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The Summer Bat & The Lightning Bug

Jul 15, 2022

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

- Carl Sagan

The bats appear with the lightning bugs now. The summer evening comes on strong in these parts; the old mountains blow cool down into the valleys and the long hot day, she begins to slip and stumble. The collapse is muted. Subtle. Graceful, I guess. Across an hour or two the world/ our world here/ it dies tired and beat/ a heart that wants only rest/ ambition fading/ and is magically reborn with fresh slick skin/ right before our eyes.

Right before your eyes.

The summer evening rises up out of the maggot-riddled roadkill day like some twilight ghost ready to gamble. Ready for the limitless night.

In the Adirondack chairs Arle painted blue last year, we sit with our drinks, our Miller Lites and our cheap red wines, and we watch the whole thing go down. Just the two of us, listening to the Bluetooth speaker, the tunes somehow soundtracking these fleeting moments in marriage in full swing.

If it’s up to her: we listen to Bright Eyes. Or Bruce. Maybe Sam Cooke or Solomon Burke. Stevie Nicks. Billie Holiday. Julie London. Her music fits me too, although I also understand that she plays it that way. More than I do for her, probably.

I play my Chet Baker. My Miles. My Coltrane and blah blah blah. If I’m pretty buzzed I play old Charlie Daniels stuff and talk a blue streak about the lyrical genius of it all. Then when she tries to say something, I hush her quick.

Shhhh!, I smile, my finger to my lips. Listen to this line!

And she does, inevitably. She smiles from inside a weak frown that comes from as genuine a place as anything we’ve got. In her times of Bluetooth control, she tries harder than me to pick music that she knows I will like too. In my times, I try less, I guess. It’s not something I’m proud of. And you know, it’s never too late to just let her have the picks every damn night.

Fuck Charlie Daniels anyways. Fucking Louis L’Amour John Wayne asshole.

The bats swoop and dart at the bugs in the low sky just above us. Some nights we light some sticks and logs in the rusted fire pit she got me for Father’s Day a few years ago. We never really used it all that much. It got rusted out there in the snow and the rain. The sun pissing down hard heat on the punished body. The black paint flakes off like skin cancer. Like a dead body rotting by the tree swing. But things have changed. I don’t know why. Everything changes, I know that much. The changes come whether you want them or not and sometimes they hurt so bad and other times you end up sitting there under the bats, grinning through your buzz.

It’s 8 o’clock on a summer night.

The fire pit’s going.

I look at her over there in her tight tank top. The rust colored one. Her face looking up at the white pine branches/ looking up at the vultures a mile deep above us/ I watch it too and I feel the upsidedownness of it all/ the sudden shifting of directions/ us looking down instead of skyward, into the clear pond, the mountain lake, the tipping blues pulling us in and I can see a wild bird swimming down in there/ never flapping his goddamn wings/ forever and ever/ just moving without swimming/ soaring without flying/ on a thermal/ in a current/ I don’t understand how any of this works.

But look at her now, I tell myself.

Look at her thinking about just diving into it all.

On the edge of the thing, the drop, the climb. At the cliff with a leap in her heart.

Fuckin-A, cowboy.

Look at all this.

Her. The bats. The dogs over there in the grassless dirt, the summer dust. Walking tight circles and barking at the people coming down the alley, walking toward their own summer evenings getting born back behind ours popping out right here.

I tap my jelly glass with my middle finger fingernail. Clinkclinkclink.

It’s our little thing, a little bullshit game we play in the face of all the political correctness and righteous indignation lined up around every corner. Tapping your glass to tell your significant other without words that you need a refill is about as obnoxious and sexist and disgusting as it can get before you cross over into places you can never return from.

But for us/ it has taken root. There is a game, a race if you will, to be the one who gets the other one to walk the long path from the fire pit to the kitchen, or even the much shorter one from the couch to the fridge. After all, to not move a muscle and yet be rewarded with alcohol is the American Dream in a nutshell and you and me both know it. Plus, if it’s your wife doing it for you, there’s that sharply honed edge added to it all. That ironic twist of fate in which one serves the other in such a blatant fashion that it almost HAS to be seen as both wrong and foul by anyone who would be present and witness the whole process.

From the clinkclinkclink to the getting up and shuffling off with the empty vessels to the returning not long after with healthy pours and unopened cans sweating their chilled sweat balls out onto this unfolding strange beauty.

