You'd spend three months riding the bus, crinkling the printer paper with your clammy fingers, route map downloaded ahead of time and inkjetted out. Late era Sony Discman held parallel to the bus floor such that it wouldn't skip, burned copies of albums by Gang of Four and Primus rattling around in the first messenger bag you ever owned. A cell phone shared by you and your Dad, two transfers, spending a whole afternoon in transit just so that you could hold hands in a parched city park and get one errant whiff of body spray bought at the mall.

That or you'd haul ass on your foldable scooter on the asphalt path that ran beside the train tracks, daring yourself to get all the way to the strip mall with the big box guitar store and the little independent video rental place. You'd spend as much time as the staff would allow playing the five string basses and the cheap synthesizers and then when they'd ask you to buy something you'd go next door and grab a handful of R-rated DVDs - that place never cared how old you were and in the late evening, waiting for the rest of your family to come home, your eyes would go all wide, things you weren't ready to see played off a Playstation, gripping the controller like your life depended on it.

Or you'd spend every second you could at church, begging your Mom (the church receptionist) to drop you off first thing, staying until the early-20s counselors told you to scoot. You'd dutifully bow your head during prayer and joyfully raise both hands high during worship, basking in both the presence of the Lord and the absence of bullying - who's cooler than who at bible summer camp?

But then you started working, needed your own money for gas. One whole summer spent cutting keys and filing bolts at the hardware store down the street from your high school, the smell of turpentine and orange-scented mopping compound strong on your clothes and a walkie-talkie on your hip. You'd pipe A Tribe Called Quest into your earpiece and once in a while your manager let you smash the out-of-catalog patio furniture with a sledgehammer, the sun brutal in the parking lot. The money felt strange - it felt unearned and light as air in your pocket but was also somehow never enough.

Later on you'd take these precious months to drive around and play music with your friends, often doing drugs and binging beers in equal measure with singing and crossing state lines. Or you'd fly 3,000 miles to a city on an island dwarfed by the Pacific, raven calls echoing in the spruce trees as your guitar rumbled out. Or you'd live out of a suitcase, hauling fifty pounds of vinyl records on your back up on the Freciarossa. And now you're lucky to ever simply convey yourself, in all of your thick glory, to any shoreline. Dip your head in the water, child, the days won't go on forever.

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We don't mark the time since in calendar years gone by. We don't keep track of days without, or however many months it's been. What really makes it real is the summer breaking through. Sunburns and grass crisping up in the heat and brilliant, late-evening sunsets are the clocks we keep her by.

And not just because that's when we lost her - it's right in the middle of summer, the anniversary of the accident (and those absolutely awful phone calls). That heavy, heavy date swirls in a pool of gravity. Other summer dates get warped around it - the 4th, the day I was born, the date we moved in together, all twisting, bending down. The solstice and remembering, hand in hand.

But the date is coincidental, the calendar irrelevant, because what this time of year holds is her undeniable energy, her fun, her boundlessness. She was free, warm, and abundant, always radiating. She held more possibilities than anyone I've ever met - how it feels when it's the middle of summer and the sun's still up at 9pm and you do a dozen things in a day because the light fills you up? That's how it felt to be around her - we could sing another one, we could close down the bar, we could eat dinner for six hours and laugh and laugh and laugh. She was tidal - when she roared into a room or summoned us via our phones we'd get swept up in it, dragged smiling into something larger, a little scary, a little thrilling.

We see a million things in the course of the longer days that bring her back to us: fireworks overhead, of course, people partying on the sidewalk because it's too hot in their apartment, fireflies, skimpy clothing, beautiful plumes of vape hanging heavy in the humidity, the childhood reversion and geologic scale of hanging at the beach, loud music bouncing off of hot asphalt, trespassing on rooftops, people working hard at what they're doing, harmony singing, people sweating, people having fun and smiling. Most vividly there's that feeling of something fun and bold just within your grasp, if only you had the moxie to make it happen, every time we dare it we feel her. Every brilliant sunset that sloshes around oranges and purples feels like a personal greeting. She's here, we say, and point.

Her work in the studio was to distill all of this into form, to bottle up all that was wonderful, terrible, and temporary of the anthropocene and give it back to us in polished resin, rounded edges and jagged shards, in colors just a little too vibrant to be naturally occurring. Her work glowed, a little phosphorescent and a little radioactive. A technicolor warning: this won't last forever, nothing will. And maybe that's why she was always conjuring, always wringing out the last few drops of the day - abandon and urgency. And on the hottest days, the longest ones, when we think how much more can the planet possibly stand, we stay out late, another summer passing.

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One tether after another snapped and upward you ascended, a set-free hot air balloon, smoke curling airborne from a pyre, an angel returning to heaven. These were the places, the people, and the animals with kind, soft eyes that kept you rooted to the spot. And now you're aloft in the eddies of the wind, high enough to see the world curve.

