From the Top by Michael Perry Read Free Book Online Page A

grass and watch the crowd filter in, and it really is something to see them gather, everybody milling but quietly so, folks passing in and out of the tent and clusters of friends meeting up to have beers in the grass or eat bratwurst in the concession tent. As the light faded, the crowd gathered and turned itself inward, as if the people were metal filings and the big tent—lit from within now by bare bulbs strung through the quarter poles—was an electromagnet on a rheostat. We allowed ourselves to be drawn in as well. Then the house lights went down, the stage lights came up, and when, three months later, the woman with the blue eyes said for better or worse she too was willing to fill out the paperwork, well, I knew that our night in the Big Top had something to do with it.
    You hear that? The crowd has returned. I wonder if somebody out there is sitting beside some other body, wondering if they too might find love beneath the canvas. It happens, you bet. So as the lights come down, go on and pull that somebody special a tad closer and let the music and the canvas do the rest …
TAKING THE AIR
    Welcome back to Tent Show Radio, folks. The audience is returning from intermission after having had an opportunity—as they used to say in grander days—to “take the air.” No better place to take the air, really, than up here on the open face of Mount Ashwabay. This is enhanced air; air that has been scrubbed by Lake Superior breezes, filtered for freshness through stands of pine and poplar, and infused with the sound of song. I dare say this is edifying air, air that stimulates your cultural and intellectual improvement. Goodness knows I can stand a few lungfuls. If I were the kind of guy to hire a life coach—well, first of all I’d have to hire six, and they’d have to take shifts. Even then they’d all probably just knock off early and hit the bar to gorge on pickled eggs and do Jäger bombs in a desperate attempt to repress everything as quickly as possible.
    If I did hire a life coach, I would request specific guidance in the area of edification. I have tried the self-edification route, but I never quite seem to get through it without finding a wad of figurative spinach stuck in my all-too-literal teeth. One time I read a New Yorker article about the Ring Cycle and got all fired up about the potential operatic acculturation and ordered a Wagner CD, only to find out when it arrived that I’d picked the one with the helicopters from Apocalypse Now on the cover. Another time I resolved to comprehend jazz. I read a book about John Coltrane and then put on one of his albums while I worked. I admit I was probably a little distracted and probably had been eating toomany Little Debbie Zebra Cakes, but at some point my attention swung back to the music and I heard, “… a love supreme … a love supreme … a love supreme …”
    â€œA-ha!” I thought. “I am beginning to understand! He is building on a repetitive theme!” I felt a surge of pride. I understood jazz! Another forty-five minutes would pass before I realized I had the CD player on single-song repeat and had listened to the same track thirty-seven times straight.
    Once—mostly, I admit, in the service of love—I tried to learn French. I mastered two phrases. The first was Est-que les vaches sont dans l’étable? “Are the cows in the barn?” I cannot begin to explain the situation that precipitated that particular interrogatory. Naturally, the second phrase I learned was Je nes palpa français, which as far as I know is French for “I don’t understand French.” If that’s not what it means, please don’t tell me.
    My wife is fluent in Spanish. I have one brother-in-law from Ecuador and another from Panama. Most of the family (children included) is bilingual on a sliding scale from fluent to … me. Thus, at our get-togethers I have the