Willow Springs

Ever see The Return of Martin Guerre? It’s the best movie. Actually, it’s the worst movie, but I’ll get to that in a minute. It goes this way: Martin Guerre is married to Bertrande, but in 1548, he goes to fight in one of those seemingly interminable wars that the French were always fighting, and he doesn’t return until eight years later. Boy, is Bertrande happy to see him! There’s only one problem, which is that the new Martin Guerre doesn’t exactly look like the old one. And when he starts to squabble with relatives over his inheritance, they say Hey, this guy’s an impostor, and things don’t get any better after that.

My kid did my hair this morning. She got her fingers in my mop and fucked it up. Made all these spikes and railroads trestles. Threw in some twirls and blue paint. I had spent an hour with the brush. Didn’t matter. She came upstairs and got her hands in there, did some modern dance acrobatics on it. When she was done it was a garbage dump, a forest of brutalized pines. She said, Your head’s a forest. She was right. She’s nine.

Days when the planet seems particularly poised for disaster, I wear both my cephalopod T-shirt and my cephalopod ring. Have you heard of a more Anthropocene coping mechanism? I do it for the birds with nowhere to land at the critical point in their migration, for the skewed seasons and the jungle ants with parasite-skewered brains. Cave dwellers evolve to survive their sealed-over eyes. Who needs eyes on a planet wobbling its axis like a Tilt-A-Whirl? No wonder I wake motion sick, the fact of death and the ocean and the mouthparts of insects brimming the list of things I can’t control.

THINK OF THE OCTOBER you read Pinocchio by flashlight inside the bomb shelter model, left to play or read while your entrepreneurial father accomplished small miracles in his shop, development housing spreading in all directions and across the horizon, cacophonous Ohio traffic leaking into the concrete-block model like fallout, like you guessed invisible charged particles behave or so they demonstrated with charts and a short film after civil defense drills at Rolling Fields Elementary.