Canorous: A Story About Batteries

My father can no longer hear the Spring Peepers. They’re all I hear. I lie in bed and twist myself in the white sheets and quietly ask them to cease. I know I can close the window, but I won’t. I know I can wear headphones, but I will not reach for them.

I can’t hear the Spring Peepers in New York City; this bothers me. Their chorus from the tiny waterway behind my parents’ house has always signified rebirth. The winter has closed up shop, we made it through the snow, and now there’s a melody of proof that we’re still standing. I’m still standing.

I stand with wobbly knees. I wonder if it’s lack of calcium, lack of backbone, or misplaced strength. I’m not strong where I should be. I’m not a lot of things where I should be; and I have the mirror as proof. Someone I loved once called me broken. I never forgot it; and I think that day too much of me succumbed to his definition of me. He never knew me well enough to say for sure, but I held onto the adjective and the pain that was attached to it. I’ll always try to unremember it, but unremember isn’t a word, so by that standard, the action doesn’t exist.

From my broken bed in a city that I’ve loved and hated like no other, I hear, with broken ears, the thuds of trucks and cabs against the potholes on Houston that just get deeper with each winter; the hilarity of strangers as they wander from bar to bar on the Lower East Side, and the faint cooing of a saxophone. I have never cared for the saxophone; its pitch has always induced anxiety in me. But this one, the one somewhere outside my broken window that I’ve yet to find, is my Spring Peeper. Its sound is unbroken.

I once wanted to save the world; this was before I knew better. I was going to start with the animals of course. I would break for turtles, risking my own life as I jumped out of my car on any street to run to the aid of the only creature lucky enough to carry his home with him; it’s hard to feel misplaced when you can pull yourself away from the chaos at any moment. I almost lost a finger to a snapping turtle once. I was almost hit by a truck when I darted across a highway to grab a dog that was on the loose. I once sat on the edge of a back road with my father at the side of a bunny we couldn’t save, but we didn’t want him to be alone in his final moments. It’s hard to save the world one animal at a time.

There was construction a block away from our house the summer before fourth grade. We’d play on the knocked down trees mimicking the scenes from Dirty Dancing, and listening to Madonna from the purple radio my sister and I dragged everywhere. The cluster of frog eggs were in the shallow bits of marsh that had gotten trapped between the broken birches and cement foundations that would take all summer to evolve into homes. We knew their fate; we had to save them.

Bucket after bucket, we lugged every single one of those eggs home to our backyard. We set them up comfortably in the plastic pool that had been under the porch for years. We waited. Sometimes things are worth the wait if you know the result before you get there. We loved them; and we realized when they hatched that tadpoles don’t care for chicken.

Before too long they were tiny Peepers we couldn’t handle – hundreds living in the blue plastic pool decorated in green and pink seashells; a make shift home with no waterway to a stream or even a stagnant puddle. They kept us up all night, their singsong chorus that seemed to have been composed so perfectly that not a single one ever missed a beat. And when it was warm enough, we’d lie on the deck just feet away from them and fall asleep to their peeping, perfect peeping.

When we returned from the beach one day, the blazing sun had had its way with the backyard and the pool especially. The water had been sucked up and our Peepers, the ones we tried to feed chicken and garlic bread, were drying up before our eyes; life removed, life misplaced. My sister ran for the hose, I ran for the marsh and we soaked those who remained until the breath was put back in their tiny veins. It’s hard to save the world hundreds of tadpoles at a time. It’s hard to admit that sometimes we save selfishly in the hopes of really only saving ourselves; it’s broken is what it is.

We knew we had to let them go; even things not meant to fly should be given the chance to spread their proverbial wings. Just as we had done weeks before, bucket after bucket we lugged our Peepers off to the stream. We tried to name each one as it jumped off into the world, but they were in such a rush to get away from us; and it’s hard to discern between Harry and Fred and Willa when they’re all clamoring over each other in a slippery escape.

For the rest of the summer, we swore we could tell the difference between our Peepers and the rest; our Peepers were much more refined in their song, a perfectly scripted language all their own that was the result of something we had imparted upon them. Perhaps, an eventual craving for poultry, too.

My father was always the first to hear the Peepers. Early April he’d usher us out to the front porch to listen to them. Then he stopped being able to hear them, and we stopped standing on the porch waiting for them. It wasn’t that we forgot, but life had evolved past knocked over trees and juvenile attempts at solving problems bigger than ourselves. And time, the minutes that should be spent on something else, is no longer your own and you succumb to other people’s ideas and life’s expectations. My dad was broken for not being able to hear the Peepers anymore, and I was broken for thinking I could save something I could not.

It’s my mother now who holds the phone to the night sky through the spring months so I can hear the Peepers; but no matter how loud they are to her, I can’t hear them. I tell her that the phone is broken, that she should invest in another one. She assures me it isn’t, it just needs new batteries. However, it’s more than that; it’s always more than the obvious answer. Radio Shack didn’t have the ones she needed, they also didn’t carry the ones I needed. It’s hard to explain to a salesman that you’re sure you need new batteries without getting strange looks.

I come to New Hampshire and I lay in these white sheets, I twist my legs around the comforter, pull the pillows over my head to block out the Peepers. My father sleeps soundly down the hall and I know that on a mystery street somewhere in the city, a saxophone player is lulling a neighborhood to sleep. But it’s the Peepers I envy most, the perfect Peepers, who unlike you and I, and everyone we meet, will never need new batteries.