Blue Star

By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Powerless
“Dad, I won’t bury you in Sleepy Hollow,” said Flannery. “It’s for pets.”
“And I’m not one? Eternal rest among dogs, cats, birds, snakes, a monkey … How don’t I qualify?”
Blame a summer 2009 harebrained dad plan when I’d prevailed on her, 8 then, to pedal her Razr along while I ran on the Kent Trails starting and ending at Sleepy Hollow. I’d unload her and the scooter from the car there, we’d explore the path till she wanted to turn around, walk through the graveyard studying stones and plastic commemorations. We had lots of pets — dogs, cats, birds, bunnies, fish, a ferret once — and would conjure stories about past lives lying at our feet, then stop en route home for ice cream.
“It was weird,” she recalled when I broached the idea.
“That’s what dads are for.”
A thump came that night.
“Power’s out,” called Flannery from the next room.
“I can see.” Woken without without my glasses, time’s red blur on the digital clock was absent. Where were my lenses? Fishing the night stand turned up them and a cell phone whose flashlight I couldn’t turn on, swipe or punch at screen balloons as I might. “Flannery?”
I padded out, skirting dog toy remains of a stuffed grinning avocado, handed her the phone which she diagnosed, pushed this and that and handed it back with light on. “You were getting there,” she said.
I put on the same model running shoes — light, cushioned, gliding — I used maiming my right foot and ankle running roads and trails I could reach from my doorstep.
The south path past Sleepy Hollow followed an old graded rail bed till it ended at Byron Center’s 12-foot chicken, a fiberglass sculpture set on a 4-foot-high concrete pansy box to keep restaurant parking lot cars from smashing it. The crooked outdoor pipe faucet at the trailhead worked summers, as did the porta-potty which apparently was permanent.
It was six miles south there, six back, a 12-mile day.
Now I grasped the left rail counterbalancing with the orange right wall’s plaster hole shaped like America going downstairs, dodged and disengaged dog gates at the bottom, passed the pit bull pup sleeping in her crate, through and out the door maze, down the big step leap to the uneven gravel driveway.
The phone’s beam and distant streetlights isolated and framed the giant west limb of our streetside maple had fallen, missing Flannery’s parked car nearby but pulling down power lines and cutting off access to and from 12 more homes on our dead end. The neighbor on one side had lost lights too. “We’ve called the fire department,” the other-side neighbor said.
“They’ll need the power company too,” I said, looking at our steel mailbox down on the street. “I’m not touching that.” We didn’t wait long.
“They’re coming,” other neighbor said.
Firefighters, hot in reflective gear, lit and blocked both sides of Greenview turning into Crestview Drive and waited with chainsaws for utility crews to make sure they would not be electrocuted.
“Can I help?” I asked one, who appraised me standing in orange shoes and pajama shorts.
“Yes. Go back to bed.”
“You always help best when you’re gone,” said my wife, home from her night shift charge nurse stint at 7 the next morning to let out the puppy. Walking from her car across sawdust between cut-up maple stacks made diagnosis what had happened easy.
“The power’s back on and internet up,” I said. “I can lay out the paper now.”
“New old stones rise in Riverside” was that week’s lead story. Had I done this or that my photos might have been better, but too late now. I’d lost sleep but had an image inventory around which to design inside stories.
The ice cream truck came as I worked my way through the B Section. “Oh Susanna” it plays this summer, over and over. I’d go nuts driving one of those things. Sound came through two open writing den windows, one through a screen hole cats have torn to jump through onto the porch roof and back, also bugs and a squirrel now and then. Based on stereo effect and volume I deduced it had made the Holliday loop and turned on to our street.
My dad 60 years ago had a banjo on his knee. He took lessons from George Stavis, a tall and dark-bearded late-‘60s campus guy whose left hand flew over frets and right fingerpicked, my bluegrass Lincoln, when I was eight. Two years later came “Deliverance,” James Dickey’s novel, then the film whose “Dueling Banjos” theme joined other impressions left.
Hard or sugar maple makes a great big-body guitar top; I should go out and cut it up. Afterward craft my own music box out of hard-rock upper sections. What sound would bug-rotted veins where the wood sheared bring? How long did it take Stradivarius to craft maple and spruce, shape, fuse, laminate, finish and string his instruments?
“Dad, you know nothing,” said Flannery when she called from her next-room cell phone and I told her my plan. “Can you get the usual?”
Being time to re-energize via respite, I drove to Starbucks, where younger women and men fly around serving coffee confections to tables filled with gabbing groups or solo writers in a caffeine haze.
“Got it,” I told Flannery back upstairs, bags of brownie, chocolate croissant and plastic water cup in my left hand, pulling on the rail with my right. I told Flannery. “But I gave it to Pilot. At least the dogs I can talk to.”
Her door popped open.
“Thanks, Dad,” she said.