More Winged Things in Heaven and Earth

I live down by the Susquehanna River. On the good side of the water. But that poses some problems. I can’t sit on my porch these summer nights for ten minutes before retreating to my chair in the living room. I ask myself: What is it that certain creatures continue to love about me? Can any other on-again off-again love be as steadfast? I thought maybe they’d give it up after 50-plus years. But no.

Let me take you back.

I remember waking up on sweltering July mornings in this skinny little ineffectual body with mosquito bites all over me, but most prominently around the ankles. Exposure was part of the problem. The most I wanted to wear in sleep were white briefs because how the heck could I layer on anything else in dead air allowing admission to eighty degrees Fahrenheit, outside the house and in it. On those nights, one might suppose even the right arm of Jupiter could not at least give a faint breeze a reason to be.

All we had were wood-framed window screens, and they couldn’t keep the little chirring varmints out of my room. There was one box-fan in the house that possibly denied them entry and that was awarded to my mom and dad. No doubt they deserved it.

I was told I was young. I was told I was a kid. I was told I was resilient and resplendent but not exactly in those words. I was told I could survive without spinning blades that probably did nothing more than effectively draw more hot air inside. But it was the simple idea of circulating air that gave me hope. That pacifying, palliative idea. Yet pleading for my own window-fan was a unilateral argument-- one that carried no weight on my end.

“But dad, why do these things bite me so much?”

“It’s because you’re so sweet, my boy.”

End of discussion.

I’d drag my ass downstairs and pop open that diamond-shaped spout from a rich-blue Grablick’s Dairy whole milk half-gallon and uncomfortably slosh it onto my morning-time Apple Jacks. And ah yes, Pop-Tarts. (A little tip: Don’t capitalize the second word of a hyphenated term, but Madison Avenue never had any scruples—linguistic or otherwise. Just disregard their examples.) The toaster pastries seemed thicker and more liberally frosted in those days. More packed with that fake fruity strawberry sludge. But maybe I’m just more jaded after five decades have passed. And I’m a lot bigger in stature now. Maybe it’s just that the two-minute sugar-bomb breakfast treats are comparatively smaller.

The TV had a push-button that turned the box on and off and a dial that let you click incrementally from one to another of four total channels that the rabbit ears would call in from the sky. Not the satellite-ridden television slice of outer space far beyond the exosphere. Just the sky beneath the clouds through which signal rays beamed from one big-ass antenna on a nearby mountain to a smaller tenuous one on our shingled roof. The roof that my uncle climbed once in a while to coordinate clear communication between the aerial, the set top and the Close-Encounters-of-the-Second-Kind transmitter on top of some hill called Penobscot Mountain. I mean… what ten-year-old in the Wyoming Valley even knows where Penobscot Mountain is?

But when the Saturday broadcast clarity of Penelope Pitstop and Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork and Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones was at stake, you’d wanna know where that mountain was at. You might have done well to send up an atmospheric plea toward its summit—a hope that you didn’t have to Monkee around with that bow-tied antenna for thirty minutes while your favorite show faded in and out of a snow squall arm-in-arm with dirty-white noise.

We had a scratchy green tweedy couch that couldn’t have been a better fit in the moment. I could twist and turn on it to relieve the itch but it only served to make the bites itch more. What I was also told was don’t scratch the itch because it only made the itch itch agonizingly more.

Kid. Adult. Somewhere in between. At any age, you know it’s best not to scratch. But that advice don’t keep nobody from scratching those little freaking bumps that persisted like beach sand in a suitcase. That’s some scratchy shit, too.

Tell me. What’s a poor uncomfortable boy supposed to do? When he ain’t got nothin’, nothin’ to lose, and nothin’ to salve his wounds.

You could try that pink stuff. That pasty puree in the brown bottle. But it couldn’t have worked. Calamine lotion to me had to be placebo. Because do you ever see it around anymore? Does anyone still store it behind the mercurochrome in the vanity or behind the mirror if that’s the space you still rock?

An ounce of prevention, it’s been said. Yeah, right.

What do you do to keep freaking mosquitoes away? Aerosol is just poison in any iteration. Citronella? It sounds nice and smells inoffensive, but it never works for me. Then came the revolutionary Skin So Soft. Throw every other bug repellant away, the advertisers said. I haven’t seen anyone peddling that spray at backyard parties these days. But maybe it’s because I just don’t ask for it. And maybe it’s also because I would wave it off since I relish the thought of those damned winged vampires crashing and burning like Icarus after they tap into my veins during a Fourth of July party. Bad old habits, they don’t die that easily. Not as easily as a reviled pest destined for a glowing purple bug zapper. I haven’t seen one of those in ages, either.

After sixty-two years, I must ignore the minor irritants. I choose my battles. I will away the small summertime nuisances now because there are always bigger issues to reckon with, oftentimes the disruptors of my soul’s amorphous state.

A few blocks away from where my dad was born and raised, I sit on my porch on a salvaged church pew on which worshippers once wrestled with their own spiritual dilemmas and age-old questions that only the supremely confident and firmly faithful ones seem to be able to answer. Who am I? Where have I been? Outside of time, will I be granted access to an inviting place as readily as a mosquito on the windowsill of a dream?