The grandkids came. Nancy, Kimberly, Wanda, Norman, Andrew, Catherine, Curtis. Charles bought the law firm. Edith was in a horseback-riding accident.
One day, around the time the grandkids started becoming teenagers, Milo found himself looking out at the great steel cars over in the country-club parking lot and at airliners thundering overhead. The radio squawked in the living room, behind him. Some new music called jazz.
He thought about the sleigh-ride days, when everything had been horses, horses, horses, horses.
“What the hell planet are we living on, anymore?” he asked aloud.
“The Pepsodent Theatre of the Air,” said the radio, “brought to you by Pepsodent and NBC.”
—
Centuries later, when people perfected the OZ drive and started going out among the stars, some of them wanted to take pets along.
Cats turned out to be perfect for space dwellers. They were excellent at floating. Didn’t seem to mind that there wasn’t really an up or down. They tended to stay out of the way.
Milo and Suzie, born to separate litters on a space station in Pluto orbit, were among the first space cats to cross the interstellar voids. They were like two furry rockets, shooting through hatches, flying across pods. They were impeccably neat, which helped and kept cat food from getting into the ventilation.
They grew long and thin, became like aliens.
They napped for years at a time.
BLUE CREEK, MICHIGAN, 1942
Norman went off to fight in the war. His parents, Charles and Lydia, got a star, like a receipt, to hang up in their front window.
Milo made an unofficial star out of linen and hung it in the front window at the big house, on the side away from the golf course.
He and Suzie went hunting. It became their way of keeping watch over their grandson, in whatever far field he camped in or marched on. Norman marched across northern Africa; his grandparents marched the fields and woods around Sand Lake.
When Norman was killed at Anzio, they looked at each other and leaned against each other, the only alternative to sinking down on the floor. Then they geared up and went hunting, anyhow, stomping the winter-brittle weeds and wheat, skirting the frozen lake, taking note when the dogs quit the trail at their feet and sniffed the air instead.
A bear rose out of the winter wheat just yards away. An old bear, with a fading coat and scars.
“Dogs!” barked Milo, a simple command and a simple gesture, and the dogs sat down, as they’d been taught.
Suzie aimed quickly but with care.
Crack! Crack crack! said Suzie’s rifle. The bear lay dying, fast and painlessly, shot straight through the eye and then double-tapped through the heart.
“Jesus, Suze,” said Milo. “I thought it would be like a poem, where we look at him and he looks at us, and then we just let each other turn away and go. Later on we’d tell how he was close enough that we could see the specks in his eyes and the wind in his fur.”
“This isn’t a poem,” she snapped.
When they got home, Milo went out and bought some crayons and made them an unofficial gold star to hang in the window. He took down his original star and laid it on the coffee table, unable to bring himself to throw it away.
Suzie came along later and put it in the trash.
—
They came back, in more than one life, to live in the wine country (who wouldn’t?). They came back and lived in villages, in forests, and in huts by the sea.
They learned kung fu and knitting. They learned more ways to make love than any other lovers had ever known. Sometimes they remembered the things they had learned from other lives. When they were seven years old on Rapa Nui, in 1700, they remembered that they had flown on starships. They saw the starships in their dreams, and carved surfboards in their image, and learned to fly on the water.
They came back as two Navajo women. They came back as lungfish and banana farmers.
Sometimes they died together, or a few minutes apart, and sometimes one or the other faced long years alone.
BLUE CREEK, MICHIGAN, 1947
Two years after the war had come to a stop, Milo and Suzie sat on their front porch swing, on the evening of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Their thin, veiny old hands lay tangled together in her lap. Their children and grandchildren bustled inside the house, preparing supper. The homemade gold star hung in the window still, for Norman.
The dogs curled up together nearby, faking sleep.
Milo leaned close and said, “I’m proud of you, Suzie.”
Cooking smells drifted out through the screen door, as if the house were breathing pumpkin pie and onions.
Suzie said, “Mmm?” because she didn’t hear well, so he repeated, “I’m proud of you.”
And she squeezed his hand and rested her head on his shoulder and laughed, and said, “That’s all right, love. I’m tired of you, too.”
For Dad and Barbara
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Every book has friends.
Some of these friends are people who actually help the book get written. Maybe they read and offer advice. Maybe they’re agents or editors or people who spark ideas. Others are people who are friends of the book because they are friends of the writer in some way. And of course there are readers, the best friends any book has.
Man, this book sure has a lot of friends.
The list begins with my wife and friend, writer and poet Janine Harrison. Janine has been excited about Reincarnation Blues since I first mentioned it and has been a tireless cheerleader and adviser. She is also much more, of course.
My agent, Michelle Brower, dropped into my life by telephone one day some time ago, saying, “I like your style. Would you like to try and publish books together?” She changed my life, and I thank her with all my heart. It should not go without saying that this book was actually sort of dumb as a first draft, and Michelle guided me toward the light. Everything that’s good about Reincarnation Blues has her mental fingerprints on it. Her assistant, Annie Hwang, can also share in whatever credit is due.
Tricia Narwani, my editor at Del Rey, was wild about the book and is also fun to drink beer with. She, too, guided me through some changes. In the nicest way. You know how some writers will tell you that working with their editors and publishers was pure, raw hell and that the book they wound up with was hardly their book anymore? I have never experienced that. Tricia and Del Rey have been good and gentle friends.
A humble thank-you to Alice Walker for her pamphlet Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (Seven Stories Press, 2001). The story of the wise, loving people in chapters 9 and 27 is inspired and informed by Walker’s account of the Babemba tribe, appearing in this essay.