Lying in bed, awake but not up, listening to the sounds of the early morning from the open window behind my head. There is a softness to the acoustics of this early hour that makes the sounds filtered and precise and storylike. I remember it from when I was a kid. Lying in bed on a Saturday morning at 82 Nutmeg Lane, listening to the shouts of my friends in the street outside, like characters in a play, until I had to get up and enter the scene myself.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Rear Window
Lying in bed, awake but not up, listening to the sounds of the early morning from the open window behind my head. There is a softness to the acoustics of this early hour that makes the sounds filtered and precise and storylike. I remember it from when I was a kid. Lying in bed on a Saturday morning at 82 Nutmeg Lane, listening to the shouts of my friends in the street outside, like characters in a play, until I had to get up and enter the scene myself.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
The Vigil
The vigil has been going on for a couple of weeks now. On both sides of Alewife Brook Parkway the congregation has grown, people camping out in folding chairs, people with spotting scopes, binoculars, and massive, multi-lensed cameras on tripods, all tilted at the same upward angle, trained on the window ledge above and to the left of the big red 185 on the up to now hardly-noticed office building across from the Fresh Pond Shopping Center.
But this spring, 185 Alewife Brook Parkway has been the home address of a much-noticed family of red-tailed hawks. And for the past week, that attention has built tenfold as birders and photographers (see above, by the peerless George McLean) and the irresistibly curious gather daily to witness the moment when the robust older chicks, named Larry and Lucy, and maybe even the youngest, Lucky, will “fledge,” or FLY.
That moment, certainly for the oldest two, is considered (by human experts) to be several days overdue. The first chick, Lucy, hatched in mid-April. The other two emerged at five-day intervals. Redtail chicks normally leave the nest after six weeks, give or take a few days. 46 days is the outside number bruited about. Today—May 30—is, I believe, day 49.
I’d been hearing about them for weeks from friends, fellow birders—there was even an article in the Boston Globe—but I had promises to keep and warblers to chase. Only this past week have I joined the fold, the day after the heat wave broke.
I saw the parents come and go, demonstrating the goal with agility and finesse. I saw Dad, also known as Buzz, settle on the big Fresh Pond Cinema marquee in the shopping center, just above “How to Train Your Dragon,” and proceed to shake a dead mouse by the tail to free it of blades of grass (none of this vegetarian crap) before ferrying it across the parkway and dropping it in the nest. I saw Mom, a.k.a. Ruby, deliver some luckless fledgling, a starling or a robin, only to have the trio ignore it, perhaps because it was unplucked.
Mostly, along with everyone else, I watched the fledglings. I watched on the shopping center side while standing in the hot sun; on the 185 side while lying down in the shade, sniffed by an inquisitive Shih-tzu. I watched the chicks eat; poop (the wall behind the nest marked with mysterious white runes); perch on the nest edge three abreast; beat their magnificent four- to five-foot wingspans in each other’s faces; nestle next to each other; step on each other; and at times, thrillingly, take practice jumps into the air, causing corresponding leaps in the observer’s stomach.
But not fly.
You can’t help but wonder if this burgeoning community of vigilantes is, ironically, cramping their style. Hard enough to take the ultimate leap off the high diving platform without a crowd of your once and still distrusted enemy gathered below with hardware not unlike cannon barrels aimed at you.
But after all this time, they probably know that the vibes are good. In fact, maybe we’ve made their comfort zone too big. Given them too compelling a reason not to flee, lest they deprive us, this obviously friendly gang, of their company, or at least to keep an eye on what we’ll do next, to chronicle our comings and goings, sometimes hatching out of our strange metallic eggs, but not, disappointingly, taking wing.
Instead, we’re apparently nesting, too, taking up residence opposite theirs. Becoming instant cognoscenti for the benefit of passersby.
“What kind of bird is that?”
“Is that an eagle?”
“What’s everyone looking at?”
