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

opportunity to polish my Spanish. Mainly what I’ve learned is that when it comes to raising children, you really need only two words in Spanish. The first is cuidado, which basically means “be careful.” The second is despacio, which very loosely translated means “for the love of Pete, take it down a notch!” So when you find yourself in charge of a backyard full of screaming bilingual kids, you just stand there hollering, “Cuidado! Despacio! Cuidado! Despacio! DESPACIO!”
    When you blend a family of native Central and South Americans plus Scandinavian cheeseheads, you get what I call your Scandihoovian Spanglish. Just the other day my toddler was doing something mildly dangerous and I found myself saying, “Cuidado, ’dere!”
    She knew exactly what I meant.
    Bottom line is, I’m the kind of guy who’s happy to attend the opera, but I should like to be allowed to wear steel-toed boots with my evening suit. I like to read Harper’s with a chaser of Varmint Hunter Magazine. Maybe that’s why I enjoy a good show under canvas. Here we sit, brain-deep in arts and culture, but we’re also just people hanging out in a tent, some of us wearing boots, a few of us wearing Birkenstocks, and best of all we’re breathing free fresh air filled with music.
SWEATY CHEESE AND INJURED CEREAL
    One of my favorite things about the tent shows is the sound of guests at intermission. It’s a gentle sound. It’s a warmhearted sound. It’s the sound of old friends reuniting and strangers getting along. It’s the sound of people visiting.
    You know what? It’s the sound of happiness.
    And why not? Here we are, feet planted right on the earth. It really is a tent, you know. No floorboards. You come to the Big Top, your feet remain in contact with the planet. You’ll catch the light scent of gently trampled grass (yah, you can trample something gently, it just takes time and civilized persistence), you’ll hear the crunch of gravel underfoot, a whisper of canvas on canvas, and now and then when the wind is right you’ll catch a whiff of bratwurst sizzling under the food tent across the way. And you can eat a brat when you’re up here with no worries because the rest of the experience is so very heart-healthy.
    Me, I’m backstage picking around what’s left over on the deli tray. It starts out as a nice little spread, as well it should be: hungry musicians are cranky musicians, and cranky musicians tend to slide off key or transpose everything into the key of D-minor, the saddest of all keys.
    But now there’s not a lot left of that deli tray—just three pieces of sweaty cheese. No surprise, really. I spent some of my formative years in the company of country music roadies, and they taught me the two most important rules of the road (and life). Number One, if you get ten minutes, sleep. Number Two, if you see food, eat it.
    I always kinda operated that way anyway, at least on the food front. I was raised in a big farm family. When we had company for dinner, before passing the first bowl of food Dad used to tell the guests, “Take what you want the first time, because it ain’t comin’ around again.” Mom fed us mostly on oatmeal out of a twenty-five-pound bag. One fall she got a garbage pail full of wheat from the neighbor’s gravity box grain wagon, and for a pretty long stretch there we had boiled wheat for breakfast. The only time we got box cereal (which we called boughten cereal because, well, because it didn’t come from the neighbors’ gravity box ) was on Sunday mornings, because Mom had to get six or eight kids ready for church and she didn’t have time to boil all that wheat. And even then she bought all the box cereal at some big ol’ scratch-and-dent warehouse up a back alley somewheres. * We used to say we never ate a box of cereal that hadn’t been backed over by the truck that brought