Free From the Top by Michael Perry Page B

she would flip the imaginary treat into the air and catch it on the way down. We were doing this in the living room one day and folks were applauding and Amy was wagging her pretend tail and suddenly it hit me that the day she finally dials up socialservices, this little bit right here will be number one on the list of submitted indignities.
    Amy stopped doing the dog tricks a few years ago. She’s already nearly as tall as me and on the verge of becoming a young lady. And this is the other thing about children: at some point after they stop howling all night and toothlessly gnawing on your chin, they learn to walk, and once they learn to walk they find their way to the clock of time and attach a rocket to the minute hand. I find myself breathless sometimes when I look at my children and want desperately to slow things down. When my younger daughter, Jane, became potty-trained, the only drawback was that she couldn’t reach the bathroom light switch, so Dad still had to lever his lard out of the chair whenever she went in there. Then our friend Lori made her a flat stick with a scallop and a hole in one end. By using the scallop to push the switch up and the hole to pull the switch off, Jane could run the light herself, and Dad could remain a lump. Then one day Jane called out to let me know she needed some assistance in the bathroom—or, as she put it, “I have a surpriiiise for you!”—and when I got done with that job (the less said the better, really, although as a longtime volunteer firefighter let me say you just never know when that hazmat training is gonna come in handy) we washed up and headed for the door. As I reached for the switch, Jane jumped in front of me and said, “No, Daddy, I can do it.” And without that stick she reached up and up and then got on her tippy-tippy toes and— click —off went the light. And crack went my heart. Because I was happy for her, sure, and real proud, but I also felt like I had stepped off into a black hole and was trying to grab armfuls of time.
    You can’t slow it down, though. And you can’t wallow in the past. Can’t spend your life—as I wrote recently—in a hesternal funk. ( Hesternal means yesterday, basically.) So the night our new chicken coop was finished, and the floor was still clean, and inside it smelled of fresh wood, Amy and I—Amy, the little girl who is now nearly as tall as me—unrolled our sleeping bags on thefloor and camped there overnight. We giggled and spoke in the voices of imaginary chickens. In the dark after Amy was asleep, I smelled cool night air and kiln-dried pine and I listened to her breathe and I ignored the vanishing past and speeding future and instead fell gratefully asleep in the wholehearted present.
TYPHOID MARY
    Recently my wife went away from Sunday to Sunday to help one of her sisters with a new baby, so I was nominally in charge, which meant supper sometimes happened in a rush and with ingredients not normally associated with each other, although I will take it as a point of personal pride that we made it clear to Friday before the old man bolted into the supermarket for a frozen pizza. And even then I made it my own by adding barbecue sauce and sliced dill pickles. Why I do not have my own cooking show I do not know.
    At one point during our week, Jane, the younger of my daughters, had a bad dream and got a case of the missing-mommy weepies, so I wound up sleeping by her side. In the morning I awoke to see her sweet face three inches from mine, at which point she laid a cough on me like a two-pack-a-day coal miner. I don’t know what she caught, but by midmorning we decided only one word really described it, and that word was phlegm-tastic.
    And now I’ve got it. I don’t get sick often, which is much more a testament to my genetics than to nutrition and lifestyle. But the last two times I’ve caught something, I’ve caught it from my blue-eyed