The Ratel

I had an interesting animal dream the other night. It started with a familiar motif: A distant, incredibly tall treetop around which several magnificent hawks and eagles are wheeling and alighting. It occurs so often in my dreams it could be the logo at the start of a film, like the stars arcing over Paramount's mountain.

The focus shifts to a nearby bush, snow-covered and sprinkled with red bits of fruit that resemble strips of red pepper or pimentos. And a flock of small gray birds is making short work of them, plucking them clean. One small bird remains near the top: a pygmy owl, gray and soft-feathered. Thinking it needs rescuing, I lift the little owl off the bush and bring it inside my house. Then the dream pulls a fast one. As I'm stroking the owl's soft feathers, I realize that they're not feathers; they're fur. The bird I have saved is a mammal, and it is growing rapidly. I put it down on the ground, and now it's the size and has the black and white colors of a skunk. Except the tail is stubby. I hastily put it outside. It looks around a bit and then attempts to come back in through the sliding glass door, but I won't let it. In fact, I kick it as far as the neighbor's side yard. I feel guilty, and the maybe-skunk's non-reaction confuses me. You'd think it would have immediately sprayed me with a jet of skunk juice, but it didn't. Maybe it's not a skunk. At one point it blunders into something that detonates in a straw-colored starburst. Poor dumb moke. But it's still dangerous.

The following night's dream brings a rare continuation: the critter is back! I'm watching it from a third or fourth floor window, looking down upon a small park. There it is, roaming around, the size of a tapir now, and with a more even pattern of black and white. I think I know what it is. I think it's a ratel.  Also known as a honey badger, found in Africa. Those facts don't enter into the dream. Just that this must be a ratel, big as a small horse, a wild animal of unpredictable behavior. People should be warned.  Later in the dream I'm staying with friends in their rustic hilltop house in the woods. I know that my friend Henk is a hunter, and I suggest that he get his shotgun and shoot the ratel dead. The dream ends without this happening. But I wake up reflecting thatI have gone from petting a cute little owl to booting a phlegmatic skunk into the neighbor's yard, to recommending a kill shot on a ratel. Quite an evolution.

Not long after it occurs to me that ratel is an anagram for alert. And later. And alter.

*

It's about me and nature. About what's become of our relationship. Even in this blog, between 2009, trying to notice every seasonal nuance, and now, nothing to observe between January 19 and April 18. It snowed. We went to northern California one week in February and sawSpring (someone else's), saw daffodils and tulips, and now Spring has made its way to New England. So the ratel is nature,  or maybe it's me—Honey to my wife, Carol, but badgering myself. Okay, fine, it's both; roll the film, someone get the light...

It was an early connection, going back to the woods that bordered the house I grew up in (age 5 to 12) in suburban Stamford, Connecticut. There in my Cub Scout years I discovered sassafras mitten leaves, wood thrushes, flickers, skunk cabbage, the fantastic scarlet tanager, moseying black-shelled turtles in the grass, and the rumor of water moccasins lurking around giant boulders.

After my dad died we moved to El Paso, Texas (age 13 to 18), where family was, and nature turned foreign: chaparral, lizards, roadrunners, and walking stick insects or large pale moths clinging to the kitchen screen door. 

College in upstate NewYork: nature and I kind of drifting apart, save for shockingly cold winters, trumpeter swans one time on Lake Moraine, and scallop-shell fossils everywhere.
         
Dropped out of grad school, saw America, dropped back into UBC in Vancouver  (age 24 to 37) began to romance nature in writing: wrote a kids'  book about an old character from the 1880s named Lunch Counter Jones who shows up in the 1980s and befriends animals and shares folksy stories with them.

And finally, back east to Boston, where I took to roaming meadows and woods and wetlands and writing about it for fun, and became more of a birder, stalking brown thrashers, Blackburnian warblers, indigo buntings, and the fantastic scarlet tanager. 

And then in 2009, three things happened in fairly quick succession: 1. I was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, 2. I got laid off from my 20-year job as a textbook editor, and 3. I started this blog called Old Hatch's Almanac, writing about time and nature: The Ary boys, Janu and Febru, and March forth! and the birds and bards of April and May Questel (Betty Boop) and June fireflies and rounding Cape August and Laurel and Hardy singing Shine On Harvest Moon in the French Foreign Legion and front-porch pumpkins and my namesake October and memorious November and the revels and  revelations of December. But you can only make those rounds so many times before you start repeating yourself or worse, taking it for granted, or even worse, stop noticing.

