of thousands on booze and drugs and dancers and bands and then wind up in legal trouble (or worse). Hard to spend that money from prison. Some people do better at saving, but begin to become paranoid because of all those new friends who keep showing up with proverbial hats in their hands. There are those, too, who change fundamentally overnight, leaving long established and otherwise happy marriages and children to hide out on some Caribbean island surrounded by bikini-clad women and getting tribal tattoos. Money makes people behave strangely even in normal, non-lottery cases. Just ask any CEO or Bond villain billionaire you happen to meet and see if they are in any way what you might define as normal, mentally healthy or typically functioning.

If one has the misfortune to win a vast amount of the green stuff, there are appropriate and cool-headed ways to deal with it and stay safe (relatively). Our son is an investment banker and certified financial planner and he has made clear what to do in the extremely rare case one of us ever wins the lottery. He recommends not claiming the winnings right away. Instead, we would hire a trusted lawyer who deals with finance (make sure they’re from a smaller, more trustworthy firm with experience in these matters) and put them on retainer. Then, once everything is prepared and the paperwork signed, have the lawyer claim the ticket and winnings (thereby keeping the actual winner’s identity a secret) and have the money doled out by the lawyer, acting as an executor or trustee. Even this, Ethan says, can be locked down and tweaked for specific requirements. One could have the trust set up in such a way that even the winners cannot get access to it except at certain times per year or under limited circumstances, limiting access for those impulse buys and also preventing anyone from being able to take a hostage to get at the cash. 

It all sounds like a headache just to pay off some debts and be free to not go to work every day. I ought to point out here that perhaps our system is broken if the only way that people feel they can be free of the massive work-a-day responsibilities in order to have food and shelter and the peace of knowing that I may just be able to retire sometime before age ninety is to hopefully win the big bucks lotto. I admit that to me winning a large sum of money sounds good on the face of it, just for this reason. I like my job and am grateful for the chance to do something I believe in, but given the chance and the financial independence for us to travel the world and raise sheep and bees on a small but lovely wooded parcel with a beautiful view of the sunset and not have to clock in or bow to the false hierarchies of capitalism, I’d take the latter without much hesitation. When we consider just how big a headache the money becomes and what might be at stake—relationships, mental health, our lives—I think it might be better to just go on hoping with fingers crossed that we never have the horrible luck to win super mega millions. Perhaps, though, I will befriend a billionaire Bond villain, in which case, we should be golden.

Caught Between a Shovel and a Snow Dance

Years ago, before I had the great fortune to work at the library, I was employed by the local city school system. During this time, especially in the darker months of winter, we still got snow fairly regularly. On the mornings when inclement weather was expected, we would rise earlier than usual, put on the local news stations and watch the scrolling banner on the bottom of the screen to see if our school was delayed or canceled. Our lads would be sitting quietly in the living room, eating drippy cereal, watching eagle-eyed, memorizing the list of potential closings and hoping to see our school system go by.

Elliott, our oldest, decided one morning that it would be prudent to do a snow dance. I'm not sure where he learned this particular skill, but I will say that on several occasions which still defy natural laws, that little fellow danced and it damn well snowed. Perhaps it could be defined as coincidence, but I don't believe the universe is that lazy. Regardless of how or why it worked, it did seem to work. So, anytime a snowfall would be welcome and convenient, we told him it might be a good idea to shuffle or shimmy with that in mind. I am at heart a natural skeptic. I have reinforced this inbuilt tendency with years of study. Other disruptions in the natural laws I will doubt until the cows are called home across the Sands of Dee. The Snow Dance I will believe in until Micki brings down my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. I know what I believe despite the scientific principles that are being challenged. This kid danced. It snowed. We had a day off school. That's powerful stuff.

How was I to know that, all the while we were encouraging this simple weather jig, there was a power working hard against Elliott's magic dance. I didn't actually know about this until halfway through my time in the schools or perhaps I might have been more keen to intervene on his behalf against the sinister counter magic at play. Forces very close to me were aligned against this sweet, good-hearted boy’s ability to dance up snow and I was soon to discover just how potent they were.

