I'm thinking I'll hang it in the attic.

I recently inherited a giant wind chime from my parents. I was over at their house helping clean out the garage and there it was underneath a half-empty bag of potting soil.

My dad saw me see it there, the wind chime, its mute brass tubes splayed out all over the place like a washed up robot squid.

"You want to take that home, you think?" he asked, a little sheepish. I snorted.

I bought the wind chime for my dad a few years ago. Father's Day, maybe. Or a birthday. My grandparents, his parents, had hung a wind chime in their yard decades ago; as they became ill our memories of time spent at their home grew sharper with the appreciation of better days and my dad started mentioning the sound of the chimes enough that I sought out a specialty store and bought him a close approximation of the same chimes.

I dragged the giant, clanking cardboard box into the family room and I could tell by my dad's face that he was hoping against hope it was three thousand pairs of cufflinks. He reached inside that box, pulled out a polished tentacle, and cringed as if I'd just thrown a church organ against the wall. It didn't help that when he pulled out the entire contraption it did, in fact, sound like I'd just thrown a church organ against the wall.

"I love it," he said, sprinting the whole apparatus outside to the patio. I think that's what he said; I can't be sure, I had my hands over my ears. My dad hung it roughly five inches from the arcadia door and prayed for some global catastrophe that would eliminate wind. Months later, his prayers dissappointingly unanswered, he took matters into his own hands and he wrapped a bungee cord around the chimes so they couldn't move.

I walked into their backyard and there they were, bound and gagged, listlessly drifting from side to side like a wind chime mime.

My dad saw my horror and tried to cover: "We love them," he started, "just... not when they move."

"Well sure," I snorted, "obviously. That's what wind chimes are all about-- looks." I half suspected that an inspection of my dad's car would unveil a trunk full of handcuffed songbirds.

"We have pretty much the same wind chime and we enjoy it!" I elbowed Randy for support. "Right? I mean, we really love ours. It's not right by the door, though, it's... " Huh. I couldn't remember. I looked at Randy. Randy turned his attention to the space just to the left of my head.

"Where is it? Where'd we hang it?" I asked him. I couldn't actually remember seeing it-- or hearing it-- since the patio remodel a year ago. "Do you remember?" Randy peeled some paint off the door jamb with his thumbnail and shrugged. I had a vision, then; a shallow grave, the desperate clink! a shovel full of dirt would make as it landed on a helpless brass tube.

Finding myself suddenly in menacing company, I dropped the subject. Several months later in an effort to mediate peace my parents presented Randy and me with a handmade brass whirligig designed to hang and spin in the wind. My love of shit that hangs off the house was now presumably sated, as was Randy's love of shit that shuts the fuck up. And it was nice, this little thing, with its silent little blue glass ball that spun silently down a brass spiral to nowhere, but it didn't heal my wounds.

Soon after, we had my parents over for dinner and I made sure the brass whirligig was front and center on the patio-- with a pointed modification-- but no one noticed. In hindsight they probably saw it and just assumed I'd finally come around, that I'd seen the crotchety light. The light where nothing is allowed to move and everything is better if it makes less noise.

Meanwhile, my parents' wind chime was inevitably making its slow, undignified crawl into the garage. It started one blustery night when my dad, frustrated that the entire bungeed contraption was banging manically against the house, took the whole thing down and laid it on the patio. Whereupon my mom immediately stepped on it in the dark and almost brass tubed herself into a concussion. That was the beginning of the end.

So last week when my dad asked me if I wanted to take his wind chime home with me, desperate as it looked lying there on the garage floor, cords all tangled, tubes all dented and akimbo, I didn't have a choice. I'd certainly asserted myself as a champion of noisy crap in the yard-- every day when Randy came home he was afraid he'd find a rope of monkeys and tambourines swinging from the patio ledge. Plus getting it away from my parents would be like helping Catherine Martin out of that well-- yeah, it might take some work to get her back to normal, but at least you've freed up some bungee cords. 
¶ posted by Erin on Thursday, May 21, 2009