pigeon

the smell of melted ping-pong ball in Grandpa & Grandma’s basement

I’ve mentioned grandpa and grandma’s basement already. But why do I get transported back there instantly, every time I smell melting plastic?

Why do kids make indecipherable, inscrutable choices?

Why is it raining on the UWM Student Union roof right now over my head as I’m sitting here at a wobbly table typing out questions I know I’m not going to be able to answer?

Why does the rain sound like the inevitability of acceleration, time flying, damage done, proximity to the sudden rush of death?

Even as it nourishes.

It’s been dry and hot. We need the rain. The rain undoes everything.

Why did my brother and I have a ping-pong ball that had been perfectly split in half? Why did we choose to place one of its hemispheres atop the incandescent globe of a floor lamp in our grandparents’ basement in Yankton?

Whatever the reason, we forgot about it until much later in the day, when my dad ducked down the stairs to get something or tell us to come to dinner or something, and said, “What the heck is that smell?”

We followed our noses to the source, and found a tiny pool of milky white slag oozing down the globe like icing on a cinnamon roll. Only it didn’t smell anything like a cinnamon roll.

Some people think sore muscles don’t feel good. “They’re sore!” they insist, as if it’s self-explanatory. I have always been genuinely puzzled by these people, because having sore muscles, the kind you get after a good workout, is one of my all-time favorite physical sensations. It’s like an internal massage. It’s like my body is made of a couple dozen good-humored cosmic badgers, all running around in a locus of spacetime roughly me-shaped, reminding me that it’s a joke and a privilege to be alive and have a body that you can do weirdly satisfying stuff with.

Such as choose to put half a ping-pong ball on a —

I kind of wish I could remember what the reason was.

Oh, but I almost forgot why I brought up sore muscles. It’s an example of the eccentricities of pleasure vs pain. And for that matter, how about appealing vs revolting — do you like the smell of a school bus idling, even though it’s poisonous? How about cilantro? Melted plastic seems like it should be a bad smell, but — as long as it’s the right kind, presumably the kind they make (or used to make, in the late 70s or early 80s) ping-pong balls out of, heated up the right way, presumably slowly, such as by application to a warm but not incinerating surface — it smells good to me. Is this only because it became associated with one of the most idyllic settings of my childhood?

Is it still raining? (pause to listen) Can’t tell. That white noise could just be the student union’s gigantic HVAC system — another poisonous thing that elicits a pleasurable response.

Dad was a little miffed but not too upset as I recall. The accidental fluid materials experiment must not have done any major damage.

Maybe the little plastic dome was a vessel for a space colony, and the lamp was the remote world they’d landed on. Warm, glowing, protected by an orbital torus of some kind of celestial fabric — perfect! Let’s start our new life here, fellow travelers! And then a few hours later, there was nothing left of the colony but a hot stinky puddle.

It’s a plausible explanation — most of what my brother and I got up to had something to do with space travel, after all. He was taller than me for a few years, but long after I’d surpassed him in terrestrial height, his elevated vision still infused mundanity with the technoactive clouds of science fiction. He could see things in other worlds I hadn’t seen, and he explained them to me, made it all make sense so I could go there too.

For example, the fourth spatial dimension. A point is zero dimensions (he said, probably drawing on a napkin); extend it out to get a line which is one dimension; extrude a right angle out from that to get two dimensions (plane); extrude a right angle again to get the third dimension (cube); yeah yeah, obviously, what’s your point; but then he asked me to extrude a right angle from that to get a hypercube — the mere possibility was — I couldn’t actually see it, mind you, though not for lack of trying, but just knowing there is something there that you can’t see — that’s the kind of shit that reshapes your mind forever, I’m sure of that.

What if you never had someone in your life to introduce you to stuff like that?

I wonder what happened to the other half of the ping-pong ball...?

What does a ping-pong hemiball do without its other half? Maybe sit forgotten in somebody’s grandma’s garden, becoming a tiny reservoir of gentle rain. A minuscule dram of the greater whoosh of chaos. A firefly’s bathtub. What there is to a planet or a life — that which inexplicably, accidentally on purpose, holds water, for a time, in a space, until it fades, and cracks, or breaks, or melts, and makes no sense.