The first time I truly understood there were other interests at work beyond Elliott, I remember distinctly it was a Sunday morning. Snow was forecast overnight. Several inches would follow a thin sheen of ice, as sleet transformed into snow as the temperature dropped below freezing. At the very least, we were guaranteed a two-hour delay that next Monday. Yet, it seemed hopeful that we might be in the swath of what the TV prognosticators were predicting would dump three-to-five inches over the piedmont. Bands of various shades from light blue to deep purple swept across the map of our state on the TV screen as infinitely talkative meteorologists filled the local airwaves with endless winter augury. After exchanging meaningful glances with each other, the family looked to Elliott who rose silently from his spot on our family couch, nodded solemnly and went to his room to limber up and prepare for the ritual. Even as he bravely set forth, somewhere in the city, a manic hand reached out of its front door and placed a snow shovel on the porch as a warding sorcery against the coming snow. 

I grew up in the North. When it snows—and it used to snow a lot—there's not so much chatter. Sure, we would listen to cancellations on the radio, but it took way more than flurries to stop the school buses. We had to have at least five inches guaranteed before the school system I attended as a young scholar would even consider shutting things down. Even then, once the roads had been plowed, the buses—equipped with chains and sand—would roll and we had better be on them. Here in North Carolina, it takes just the whisper of the word ‘snow’ for panic to ensue and everything shuts down in anticipation. I have seen a four car pile up on a dry, sunny day just because some newscaster put it out there that the white stuff might make an appearance. As a result of this madness, school is canceled usually at the drop of, in this case, a flake. So to my Northern heart, the Southern flutter caused by inclement weather has always been a bit daft, but that’s just how things are here.

However, my coworker, who also grew up and lived in the North for most of their life, had been filled to the eye teeth with bad weather. They had moved to this part of the world to get away from the apparently unending winter there. In response to any hint of ‘the white stuff’ they had developed a habit of setting out their snow shovel as a kind of apotropaic against any incoming inclemency. Like with Elliott’s snow dances, I had seen this coworker’s shovel work, too. At least three times over the years, they had set out this powerful totem and snow that had been forecast vanished. One of those times, we’d been promised at least six inches over the beginning of the week and the Friday before, they put out their anti-snow weapon. As if on cue, meteorologists all over the central part of the state began changing their tune. Six inches dropped to three and then dwindled to a dusting. Temps rose, and even the rain that remained broke up like an angsty garage band and we had unseasonably balmy and sunny weather. 

When I asked why they hated to be off school (so far as I know, no school staff ever would be disposed to go to school if the day could be canceled due to weather) the reason they gave only added to my unhappy feelings. If they cancel school, they said, they take days away from our Easter Break (they meant Spring Break, but I understood). Here in NC, for each day that the snow flies and the buses stay locked, one day is taken from the end of the week designated for our Spring Break. One year, we had so much crappy weather that we lost all but one day of that essential and necessary rest in the longest and most intolerable stretch of otherwise uninterrupted school. Snow meant less break. So, my coworker put out their magic shovel. 

I sympathized. When in school in the backwater district in Pennsylvania, they not only drew from Spring Break time, but then tacked on days at the end of the school year, pushing the end date out into the glorious days of freedom we had worked for and desperately needed. In 1993, we had gotten so much snow (including a full-on blizzard at the end of March) that June positively felt like Purgatory. I don’t think we got out that summer until just a few days before we had to go back. We called it The Year Without A Summer and I’m positive that the decline and fall of some of my classmates into criminal endeavors can be traced to this particular year. Nevertheless, even the year North Carolina had “snowpocalypse” it was absolutely nothing in comparison to ‘93’s devastation. But now, thanks to my coworker, the shovel was ruining even a tiny chance of snow for everyone and it was working in direct antipathy to the fancy footwork of a very gifted young snow dancer who merely wanted a day off occasionally to play in the snow.

To his family, Elliott was doing the people’s work. He could swing a dashed efficient shoe and his gyrations had accomplished much by giving us needed days off here and there throughout the winter. My coworker’s shovel therefore, despite its apparent potency, had to go. I might have been a little less ready to act, had this particular individual not been in other ways an intolerable person. Their magic shovel might have just been a thing to accept. However, this was by far not the most evil and nefarious thing this coworker had done over the years. In fact I’ve had few experiences outside of foodservice with someone who was less desirable to be around in nearly every way. If the shovel was all that they did to mess things up for me, then I would have been less likely to get involved. By challenging Elliott’s snow dancing, they called down the thunder (or rather, didn’t) and so, they were going to get weather of a different sort.

The statute of limitation is probably well past on this particular story, but I’m not one to self-incriminate. All I’ll say is that several of us at work were asked to help with some “heavy lifting” at this coworker’s house one weekend to move and prepare some things for a garage sale. The shovel, which was prominently displayed even then during the warmer Fall days, may have been moved into the back of the tool shed from which we were removing items. It may have been placed behind some other garden tools at the very back under an old, ratty tarp, hard to spot from the doorway and even more difficult to get to.