And we (professional or neophyte) reply with pride or with weariness, depending on how many times we’ve answered, but with a deepening sense of propriety: “Those are red-tailed hawks. Babies. 49 days old. They’re going to fly. Any minute!”
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Numerous Days in May
Minus birding, minus just going outside (too hot), minus a post of palindromes (too hot to hoot), what’s left?
How about an incomplete list of the holidays I missed noting this month: Martin Z. Mollusk Day in Ocean City, NJ (1); Lumpy Rug Day (3); Respect for Chickens Day (4); Totally Chipotle Day (5); No Pants Day (7); No Socks Day (8); Limerick Day (12); Root Canal Appreciation Day (13); Mike the Headless Chicken Day (14-15); May Ray Day (19); Eliza Doolittle Day (left) (20); and Towel Day (25), in honor of author Douglas Adams.
To make up for my oversight, I will choose three days to belatedly observe. I had a chicken salad sandwich (or a “chick sal sand,” as the waitress in “Five Easy Pieces” called it) for lunch, so that either embodies or rules out Respect for Chickens Day. Call it a wash.
I haven’t been wearing socks all day, so put me down for No Socks Day.
And I can’t very well pass up Limerick Day. Here are three lime rickeys:
Forcing a rhyme in a limerick
Can be cute, but it’s mainly a gimmerick.
One should practice restraint
Or it might leave a taint,
Like a dish overseasoned with turmeric.
* *
A citrus fruit high on a shelf
Rhymed with no one except for himself.
He was one lonely orange.
Then he thought, “Orange-schmorange!”
And went on a date with an apple.
* *
The writer would like to suggest
that you stop now and then for a rest.
Too much aabba can cause a
Slight feeling of nausea.
So pause: a nice walk might be best.
*
“Between the cosmic and the cosmetic there is a thing,” he said, pleased with what he thought was an epigram….
He then started a procession of perfume sensations going under Runyon’s nose. “This,” he said, “is OPENING MOVE and this one is called MANTRAP. We expect both of them to sell well throughout Camelopardalis, because they are made from the bile of camels and leopards. Local pride, you know.”…
When he had exhausted his perfumes, he told Runyon about the invincible line of lipsticks which he carried, and he recited the names as he would a catechism: “Rising Moon, Wet Maroon, Ruby Ink, Parlor Pink, Country Maid, Scarlet Shade, Cupid’s Bow, Virgin’s Glow, Slightly Kissed, Amethyst, Bloodshed, Seeing Red, Rose Petal, and Hot Metal.”
Runyon looked out the window at the bright blue galaxies burning beyond the black Coal Sack of Magellan, and he found that by concentrating on the great lights yonder, he could make the voice of the salesman seem farther and farther away.
* *
In case I forget, tomorrow is Cellophane Tape Day, Friday is Slugs Return from Capistrano Day, and Sunday is Hug Your Cat Day. Among other abundant excuses for celebration.
Monday, May 24, 2010
The land of Mayjune
Mayjune. That would be a nice name, and it is for at least one person who surfaced when I Googled it. You’d have to live up to a name like that. Be willing to be evocative. (There must be people, real or fictional, named for each month, day, and season. May Pang, June Allyson, Tuesday Weld, January Jones, Thursday Next, and Spring Byington, for starters. November Brown would make a good name for a torch singer.)
Mayjune is where we are now, the green still fresh, trees still fluffy, the tale of the year still developing, but also that mysterious zone where spring takes on summer. (That's a summer tanager, by the way, in transition.) Mysterious because the signs are both subtle and sudden. A path that’s unexpectedly overgrown. Crickets chirping in the meadow, like a thought you didn’t know you were thinking. The woods suddenly hollowed of migrants and their frenetic energy, settling into a thoughtful realm again. Bubbles of heat that chase the corduroys from the bureau and the shorts and short-sleeved shirts down from the attic where they’ve been hibernating. Dictatorial thunderstorms.
