November 9th, 2016 - Matthew Gavin Frank
There are over 350 species of lovegrass (most of which feature, according to my tea-stained Encyclopædia Britannica volume, “characteristic glands on the leaf sheaths and inflorescences”) but I sit in my backyard among none of them, because I don’t live on the Horn of Africa, where most of the lovegrass is. Instead, I sit in the roiling pot of what was just yesterday referred to by the news anchors as a crucial swing state, amid the clusters of pinkstink dung moss, listening to the neighborhood chainsaws, and the tap-tapping of so many lawn signs sinking into less loving grass. I am looking up things with “love” in their names because that’s apparently what I have to do today, trying to remember the moments in human history when we were so full of it, we had to name our favorite ornaments of nature after it; brief moments when our collective infatuation didn’t drag along with it the threat of violence. In the cinderblock garden, last season’s robin carcass, buried deep now, feeds the yellow oxheart tomato plant. I don’t expect the tomatoes to persist either. My wife and I planted too early. We forgot which day of the week it was, what time it was. We had a vague sense of the season. The nights are so cold here. Love, love, love, we say to get through them, at least until sunrise, when we’ve started getting our best sleep.
There’s a village named Love in Illinois, a village named Love in Togo. One in Malta, Estonia, Angola, The Bahamas… In 1950, on October 19th, Hurricane Love crossed the Gulf of Mexico and amorously decimated homes and hospitals along the Big Bend coast of Florida. Sometimes our feelings are too strong to be named. When my grandfather—after having been shot in the back by German soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge, bleeding out facedown into the droppings of the cedars and pines of the Ardennes forest, and after having convalesced in a nearby medical tent— returned home from the war, he hugged my grandmother so tightly that he broke her rib, that the bullet in his back shifted. The scar there began to morph into the shape that he would later tell me was the result of him having been gored by a rhinoceros. He never believed that the sort of fascism which inspired him to put down his saxophone (he was a jazz musician) and pick up a gun could ever emerge here in the U.S., and so never spoke of his experiences as cautionary tales. In his later years, he lost his ability to string words together. He had difficulty telling his family what he felt; that he was afraid, and that he loved us. I heard the real story of his bullet wound for the first time at his funeral.
In my backyard, I lay my encyclopedia on the cinderblock next to the waning tomatoes, and, in the company of so many obsessing on the overlaps of love and death, I comb through my search history on my laptop. Because it’s 2016, and I can’t yet tell the future, I have no idea that, on December 27, 2019, when the first coronavirus case in France would be confirmed at a hospital in the north of Paris, the headline that would capture my attention, and dominate my search history would read, “Love triangle complicates efforts to breed Sumatran rhinos: Efforts to breed the critically endangered Sumatran rhino in captivity have faced myriad challenges ranging from mysterious deaths and reproductive health problems to bureaucratic hurdles.” I was trying to write an essay about my grandfather, you see; about the aging mind’s decline, the struggle to cobble together and deliver to the world a coherent sentence—a sadness made momentarily beautiful by an acknowledgement of its universality. But it’s November 9th, 2016, and my attention is not yet on rhinos. The body politic, sometimes, elects with its intestine. I wonder which part of the body I help to comprise. I’m tired from having cried all night in bed next to my wife who also cried all night. We know we have to make plans, but don’t know where to start. So: I’m sitting today, as I did yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, in the backyard I’m so thankful to have, even as its parameters horrify me. I don’t know how I feel about the clouds anymore. Yesterday, they looked like hearts; today, tumors. I can see that now. But the birds still make their sounds among them—sounds that I probably mistake for affectionate.
I’m easily distracted, scattered, but I try to hold onto the bird sounds. I’m still trying. In my backyard, I see the clouds beating, and I tell them that I love them. I feel hokey while doing this, but I love the hokiness too. I am driven to collect these things—love this, love that—but still, can’t quite muster the energy to make them gel. Maybe, today, this lack of mustering is also an act of hope. I close the laptop, pick up the encyclopedia.
I go inside. I reheat the blueberry pancakes. I take a mask from the wall, and I put it on. I put on my late grandfather’s bathrobe. I do not brush my hair. I will not brush my hair. I stroke the cat on the couch and tell her the story of Orpheus. She finds it sad, as evidenced by her melancholy mewling, and her listless nosing at the molehill of matatabi catnip, which I always keep stocked on the end-table at the base of the half-liter bottle of Super Miracle Bubbles. The plastic blowing wand has gone missing, but that miraculousness is there in the bottle, lurking. Maybe we can still find a way to let it out, set it onto the wind where it can rise before popping. To make her feel better, I tell the cat: The lovebug is a species of march fly. When the male fly dies after mating, the female—as if grief and hope made physical and animate—will drag his corpse through the air for up to two days, over flowers.
Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of six nonfiction books, including Submersed, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, The Mad Feast, and Preparing the Ghost, and three poetry books. His books have been selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice, an NPR Notable Book, and among The New Yorker Books to Watch Out For, as well as listed among the best of their respective years by NPR, Flavorwire, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Paste Magazine, Plate Magazine, Largehearted Boy, and Volume One Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Believer, Freeman’s Magazine, Guernica, Orion, The Best Travel Writing anthologies, The Best Food Writing anthologies, The Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere.
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