One day later in the school year, probably in January, I came into work to find that my coworker had gone to put out their shovel to stop the snow and found that it was missing from its usual place of honor probably by a shrine honoring muggy equatorial weather. It also wasn’t on the porch. They were completely fogged by the missing tool, but as the day progressed, they realized that perhaps the tool had been left out too long and mistakenly removed with a pile of yard sale goods and possibly sold. I acted surprised and distressed on their behalf but gave up nothing. We Bare’s can wear the mask.

As if to underline the power of this shovel, within weeks of its disappearance, snow began to fall like gangbusters all over the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina. It was glorious and all-too brief. As I looked out of our home at the falling snow I cast my eye in the direction of the neighborhood where my coworker lived and smiled a devious smile. ‘Take that,’ I said under my breath and then went and had a cup of hot cocoa. For a few more years after that, we had snow regularly that canceled school or that delayed the start. We would make homemade tomato soup and grilled cheese and have endless snowball fights and make small snow people in the yard. I would shovel the front walk and the driveway. We reveled in the sheer joy of falling snow.

  

Time moves on and seasons change and bring their own respective joys and challenges. Elliott grew into adolescence and quit believing in Santa Claus and snow dances. I changed jobs and realized that there is an entire reality outside of the school-system mindset (and away from the mindlessness of awful coworkers). Snow fell less and less in our part of the world as the years passed, but that probably had to do with environmental concerns, rather than magic dances or warding shovels. 

Then, about two years ago, we had a serious warning for very wintry weather. Snow was forecast and we were set to get several inches. Temps began to drop and hovered just below freezing. The sky turned iron-grey. The wind kicked out of the north like a stung mule. Shelves at the town grocery markets went completely out of bread and milk. The town became dismally quiet. Everyone was “hunkering”. Then, as if by magic—and I believe it was magic—the sun came out, the wind swung to the south and the few drops of precipitation that we got were most assuredly not frozen. Such is the weather in North Carolina, people said. My heart sank. I knew it wasn’t just the weather. 

The day the bad weather vanished, I happened to be passing the house where my former coworker lived. There by their front door was the old snow shovel. It was locked behind a small, closet-sized chain link enclosure and secured with a heavy padlock. It was rustier, grungier than before, but it was that same yard tool from years before. As I looked, my heart burning within me, I saw the curtains in the front window drop closed. Just before they did, I swear that there were a pair of beady, glinting eyes burning out of the darkness at me. Had they given me a knowing look? I can never be sure. All I know is that the snow shovel somehow found its way back to the hand of its master.

I won’t say there is a direct correlation between the lack of snow in recent years and that chained up shovel, but I’m also not ruling it out. At this point, I’ve seen too much in the weather wars to be easily convinced otherwise. Elliott, now a full adult, probably wouldn’t dance for cash money. His childlike idealism has melted into the cynicism of people who have to go to work whether it snows or not and who don’t get summers off. His mother currently works in the school system, but now, instead of canceling school, they just do online classes, a sorcery discovered during the pandemic. I’ve often wondered if the magic that gave birth to the snow shovel also devised this new devilry. Gone into another era are the scrolling lists of school closings, but then, gone too are the snowy days that used to break up the agony and monotony of school days and terrible coworkers.

And yet, any time there is a serious winter weather advisory for our area, I casually drive past that coworker’s house to see if that infernal snow shovel is in its little chain link enclosure. If it is, I make my heart a stone, because we won’t get any snow. If we do, it may mean that somewhere, somehow an idealistic child is dancing their little heart out.

Drum Circle of Life

My fascination and love of the drums began many years ago in one of those Gaussian memories in which my father escorted me to a drum kit set up for a wedding reception we attended. I was no more than five and with the drummer’s permission, Pops set me on the throne (the seat a drummer sits on) and I got to hit the drums and cymbals. The view from that perspective is one I can still conjure and I remember feeling as though that vantage had to be the best in the whole band. I was immediately enamored and that fascination stuck with me throughout my childhood and adolescent years.