It’s almost a crime, I suppose. I guess I see it that way in the more sober light of day. But whatever. The darkness is sometimes important too. In the yard, maybe. In the bedroom, for sure.

We are not who we seem.

Our love is fierce and feral/ our souls are melting together/ and we are dirty carnals/ humanistic empaths/ bat lovers who have run from bats (me) and rescued bats (her).

Her eyes pull out of the dream above us and settle back into this one. She smiles, makes her little face.

It says:

Really? Fuck you, man.

I made the dinner for the kids, I say. It’s a con move. A desperate ploy that comes with my territory. I’m tired and beat and old, I tell her, throwing it in, in the sad way of losers, for perfectly good measure. She just stares at me and shakes her head tightly. Her lips stretch.

I want to bite her neck.

Later on: I will.

But she goes then. Pours me wine/ grabs a still-cold one from the new 12-pack on the floor by the record player in the kitchen. I don’t know what else she does in there. Checks her phone maybe.

What does she see?

Texts?

A new Like on Facebook?

Someone else’s vacation photos?

Where’d they go? Disney? California? Africa? The beach?

We can’t go down the shore this year. We simply can’t afford even a night by the ocean. It hurts her, I know. Last year we went and it was special. But now things are different and the world is changed and I think all this while she’s gone. I want to give her the real crashing sea but all she can have is this upside down one. With bats and lightning bugs.

I smirk. I’m a little lit. The kids bust out the back door and hit the trampoline. They are loud like beasts. Their energy is miasma to the old drinker out by the fire pit wishing for beaches for the love of his life.

But at the same time/ it’s her getting the drinks tonight, huh?

That says a lot, I guess. About us. About love. About what shifting breezes provide existence and how little crosswinds snuff it all out. Our love is here and now and that alone has dawned on me and made me happy more than anything I have ever known. Our love, me and her, (me and you, Arle), is nothing special on the outside, I figure. Outsiders looking in can never know. And they don’t even care, to be honest. Why would they? Maybe other people’s love affairs are only interesting if you are feeling vulnerable and need to be reminded of the possibilities. OR if you are macking one of them/ scouting the whole thing out/ a narcissistic predator who gets off on killing love for nuclear thrills and kicks.

The first kind: I salute you. I have been there.

The other kind: I have seen you. There will be a reckoning.

Me? I want Arle forever but I can only touch her now. It isn’t sad. It isn’t unfair. The life unfolding beneath us and around us/ these spectacular summer evenings dressed up like any old night/ we are immersed in the new religion. In the here and now. The this moment and nothing else. It seems so unoriginal because it is, I suppose. This notion of recognizing your love and your life and seeing it closely/ slowed down/ like lines of poetry about you and your lover and your kids and your drinks and the bats over your yard which ain’t even yours really/ you just rent all your land, hoss/ you just rent everything you have ever owned. Your life being read by James Earl Jones or David McCulloch or Whoopi Goldberg/ some resonator voice/ some mouth opening and the galaxy falling out/ I say this shit all the time.

Because I found it. I stumbled upon this way of living. And it’s my only hope. It’s the only way to go.

There is no tomorrow.

There is no heaven.

There is no next time around and there is no see you on the other side.

This is the other side.

This is the next time around.

You are fucking sitting in Heaven all the time.

On the back deck watching him spill ketchup down his shirt. On the front porch watching her water the hanging baskets. On the plane on the way to the paradise places. On the bed as she pulls up her jeans. On the living room floor as he talks to the dogs. On the highway as the kids holler and laugh and fight each other and cry and pick their noses in the rearview and then fall asleep with their precious heads against the doors that spill out into a river of instant death.

Anyway.

Let me shift my focus.

But I invite you to stick around.

Arle.

This Monday is our wedding anniversary. Three years of living and loving and hurting and discovering and feeling and cursing and eating and drinking and listening to the music and laughing at the absurdity of it all with you has been the best three years of my life by far. I never dreamed I would meet someone like you. I never dreamed it was at all humanly possible for me to love someone the way I love you. I fell once and I continue to fall, more and more every day.

Love of my life? You’re goddamn right, you are. We got married by a bass pond in the Church of the Here & Now. You are genuine beyond measure. You are real beyond my understanding. I know I am the lucky one. I know I know I know.

Arle, I love you so very fucking much.

I love you with all the wild sleeping bats in our attic right now.

Clinkclinkclink.

Psyche.

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