If May is a combiner, she is also a qualifier. I like what she does to nouns you didn’t always realize were verbs. April May June. Or she just as easily may February. March April May. (But always to a different drummer.) May June July: a toast to heat and summer vacation.
In sum, here’s a little poem in honor of today reaching the high eighties:
Summary
Summer takes some of the spring.
Summer takes some of the fall.
Summer takes some of whatever it can
‘Cause summer just loves to sprawl.
Friday, May 21, 2010
End Notes
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Riding on the roof
I have no idea what that means, but I like the sound of it. Well, maybe one idea. I get a little bird-driven in May, as you may have gathered from recent posts. And I may not be done. Still haven't seen my indigo bunting or bobolink. Probably too late for a Blackburnian. And as for the Canada, it's your move, dude. The point is, sometimes you've got to set your own agenda, especially in an almanac, which tends toward time-sensitive events. It doesn't have to. I mean, sure, I had a great two or three minutes this morning following a black-throated blue warbler up the rungs of a bush, grinning when it flared its wing briefly and the sun louvered through it. Happiness. Of the deep-sigh variety. But you can also take a break from the things you have to write about. You can just go riding on the roof.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Sylvan
It's the first song I listen for in the woods of May: the mystical filigree of the wood thrush.
Do other birds listen and think, “I wish I could sing like that”? Doubtful. For one, it would not serve any purpose if a red-eyed vireo, say, sang like a wood thrush. For another, birds only get jealous in folk tales. Nor do they trade, or harbor, compliments.
But we like to hear the wood thrush, and we’re animals. Cousins to birds on the DNA Tree. So who knows. Maybe there’s an aesthetic sense among birds, too. Not so much the art as the mechanics. Along the lines of, “That’s a well put-together song.” Or “That song’s all it can be.” Or, among rival wood thrushes, a simple recognition: “That bird's song is sylvan (i.e., resonant, euphonic, effective in the woods)."
A description of a wood thrush’s song works better if the reader’s heard the real thing. Then the words trigger the memory. And you can take the short intro: tut-tut-tut… the liquid, fluty phrases...ee-o-lay…and the tingly little trill at the end—and set it in a cool green forest, and give it a mysterious, echoey, arabesque quality. And maybe even picture the singer (rusty and chocolate brown head to tail, black dapples on white breast) opening its bill and these complex, dreamy lyrics sailing out.
Other birds are sylvan. Many of them are thrushes. The veery has a delicate silvery swirling song, echoing downward like rainwater in an elf’s washbasin. The Swainson’s thrush goes in the other direction, swirling up. The hermit thrush looses a long ethereal note at different pitches and after each one shimmers brief cadenzas.
Adding to the ambience of the May woods is an Eastern wood-pewee, with its plaintive peee-oo-wee? pee-ooo. Also a red-eyed vireo, seldom seen, incessantly interviewing itself in short…widely…spaced…one-word…or…two-word…phrases…until…you get…tired of…scanning…the leaves...up there. And of course there’s the ovenbird, ringing out in rising volume from the forest floor, somewhere, everywhere: cher-tea, cher-tea, CHER-TEA, CHER-TEA, CHER-TEA!
But without a thrush, especially a wood thrush, the woods lacks a certain aural beauty it might have had. Sylvan.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Tanager, Scarlet
It's not really a showboat like the others. Not an extrovert like the oriole or a "glorified robin" like the grosbeak. Its song has been famously compared to a robin with a sore throat. A raspy, tuneless singsong that is nature's way of distributing gifts fairly so that you don't get the looks and the voice.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Field Notes 3
Showboats, cont.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Field Notes 2
The Showboats
Friday, May 14, 2010
Field Notes
Where have I been? Birding, mostly. May is the month for migrants, sweeping through the woods, fattening up on grubs and seeds. And waiting for them with mental checklists if not real notebooks are the slightly obsessed legions of birders who need to be out there tallying an indigo bunting, an orchard oriole, a veery, a night-heron, and as many different warblers as the canopy will divulge, especially today, Bird-a-thon Day, the big May fund-raiser for Mass. Audubon. So for the next week or two, at the risk of boring the uninculcated, I will send dispatches from the field, or from the bivouac, beginning with one I’m still looking for.