He was stubborn and he was funny and, each time we met, he seemed larger than he ought to be. Scary, almost, mass and muscle and sinew, but so gentle with you while you brushed his hair, a sequence of implements I had never seen before. He smelled a particular way - sweetly rotting hay, sweat, cracked black pepper. He loved treats and he would register a palpable delight every time we whipped out a carrot or a mass of grains, sticky with molasses. And you were someone else in his presence. Your posture changed, you spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper, communicating with him with touch and murmuring. I loved watching you two. And then you crumpled up on the phone one morning, and before we knew what was happening we were climbing the fence near the pasture where he's buried, flowers laid in the dirt.

She howled under a blossoming tree at the edge of the farm and thus was found and welcomed, brought into the home and named for the flowers overhead. Such a rich life lived - outdoors all the time, rollicking in muck, hardly ever bathed and absolutely doted on, bacon fat poured into her dry food for the last year of her life. Sweet and lazy and so tenderly disoriented in those last months, she wouldn't leave the closet with the washer dryer, like every hour was a thunderstorm. The last picture I took of her - standing in the foyer of your grandmother's empty house - came out all blurry, but still I see a smile, her tail drawing an arc behind her.

How are you, my precious child? Was how she began to greet me, whether or not she could make out the details of my face in those last long months. How wonderful, she'd say, to just about anything. Abundant joy and divine light through the very end. Her home was full of objects and colorful paintings, all windows and mirrors - the afternoon sun would bounce around in there, dancing off all the surfaces. We'd sit on the back porch in a haze of pine pollen, as far away as the plastic tubing of her oxygen tank would allow, the gas babbling quietly inside. In the days after she left us, I played the baby grand piano, bench full of yellowing hymns. There was holiness in her heart and in the hearts of those she prayed for. She had it tuned for you, you told me, she loved it when you played. I imagined her listening, still do.


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A clear and common miracle that alloyed metal, formed into hollow tubes, can be then cut into various pythagorean lengths, ratios and measurements, then suspended from a shared frame with a wooden disc at the center. And then, hung strategically from a beam on the front porch, these interrelated lengths of pipe can catch another common miracle - that of wind, the freeway interchange of warmed air and cooled air - and make it sing.
Two hollow lengths of the same type of alloyed metal will each create an identical tone. Two hollow lengths, one half the length of the other, will produce frequencies of a two-to-one nature, known in western music theory as an octave - in other words, the same note in a different register. Other mathematical relationships determine the other intervals - for instance, a second length of alloyed metal in a three-to-two ratio creates a perfect fifth, and a five-to-four ratio creates a major third. Measurable, structured harmony that to ears accustomed to hymns, string quartets, and American top 40 radio sounds wonderful, beautiful.

But perfect music - in just the same way as perfect geometry, or the perfect observable human consumer - can't be said to actually exist, and if there were such a thing as perfectly measurable mathematical music, it would probably be boring, devoid of any surface. There are imperfections in the manufacturing of the chimes, for instance, that slightly alter the sound of each individual note. And if the wind picks up enough, the wood will strike the metal such that the chime bends, altering the quality of the note. And then there is the movement of the chimes themselves, a slight doppler effect that alters the resulting sound waves as they sway. And then there are the overtones, a whole ever-rising stack of them - the notes and frequencies above what we register as the sound of the instrument that shape its sound. Have you ever heard an actual church bell ringing out on a quiet morning? Often there is a noticeable minor chord that hangs in the air long after the original clang has dissipated - this is the mournful resonance, very present in the common tone of struck metal.

In Denmark last year I visited an enormous solitary chime suspended from the ceiling of the of a beautiful public library overlooking the Bay of Aarhus. Created by the artist Kirstine Roepstorff, "the Gong" is designed to ring out every time a baby is born at the local hospital - new parents, in extremely Danish fashion, are given the opportunity to push a button and ring the enormous bronze tube, if they so choose. I wanted to hear it. I wanted the arrival of new life to be deafening and overwhelming, wanted it to be shushed by a librarian. But on a few days of subsequent visits it never rang out.

And then, how funny, I remembered how the mall I used to hang out at when I was in middle school claimed at one point to hold the world's largest wind chimes. An entire wall of them next to the entrance to Macy's, demurely covered by bronze covers in the shape of bells to keep their tinkling to an acceptable shopping volume. They took the wind and the wonder out of them.

Wind chimes, then, are the clarion of air circulating, of cycles, of phenomena, of the Earth hurtling and spinning. You couldn't accurately simulate the stochastic rhythms of a set of wind chimes if you tried (I have tried). Every time a bell rings an angel takes flight, or a newborn arrives in Denmark, or a sale is made, they ring it up. These chimes - recorded, splashed on cassette tape, and re-sampled into a digital keyboard - indicate one thing: that one afternoon, while visiting my girlfriend's parents, a storm rolled in, fat teardrops splashing in the sandy loam.