Free From the Top by Michael Perry

Grandpa was a salesman by nature and trade, and by the time the money was counted from the gigantic raffle he orchestrated each January, all was forgiven.
    Every summer when I was in grade school, my brother John and I would leave the farm to spend a week at Grandma’s house in the city. Every morning she fed us Apple Jacks and white toast with grape jelly, then loaded us into her orange Plymouth Duster and drove us out to the animal shelter, where we cleaned cages and changed food bowls and took the dogs for walks. We also hung out with the shelter employees, several of whom were dedicating their lives to helping the animals as a result of the terms of their probation, and by the time work was over my brother and I were conversant in the intricacies of Huber law and work release privileges. One summer we worked with a high-strung smoker named Randy. Too young to understand the power of addiction,we thought it would be a real hoot to hide his cigarettes. After a two-hour stretch in which he grew more and more agitated and eventually began to tremble like a juiced hummingbird, we snuck the cigs back into the break room where he could find them. He pounced on the pack, lit up immediately, and took a drag so deep he nearly rose out of his socks. Then, on the exhale, he uttered what even to my young ears was the most comically contradictory phrase ever: “Oh … that’s just like a breath of fresh air!”
    Each week the local newspaper sent a photographer to the shelter to get a mugshot of some cat or dog that would then be featured in that week’s edition under the heading “Pet of the Week.” When my brother and I were visiting, Grandma always made us cradle an animal each and be included in the photograph. I’m sure her heart was in the right place, but putting your grandkids in the paper under the heading “Pet of the Week” really sets them up for some introspection over time. I submit for a fact that my brother still ain’t right.
    These days underage volunteers must be accompanied by an adult, so I’ll be taking a few shifts with Amy. I accompanied her on the orientation tour. Naturally there have been a host of changes at the shelter since my brother and I were perambulating the poodles and hanging out with hollow-eyed smokers on parole, but as so often happens, the smells and sounds took me right back to those days decades back. Those cats and dogs need a new generation of caretakers. My daughter has a great capacity for kindness, and I hope this experience will expand that capacity, although based on the look in her eyes as we took our orientation tour, I’d better start budgeting for doghouse lumber. Perhaps this won’t turn so much into an exercise in kindness and civic-mindedness as an exercise in me holding the line: last week, after her first day of volunteering, my daughter leapt out of the van and ran toward me. “Ferrets!” she said, joyfully. “They have ferrets!”
    The road is long, my friends.
DUMPSTER DATE
    My wife has been pricing dumpsters. The big ones. The ones that arrive on their own flatbed truck.
    I’d like to think I’m not a hoarder, but if you ask my wife I’m just a few National Geographic stacks short of certifiable. I justify all the boxing up and piling up with the fact that I generate most of my lunch money by writing stories, and you just never know when—for the sake of veritas—you’re gonna need the fake parking ticket your buddy used to prank you back in 1988, so you cram it in a banker’s box along with all those receipts for the economy size barrels of hair conditioner you were buying in 1988 because you fancied yourself quite the Midwestern Fabio and the pending follicular recession was only a faint gleam in your well-used mirror.
    Time passes. Your hair falls out. You get married. Your wife is an eminently reasonable woman, so when she hints maybe you could get rid of some those boxes