* *
O Canada
What is it about the Canada warbler? It’s elusiveness, for one thing. So far, it’s looking like another spring without seeing one. Friends have seen them. Peggy saw one that made her gasp. In a jealous pique, I accused Ed of seeing one, even though it was probably a Magnolia. Bernie, a birder I’ve been running into at Brooks, tells me where he saw one: take the dirt path along the back of the pond in the cemetery. I go. I listen for that explosive burst of sound. I stare intently for a movement in a bush. None.
In the bird book it doesn’t look any more spectacular than the Magnolia, which also has a black necklace, plus other black streaks on bright yellow. But the Magnolia is much more available than the Canada.
Then there's the Blackburnian, which is just as elusive, and even more gasp-evoking with its fiery throat, but it’s more famous, a matinee idol, a flash in a treetop; please, no autographs.
We concoct these personalities for birds—polite waxwings, affable orioles, madcap mockingbirds—and to me the Canada seems intriguingly moody, not just shy but difficult. Its song has a random quality, a jumble of notes that other warbler outbursts seem to resemble but turn out not to be.
I cling to the memories of ones I’ve seen in the past. One in a certain bush near Halcyon Pond in Mt. Auburn, pointed out to me by a birder in a satin Celtics jacket. One I stalked myself in the meadow behind McLean Hospital in Belmont. I think I spished it out—faked an alarm call, which should be against the law, but isn’t.
What is it about the Canada? It’s the only bird that makes me ask what is it about it. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get lucky.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Merrymaking
What did the Puritans think, to seea scarlet tanager in a tree?Did one glimpse put thoughts of sininto the head of Hester Prynne?Did the bird cause Cotton Matherto work himself into a lather?Was that flasher from the tropicsone of his favorite sermon topics?Oh, tell me how the Puritans managedwhen their days were scarlet tanaged?
Friday, May 7, 2010
Doris and Harold
During my sister's recent visit to Boston, we took a walk, the four of us, through Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. Dory noticed a gravestone bearing a symbol that was new to her: a sculpted stump of a tree. I explained that it meant the person buried there had died young—had been cut off in his or her prime. "Doris's grave has one," I added. "I could show you."
Not only because they were so young when they died, nor because they are our namesakes, we think of them as brilliant and extraordinary. By all accounts, they were.
Doris was a gifted artist, a painter and sculptor. In our den, when I was a kid, we had a bust that she had made of a bearded Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. It was perfect.
Harold was deft, too, a gentle wit, kind of Gatsby-handsome. I’ve seen one photo of him, with fair hair, and two of Doris’s watercolors of him in my uncle Norman’s home. I don’t have many Harold stories (or Doris ones either), but there’s this from one of my dad’s letters to my mom, shortly before they were married, in June of 1940:
Everybody here is well — including Harold, who looks like a million bucks. He’s quite a kid. I asked him to recite the alphabet so he promptly began, “A, B, C, D.” Then he stopped and I said, “Well, go ahead.” And a perplexed look crawled into his face and he said, “There’s more?"
* *
After the intersection with Montvale Ave., Washington Street loses its commercial apparatus, and after a few blocks, its trees. The cemeteries appear on the right, three of them. We pull in at the second one: Beth Joseph III.
I’m used to cemeteries, like Mt. Auburn and Medford’s Oak Grove, as places of nature: birding opportunities, mainly. There, the graves are peripheral, running third behind birds and trees. But this cemetery’s purpose is unambiguous. It is a roster of the dead. The graves are arrayed, sometimes crookedly, in long crowded rows, often with barely an inch of space between them. It is businesslike, nothing pastoral about it.
