About Crows

Five Memories of Motion

19 Fi v e M em o r i e s o f M oti o n (i) My father didn’t want us delivering in our own neighborhood. It was fine when my middle brother had a starter route: thirty papers on our street and a couple more spilling around the block; he didn’t have to cross any busy streets, and the whole thing could be completed in fifteen minutes. But when you bumped up to four or five hundred, neighbors were bound to catch wind that delivering had become the family business. At eight, I could only think he was trying to protect us from embarrassment. The same way I took him at his word when he brought the family dog to the pound after it leapt the fence and bit the Shriner’s clown up the street, and came back claiming that when he got there he met a guy who said, “Sebastian’d be perfect for my gas station in the country!” It never occurred to me he would lie, just as it never occurred shame still rattled around inside men at thirty-nine, that the half-drunk man with ink-stained hands who stumbled in our kitchen at night, mumbling maxims on work, would grow silent in the car crawling through the projects at dawn, as we ran from door-to-door-to-tailgate, and he listened to the police scanner like he was awaiting the voice of God. (ii) The local news is closing with a “feel good” on the nine-year-old neighbor. He can’t see but he’s a genius of sorts, compensating for his blindness with his sense of motion. The theme is tolerance and overcoming adversity. There’s a clip of him whacking a ball off a tee and dashing up the first-base path while the rest of his fourth grade class stand frozen in smiles 20 for the camera. My experience is that he can dodge a tag if you trap him in a pickle, but these kids don’t put forth any effort. When my sister’s smoking hand hovers left, and gently rolls the ash from her joint against the smooth inside of the glass ashtray, she doesn’t take her eyes off the show. They say this sense is primal and in us all— one of the lesser known outside “the big five”—like stretch receptors in our lungs. Some foundation just gave my neighbor a scholarship to a state college, and after the next commercial break, they’ll reveal the home renovations volunteers completed to make life easier: an open-plan kitchen with motion-sensor faucets, a spaceship bed, and the parents’ new master suite, with cornflower blue walls so fresh, the boy says he can smell the wet paint. (iii) Proprioception: the seventh sense. My sister researches it. Unconscious awareness of movement arising from stimuli within the body. Hypothesized by neurophysiologist Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, the same year that claimed the first known victim of Alzheimer’s: 1906. She’s reading about that too. Of Auguste Deter, Dr. Alzheimer wrote: “At lunch she eats cauliflower and pork. Asked what she is eating she answers spinach. Asked to write Auguste D., she tries to write Mrs. and forgets the rest.” When the Exelon patch kicks in maybe he can drive again, my sister suggests, as my grandfather walks the dog out front. But she hasn’t read his medical reports, which recommend we place an anonymous call to police and have his license taken away. He says he’s been doing it since he was fourteen, driving around Dover, New Hampshire, during the war, while his brother made it with lonely girls 21 in the backseat, and he’s not . . . stopping . . . now. Before grabbing his hat and heading toward the driveway to leave, he slowly takes a knife out from his coat pocket, and from a rumpled sandwich bag, slices a doggie treat into razor-thin wafers. (iv) After my parents retrieved my sister from the police station in the summer of ’88, after she’d been observed and evaluated by experts, and finally released, nothing happened. Life went on just as it was before the abduction. And sometimes, when watching my older brothers throw her around the swimming pool, with bright orange floaties blown up around her biceps and her screaming mouth revealing the same missing teeth as any other kid her age, I’d ask myself, Did she ever really...