Cicadas

Abstract

Cicadas James Scales (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution You can play this chord thousands of times and if, on the thousandth and one, the harmony decides to change, and play another chord, you get a new rhythm, which is one thousand times slower. —Daniel Barenboim It must have been late May or early June of 1996 when we drove down from our house outside of Boston to Ridgewood, New Jersey, where my grandmother lived. The drive, which we made once or twice each year, took more than four hours on the interstate, and at that age it was the longest distance I knew by experience. As we drove, my siblings would point out the familiar sights: a giant flag, the well-known exit signs preceding our arrival in Connecticut, the two-story McDonald’s PlayPlace somewhere past New Haven, or the steel cage of the Tappan Zee. Most notable, however, was the giant sculpture north of Providence called the “Big Blue Bug,” supposed to be the largest artificial insect in the world, 2000 times [End Page 108] the size of the eastern subterranean termite which it depicts. The house where my mother grew up and where our grandmother still lived with her niece, Aunt Teresa, budded off the stem of a long cul-de-sac in a sprawling postwar neighborhood, each house built, at least at the beginning, to the same design. My maternal great-grandfather came from Galway, Ireland, and drove a double-decker bus across the Bronx for work; my grandfather served inside a tank during the Battle of the Bulge, and later helped assemble cars at Ford’s plant in Edison, New Jersey. I remember my mother explaining how the roof at her dad’s plant had been covered in grass to hide it from above, but I cannot remember if she said who they were hiding from. A thoughtful man who always made you laugh, my grandfather died from stomach cancer in the early 1970s. Most of my memories of being in New Jersey as a kid are vivid still: the soft click of the screen door latch, the lush beige carpeting, the set of table lamps with studded white glass bowls that curled out at the top like certain fruits or flowers. I spent most of my time in the dim and musty basement with shiplap walls and tiled floors. My mother’s toys were stored down there in boxes, next to an out-of-tune piano and an old brown oil furnace in the corner that always emitted some foreboding buzz. Outside there was a small lawn with a waist-high hedge and a low and twisted apple tree with white lichen on the bark. The tree was cut down some years later when it rotted from the inside, but I remember how it was that spring, 1996, after millions of cicadas had come up from the ground and covered the trunk. At first, I thought their clicking screech, which came in through the windows of the TV room at dusk and kept me up, was the sound of overburdened power lines about to burst, until we saw the piles of their dry, discarded carapaces strewn around the grass. Today, though, as I look through a box of photographs my mother put together before she died from cancer in 2010, I wonder how much of what I remember is a true reflection, and how much has been reshaped or lost. I do not recollect the small red bike with checkered pads, although there is a picture of me riding it. On the back, in my mother’s looping, teacherly script, is written “Ridgewood, 1996.” But I recall the squares of sidewalk I rode over, or I think I can, how they were cracked and lifted by the roots of [End Page 109] trees. Maybe this is because I suffered (and still do) from astigmatism and nystagmus. It was easier to see with my head pointing down, and as a kid I often walked around watching my feet. It was only last year that a doctor finally explained why I could not see my own eyes shaking in the mirror, since...