However, these dead are not entirely strangers. I don’t just mean Doris and Harold. While we’re hunting for their gravesites, it’s impossible not to feel a kind of kinship with these Bostonian Jews, those who had come over from Europe, or their children or grandchildren, some of them babies. Their names sound almost familiar: Morris and Ida Weiner, Libby Katz, Hyman Horch, Ida Polatnick, David Kadish. Some of them might have known one of the Obers, or known someone who knew an Ober or an Ober cousin, like Harris Sobell. Some of the graves even have photos in porcelain cameos. Libby Katz is broad and Russian-looking. Morris Weiner has a trim moustache and a banker’s bowler hat, but soulful eyes. His wife, Ida, looks formidable in her steel glasses.
Dory calls from a few rows away. She has found Doris’s grave. It’s tall, white, with a sugary texture, and the cut-off tree forms it like a pillar There is a cameo photo, too, almost painting-like. Dreamy eyes, sweet smile, wavy brown hair. I can imagine her mixing paints, shaping Tchaikovsky’s beard. Those eyes focused, making an artist’s calculations.
It occurs to me that they must have all been standing here on a cold day in February, all the brothers, Emil, Harold, Norman, and Ralph. Also their parents, Mike and Gussie, whose stone is now next to hers, the low gray one marked OBER.
Harold’s grave is one row away, near the street. It’s wider than Doris’s. No sculpted tree trunk, but a small inscribed tree showing the top hewn from the bottom. “In Our Hearts You Live Forever,” it says, and much more in Hebrew. As usual, I am struck by his birthdate—October 28, 1917—one day after mine.
He was never Hal, as far as I know. He inhabited the name Harold in a lithe, athletic way that I can’t. Maybe it was a more comfortable age for Harolds. (When some flack calls me Harold, I feel a tad geeky, as if I’ve suddenly sprouted an argyle sweater-vest.)
Nor do I think of Harold as an uncle (though we would have made a fine pair of uncle and nephew, I suspect, Harolding and heralding each other). More like an older brother I never knew.
Dory puts pebbles on the graves, a custom that makes me feel, as I follow suit, like I’m copying the adults I used to watch doing it. It’s akin to that feeling when my uncle Norman, the last of the Ober siblings, died in 2008, and when my mom died a few months later: “We’re the grownups now.”
In our hearts they live forever. Well, sort of. I'd like to think a reanimation does happen. The revival of a lively imagination or a warm memory. Kind of like the way “The Sixth Sense” ended, with “I see dead people” becoming a good thing, a useful thing, not a scary thing, both for the dead and the living.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Obers and Corwins
My father's father, Michael Ober, was a constable (a server of subpoenas) in Boston in the 1920s. He had an office on Milk Street and feigned a convincing Irish brogue, despite his Jewish-Hungarian roots. He was the oldest boy in a family of twelve brothers and sisters, the children of Joseph Ober and Celia Klein, who emigrated from their home in Kisvarda, Hungary to Boston around 1885. The three oldest—Rose, Mike, and Ethel—were born in Kisvarda. The rest were native Bostonians: Sam, Eddie, Jenny, Helen, Harry, Gertie, Bertha, Mildred, and Emil, born between 1886 and 1906. My dad, also named Emil, had a lot of aunts and uncles.
Runyon alighted from the train when nobody was looking, and the conductor waved and said, "Flig kazam vuz," a homely local blessing meaning "May you have a long and happy life (flig), attended by many worthwhile progeny (vuz), and be safe from the depradations of cosmic rays, and the blight of the blim smut." (kazam)To Emil I merely owe my existence. While he was a student at Massachusetts Agricultural College (later U. Mass.) in Amherst, Emil often ate at the boarding house of Ida and Meyer Novick, who attracted many Jewish students by serving kosher. He got to know their daughter, Betty, quite well, and thought, "Here is just the girl for my cousin, Emil Ober." He was right.