By the mid-nineteen nineties, my life had taken on the hue of a Charles Dickens or V.C. Andrews novel. My mother and step-father spent much of their time in Houston seeking treatment for my mother's leukemia, leaving me all alone in a very big, very old house. Other than weekend visits from my brother and step-siblings (my stepfather's mother lived in her own home on the property and prepared meals for us), I was essentially alone. During this time, fed by the memory of that long-ago drum kit, I taught myself to play the drums. We didn't have a kit at our house, though. By using a mish-mash of items collected from around my house (a Sears catalog, water jugs, the side of an actual tom-tom drum I had salvaged) and sticks I bought to beat on any surface around me, I created a sufficient enough replica of a drum set that I could play along with music videos and recordings of concerts and slowly begin to build rudiments and gain proficiency.

At some point—as my childhood best friend Lee relates it—I told my small group of musically inclined pals at high school that I could play the drums. They laughed. I apparently said a lot of things back then. I was a teenager, after all. They were surprised when, sitting down at our school's drum kit one day, I began to play and, as Lee tells the tale, played well.

We eventually started a band. Our band teacher at the time allowed me to join the jazz ensemble and play with some of the older kids, further building on my piecemeal skill. A drummer friend from another band let me have time on his personal set. Soon enough we had recorded several demo tapes and had gig venues booked. I was the band's drummer and piano player (also self-taught) and one of the vocalists. We grew and got better as a group and I continued to practice and get better myself. After graduation Lee and I headed to school in the Midwest, where I was exposed to even more talented musicians and became even more proficient at drums. The future, as Tom Petty said, was wide open.

Like in all such tales of youth the glory was fleeting. My mother died in the middle of my freshman year at college and it tore the potential of my musical future out of its frame, at least as far as playing the drums were concerned. After that year, I never returned to school with Lee. I took part-time courses at the local community college and the closeness with other skilled drummers evaporated. Our band continued to play during breaks when everyone was home over the next few months, but it was never again like that brief, glorious era of being the drummer in a busy band. Soon enough, other priorities and other events changed the courses of our lives.

After my mother’s death, I moved in with my father, who was, at that time, in the midst of pretty unpleasant marital problems and I was told there would be no drum kit welcome there. Soon enough, I fell in love with the guitar, which drew and kept my attention for many of the coming years. I played in countless open mic nights, and after moving to Asheboro, several small “porch gigs” around town. I have taken one of my guitars to work to play for events, and for a time, had my electric guitar in my office to noodle around with whenever the mood hit. My nephew-in-law recently built me a custom guitar which I love. Guitar is one of those instruments that can be practiced and played without waking up the neighbors and one can have several without worrying about space.

Of course over the years I’ve told people that I was a drummer at heart. I am pretty sure it was obvious, since I played “air drums” any time a good song was on or tapped and banged my limbs to the beat in my head, but it seemed that, unlike guitar and piano, drumming was to be allocated only to that brief shining time in high school. A full drum kit is expensive, takes up a lot of space, requires a lot more attention than just changing strings and the occasional tuning. Drummers, unlike guitar players, are somewhat rare and are usually pulled in a number of directions; they play for home bands, in church bands, in other people's bands sometimes, even in studio recording sessions and in symphonies and jazz festivals. It’s a much more specialized skill set. A bad guitar player can still hamfist through a set. A bad drummer cannot hide.

Life, John Lennon famously wrote, is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans. I met the love of my life, moved to North Carolina, got married, dove head first into the “hectivity” of a husband and father. The years sped by. Careers changed. We moved. The boys grew, went to college, became young men and soon enough, I was middle-aged. I love my life and I have been so fortunate to have been part of my amazing, brilliant, funny and entertaining family. I’m completely devoted to my role as husband, father, father-in-law and now, Pop Pop.

From time to time though, I would still regale myself with those memories of sitting behind a drum kit and playing with a band. We had both said over the years, Micki and I, that someday I would have a set of drums again and I held onto that hope, of course, but life is busy and there is work to be done. Anyway, by this point in my life, I was probably so rusty that it would be better if I just gave up the ghost of hope that remained. I could play well enough in my head.  Even so, I was content to hope.

Then my brother-in-law got a drum kit. He has no musical ability to speak of, just the freedom to do whatever he wants to do. Difficult as it is, I admit that upon hearing that news, I was stung by jealousy. I pride myself on being easy going and I am not generally susceptible to the petty tides of envy that may affect other people. We Bare's are generous of spirit. I tried like mad to be happy for him, but my heart had been wrung with the pangs of a negative internal dialog. I was the drummer in our family, self-taught, with demo tapes to prove it. Where did he get off having a drum kit? It really colored things for a while. After that I wrestled with the possibility that my time as a drummer had been like a fleeting love affair, the warmth of which had now faded like a winter's afternoon to frozen starlight, clear but remote, dear to me, but never again to be repeated.

