When the Song, Not Just the Groundhog, Got Cooked

 

Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken.”

So it goes. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five.

(Stock photo. For illustration purposes only.) 

 

 

On a tangible hillside in honest-to-goodness hilly Pittsburgh, actual man is robbed of his bush berries in broad unfiltered daylight. Culprit is furry, breathing. Actual man clobbers culprit and cooks culprit’s wet pink meat.

Actual man makes quiche, perceptible steam puffing out. Man carries dish to party, yum yum.

True story gets around. Man’s breathing sister in fields-and-cows Virginia tells some other breathing people. One says, her thoughts coming hot on the air, “That sounds like a country song: Kill a groundhog and put it in a quiche. Tell him to write a song.”

Breathing sister does. Actual man does. Man jiggers words around in his pulpy brain and sends them to his machine, making it blink but not like eyelashes, just mechanically, across and across the front’s hard glass. Then he thinks up chords to go along. He gets the stringy strings on his guitar to quivering, his throat hums and his Adam’s apple goes up and down, and waves of molecules hit the inside walls of his house. Finally, in an ultimate act of self surrender, his mic on record, moving his wattle like before, all while racing his fingers up and down the instrument’s fretting frets, he relinquishes his music to bits and bytes. To epoxy resins, fiberglass, and solder. To plastic slots and ceramic capacitors. To frail threads of gold, copper, aluminum, silicon.

And when he puts his song out there, and when everybody else with their pea brains listens, it turns out he could sing along with himself. He sounds like three different people. Smart machine, whoa. Well, smart mechanically. The pea brainers go into gales of giggles. They scream and shriek. They laugh at how he sped his mouth around like that.

 

Breathing sister posts the words on her blog.

round about the time i turned 27
i thought back to my childhood in almost heaven
and i could smell the fresh boiled kale
and taste the fine fat cherries filling up my pail

so i set out to return to my roots in the garden
and i dug my whole yard up just to put some chard in
and tomatoes, squash, peppers and zucchini
i believed that i could be a veggie garden genie

Chorus:
Kill a groundhog and put it in a quiche
Grind up groundhog and put it in a quiche
put-it-in-a put-it-in-a put-it-in-a put-it-in-a
put-it-in-a put-it-in-a put-it-in-a quiche

well the seeds were in the ground and air was warm
then the plants began to sprout, why, this looks like corn!
i had shown my country light in an urban darkness,
i was superman with green hands fighting concrete starkness

but then a force more sinister than i had ever known
dug her hole by my yard and called it her home
before my eyes she grew in size as the squash disappeared
i felt used by this rodent, it was totally weird

Chorus

1 cup flour, splash of oil makes the crust
spinach, eggs, onions and cheese make the mush
add the de-boned corpse and turn the oven on high
bake it a while and you have yourself a groundhog pie!

Chorus

The tune is catchy, writes breathing sister. She writes, “I walk around the house belting ‘Grrrrind up grrrroundhog and put it in a quiche . . .’ I have no plans to try it, but my children are smitten. When our dog killed a groundhog (in front of our Fresh Air boy’s wide eyes, no less), Sweetsie came running in to beg me to please, please, PLEASE cook it and put it in a quiche. I declined. I have my limits and cooked groundhog is one of them.”

Breathing sister’s commenters comment, too. One says, My neighborhood is covered in mounds of dirt thrown up by evil moles. I wonder how mole quiche tastes? Another says, Heeeelarious! Is it on YouTube? On second thought, maybe I don’t want that tune stuck in my head. I’ve never had groundhog—I’m adventurous, but I’m not sure I would try it. I did have squirrel once, even after peeking at it in the cooking pot that my cousin was tending and it looked like a scrawny rat.

That’s pretty much it. Nothing much else happens, except when somebody makes a play, the kind with real people talking and walking around on a platform. Putting in some music, the somebody purposely screws up some of the groundhog song’s words to make the song fit with the play’s plot. An Angie person is then consulted, who’s well acquainted with the notation required for bona fide musicians—the stuttering, often staccato black symbols with lots of black wings and black circles blackened even blacker. She produces a piece of paper any bona fide can read with their eyes. They can force their fingers into reproducing the noises on any sort of stringed instrument, or piped. Or they can just sing the sounds with their mouths. A miracle!

And during the play, in real time, in front of the many warm, collected bodies who’ve come in gassed cars on asphalt streets, another man climbs his legs onto the stage. Almost like magic, but really not at all, everyone gets to hear with their pink, pained ears the words and notes blurting forth from the man’s gullet, wind tube, lungs. A smash!

 

 

 

All that is over and done. Just the other week, though, actual man in hilly Pittsburgh—except now he lives in the city’s dip, near river level, a squawker walk-don’t-walk box up the street and thump-de-thump cars going by—sat down at his ever smarter and smarter machine linked now to brainiac bot systems and loaded in his old beast of a song. Out it came in two minutes without anybody stirring a cell or touching, manipulating, seducing, rubbing body to instrument. It was practically Tammy Wynette, who is dead but not really. It was Tammy’s backup singers. It was tangents, tamperments, all but tam-tam-tam tambourines.

Man flashed it to his relatives.

Astonishment dripped from them onto their small blue-lit rectangles.

“KWEESH,” gasped breathing sister, tapping in all capitals. “That’s actually pretty darn good!”

“WOW,” said man’s breathing father.

“Wow!” said man’s breathing brother. “Amazing!”

And now, not long after, I’m telling it from a woods, up a diverged lane. Can’t turn back, can’t turn back. The road’s been taken. Makes all the difference. Animal couldn’t relapse to tendon and fat and cord. Song can’t either. Can’t revert to raw uncooked chords and shuddering strung strings and spit-moist, unfurbished waves of sound. Unless maybe it can, kweesh be damned.