Not so much a lie as a miscalculation

I guess there is more to life after-all??? A little more, anyway.

This is why sultan should always be with us:

1. He is the right sort of dog.

Proof: on the night of the 4^th, the air was full of sulfur and the almost omnipresent wail of emergency vehicle sirens. We notice this particularly since we are one block away from a firehouse, and any time anybody on this end of town gets himself in trouble, we hear our rescue wagons as presently as we do our own low-battery fire alarms. And since we are not far off the freeway, we hear other people’s sirens as well.

Our dogs are not bothered by this. Even when something happens on our street, which has happened one or twice over the decades, the dogs don’t seem to get into a lather about it. But on the night of the 4^th, we had Sultan.

I had already cashed in the day, tucked up in my bed reading The Miracle at Speedy Motors (kind of like taking a pleasant shower). When I began to hear singing. I thought maybe it was an overtone in the cross current of all city sirens at first. Kind of a strange moaning. Then I realized it was the voice of a dog. Or a howl, anyway.

I sat up.

But our dogs don’t howl. You can’t talk them into it for anything. Boring, boring dogs.

Still – that sound.

So I go downstairs, turn the corner, and what do I see? Guy on his knees beside Sultan, howling melodiously, and Chaz, who is sick again this year (a year to the day), tucked up into the corner of the couch, doing the same thing. Actually, they were kind of handing off the song, one choking on laughter while the other took over. So I helped. We like howling. And I am particularly good at it. With my stage experience, I can even keep a straight face for minutes at a time.

Sultan’s faced snapped around, and his amber eyes met mine. I stepped it up a notch. His head snapped again, into a tilt. Then into a tilt to the other side. Both my howling buddies dissolved in laughter. But this was serious business for Sultan and I. He put his nose up and joined right in. Then there were four of us howling to the ceiling while Skye and Piper just lay there, blinking and thinking rude things about us.

Sultan got up and walked over to sit with his back against the couch, stuck his nose up into the air and howled again, mellifluously. His face was so serious, his song so intent. We didn’t dare laugh too much. I think it was Skye who howled at a siren once, in his younger, more passionate days, surprising us into gales of laughter. I remember the look on his face – half surprise, half injury. He has never sung again, which is understandable. Would you feel any differently?

No, Sultan is the perfect dog for us in every way.

This is why he shouldn’t stay with us:

1. Ginna loves him.

— o —

I intend to watch Pollyanna tonight, in honor of the 4^th. I am wondering if anybody on the face of the planet would understand why that makes sense? Probably not.

You know, I spent most of my kidhood in LA; here—I think of myself as kind of a small-town sorta guy, but now I think on it, I never have been that in all my life. LA. Kansas City. Suburbs of New York. Small city (now large) in Texas. But I’ve always believed in the home town America thing. Maybe because of Andy Griffith. But surely because of Pollyanna.

It was the town bazaar in the middle of the movie that grabbed me and set me down exactly where I wanted to live: all the town’s people, the home-grown booths and prizes, the folks you know, selling you fresh, hot corn on the cob. The feeling of community, and each person in it with his or her peculiar contribution to the magic. The closest I’ve ever gotten to that has been at church. And specifically, in LA when our ward (small congregation of about 200-600) held a thing like that for Pioneer Day, the LDS celebration of the day when the wagon trains finally entered the Salt Lake Valley.

Then the big tennis courts behind the chapel (why were there tennis courts? Nobody even played tennis there – must have been pre-existing) were filled with white tents, and people you only knew as grown ups suddenly became barkers and hair-dressers and photographers, offering you balls or rings to throw at gold fish bowls or big bottles or through hoops. There was even a dunking thing. Get your hair poofed up in the beauty tent. And there were prizes. It was tremendous. Glorious. None of the carny grit, but all of the community hilarity and well-metness you could ever dream of having.

That concept has stayed with me over the years. Social magic. And so, when my kids were old enough that I had some energy left to bank, I decided to make over that Pollyanna thing in my own yard. I invited people I loved from the neighborhood to bring their kids; we supplied the barbeque, they supplied the side dishes and the energy. And there were games. And prizes.

At first the games were just for the kids. Then I realized that I wanted kids and grown-ups together, so we had sack races (I had to find gunny sacks for that) and water games, and relays. I’d buy those packs of little flags on a toothpick things and hid them in the hard so the kids had to collect as many as they could find. I’d score one of those big-box bags of tootsie rolls (1000 in every bag!), and a huge box of gallon zip lock bags. Then we’d write the name of each kid invited on a bag – to be used for gathering the tiny flags, but more importantly, for storing the tootsie-toll points they’d win at every game. Including the name-every-state-and-president-game—during which parents cheated shamelessly, scoring tons of tootsies for their own blinking-with-ignorance kids.

So after the prayer and the eating (and how wonderful the eating was – so many potato, or pasta or frog eye salads, in every variation you can imagine – and the pies, always at least three or four kinds – and the ice cream treats (Good Humor man, move over) and the fishing (off the back deck with a real fishing pole – and nobody “sees” the big brother below the deck on the riverbank who is carefully pinching the plastic sea creatures with the clothes pin hook) – after all of that come the games – which used to take a good part of the afternoon. And then the counting of the tootsie rolls, the lining up in order – and the picking of the prizes (which is often surprising – and why did Caleb not choose the green pony??? Or Levi, either????)

It was pretty glorious.

Of course, for a child, glory comes pretty easily.

But we stopped doing all this a couple of years ago. The kids grown up, you know. And I got tired. And last time, only one family of friends came – and they wouldn’t leave the house because it was 106 degrees outside in the blaring, head-boring sun. So, for a while, no bunting in the back yard. No salads brought by friends more salad-imaginative than I. But no planning and large-scale cooking, either.

Still, this year, with a couple of our goodest buddies who were kind of stuck without family, on an insane impulse I decided to make a little one of those crazy celebrations again. Just a tiny one. Like borrowing kids for the day, just to remember what it was like to have them around and excited.

One family couldn’t come because they had guests and plans. But the rest of us did okay. I turned the games over to the eldest sons of two of those families, knowing these were guys I could gladly trust. And away we went.

It was really fun. These are kids who feel like family to me. And everybody behaved just pretty much the way crazy but very good kids behave. Like, I could be the proud grandmother-lion-tamer. And buy prizes at the dollar store (COOL prizes). And give out drum sticks and ice cream sandwiches like Lady Bountiful. We feasted on salads and burgers and topped it all off with Rachel’s killer flag cake and home made chocolate chip/fresh cherry ice cream. Can it get better than that?

Maybe your home town is just something you make. You collect it. You plant it. You water it and something grows out of all that. All I know is, maybe I’ll do it again next year.

Maybe.

In the beauty of the lilies . . .

Char and her StarGazers