The pain eased eventually and I felt sheepish and chagrined for my flirtation with the green-eyed monster. Anyone should be able to get and have drums, I said to myself. The more the merrier, I said to myself. I knew that this wasn't about my brother-in-law so much as it was about me owning up to reality. I have a lot to be grateful for, I told myself. Shape up, I said. And up I duly shaped.

Time passed as it always does. In November, we went to my brother-in-law’s house for an early Thanksgiving gathering with some family and he told me to go play his drums if I wanted. So I did. I was most assuredly rusty. It felt good to engage those old parts of my physical and mental muscle memory, though. Micki’s cousin’s grandson, who was totting around keeping us all entertained with the comedy that only three-year-olds can muster, was immediately aware of the drums and me playing. He wanted to play. Cognisant of my father placing me on that drum throne all those years ago, I stepped in and placed the lad on the seat and gave him the sticks. He did quite well. What I hadn’t been aware of at the time, though, was that everyone else had been caught off guard by my playing. Rusty as I was, I still had it. 

I heard later that my brother-in-law was very unhappy about the kid playing his drums. I won’t say that this didn’t give me just a twinge of pleasure to hear. Anyway, the kid needed exposure, just as I had been given. I will say, being able to play again awakened that age-old urge in me. Somehow, too, having been able to take up the sticks and hammer away for a bit also reminded me of the sheer joy that playing any instrument gives me. I felt better, perhaps even healed a bit and my hopes that one day I would have my own kit kindled again in that secret place in my heart.

Then Christmas rolled around. We shopped and prepared mentally and emotionally to share the holidays with everyone (including us) away from home. We packed the car with presents and our pups and headed to the mountains to celebrate our new grandbaby’s first Christmas. All thoughts of drumming were, for the time being, out of my head.

Our tradition is to open presents from one another on Christmas Eve from youngest to oldest. As usual, we took a million photos and celebrated and made a big mess of paper and boxes on the carpet. I handed the phone to my son to take pictures of me opening my presents, one of which was two pairs of black drumsticks. I found this an awesome gift, as we drummers can use any surface from a car dashboard to a kitchen counter to make beats. The next gift I opened was a nice, heavy-duty winter shirt from my list. Then, Micki instructed me to open the larger box. Inside was a snare drum. I was too flummoxed in that moment, to truly capture what was happening. I got a drum. Just one and I was so full of joy and excitement that I couldn’t process what I was hearing. “The rest of it is at home,” Micki said.

“The rest of what?” I asked, demonstrating my keen brain.

“The rest of your drum set. It’s in my office. You have to put it together.”

I wish I could write well enough to express my feelings at that moment. I was shocked, surprised, completely thrilled. In my house, three hours away, in a box, was a complete drum set. Just waiting for me to come home and put it together. If it hadn’t been for the baby, who is quite good at keeping her Pop Pop distracted with her oceans of sweetness and adorability, I think I may have actually needed a straight waistcoat by the end of our visit. Every moment that I wasn’t helping the kids with special “Dave” projects or cooking or holding the wee bairn, I was thinking about my drums.

On the way home, Micki told me that once we arrived and got settled, we’d get my Green Behemoth Room set up and cleared out so I could build my kit. We got a carpet and some new drapes, too. I spent that evening putting the kit together. It had been so long since I’d set up a drum kit from scratch, but it all came back to me as if I had been doing it every day since high school. Now I have a drum kit. Much to my neighbor’s aural displeasure, I’m sure. I will be making things quite noisy regularly from now on.

I can say with absolute certainty that this was the best Christmas gift I’ve ever received and there have been plenty of genuinely good ‘uns. Sitting there in my music room, glossy, black and sleekly ready for me to make thunderous beats, my drum kit is just waiting patiently for me to practice and get better. The epoch of drumlessness is over and worth the wait. I have already begun to make a list of drum needs—things to buy to add to my kit, including hearing protection. My kit is perfect, of course, but tweaking, adding, moving, tuning, adjusting; it's what we do.

Perhaps, during those twenty-five years I never actually stopped being a drummer after all, but I certainly feel like a drummer renewed and thanks to my brilliant wife my life has come full circle, at least as far as playing the drums is concerned. It occurred to me recently that, just like we have showers for brides-to-be and new babies, we ought to have drummer showers, where family and friends ‘shower’ drummers with gifts from a carefully and thoughtfully curated list. I’m registered anywhere fine drum products are sold. In the meantime, if you hear that rumbling coming from my house, that's me.