Which is why I'm now going to rise from the chair, reach for my hat, tuck my laptop into my backpack, and take some time to reflect on the ratel, and the nature inside—aging, Parkinson's—as well as outside. My goal is a new edition of this blog, perhaps with a book in mind, and probably under a new name. And with that I will saunter out the gate toward the depot like Laurel and Hardy, one more time...

Not-Birds

I think it's time to write about something besides writing,  

Not birds. Or maybe not-birds. Ed Hazell and I drove out to Forest Hills Cemetery in a remote corner of Boston to see a reported black-backed woodpecker, which is usually a bird of the Canadian north. Sun just rising -- I drove straight into it, plus the windshield slow to de-fog; had to pull over once. There was also black ice when we arrived at the cemetery. 

Gates were locked. We managed to thread our way through a car-wide passage around a storage facility, and found our way to the spot, a small rise where the gravestones of Henry O. Aldrich and several Pilkins back onto a copse of trees, a small slice of a woods.This was where the woodpecker had turned up every morning between 8 and 9:30. Does this story end with a stunning view of Picoides arcticus flaking bark off a spruce? No. We stood around with a handful of other binoculared and long-lensed suitors, listening to other birds--nuthatches and chickadees. A red-tailed hawk came by. We glanced at our watches, not surprised, more like routinely disappointed. Which eventually becomes an only slightly less valuable outcome than if we had seen it. Because we had engaged with the world  and maybe were seen by the woodpecker, which doesn't count. But we do.   

One not-seen black-backed woodpecker

The Square Don't Care

I like writing in graph-paper notepads. I've probably got a dozen of them in assorted piles, in various sizes and bindings, more of them started than finished. If you need a straight west-to-east line to provide a shelf for your words, it's there, but it's also tolerant if you wander off a bit. 

The page doesn't say "Write this way" like standard ruled notebooks do. The vertical lines and the horizontals have equal status, collaborating on a light grid with a trustworthy but unofficious function. It makes a background murmur like the Grand Concourse of Grand Central Station Uniform but not blank.

The empty page extends an ironic bow: a combination of "we've been waiting for you" and "pardon our appearance." The squares may offer nothing—zilch—or fanciful doodles. They could be mosaics, crossroads, or cells containing anything, including your own beeswax. Words find good traction along these boulevards, especially in the smooth black ink of a gel pen.

The squares could also be units of time, a template for a universal calendar, currently empty of events but accepting donations. With what to fill this screen? Drops of paint or nectar? A challenging crossword puzzle, the movie reviews in the Friday Times? The latest news from Paris? 

Fill these cells with a harmless essay, doing your exercises, making excuses, doing the dishes, drawing cartoon people with big noses. They could be peeping-tom windows in an apartment building, portals to the past or to Neverwas.

Anyway at some point you're going to move from those cubbyholes to this white blogpost (Russian for "blizzard on the trackless steppe") where famous writers pad by silent as ghosts and watermarks; and imaginary monkeys bang away at typewriters, writing everything that has been written and will be written, including these words, which is both reassuring and frustrating. Yes, it validates you—this too is literature!—but how do you avoid plagiarizing from these rhesus pieces?

Fortunately, the square don't care.

Nu?

The garbage truck gulped down a few more Christmas trees on Allen Street today. A sure sign that the patina of New is giving way to the under-layer of  Nu? which is Yiddish for “So?” with a dose of irony: So: what did you expect? So, whaddyagonna do?  So, that’s life.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with New. I like preserving that New Year’s spun-sugar Fabergé-egg pristineness all day, taking a new year’s walk in the cold sunshine, saying Happy New Year to a passing stranger like you’re hand-delivering a card, getting home for the Viennese waltz broadcast, and admiring the new calendar—Japanese woodblock prints taking over from Georgia O’Keeffe—even though half of January’s days are already inscribed with appointments. Keep it new.

But there’s no denying the long guttural drawl of the garbage truck pulling up like a foraging dinosaur. Nu? Whaddya got for me? White bags with red drawstring bows? Brown bags chockablock with recycled bottles, boxes, and other bric-a-brac? Toss it in. What, that’s it? No appliances, no mattress, no bales of Boston Globes going back to last summer? That’s okay. I’ll be back.  

Turns out New gets old in a hurry  But luckily there’ll be another behemoth coming next Tuesday to take it away with a belch and a familiar groan.

Nu? You were expecting something else?

In the Vintertime

I suppose I've recollected this before, like a geezer apt to repeat himself, but it gives him such pleasure, just smile, nod, edge toward the door and make a dash for it —

It was this little ditty my mother used to sing. Probably a camp song; she loved remembering those. It went:

In the vintertime,
In the valley green,
Ven the vind blows on the vindowpane,
And the vimmen from the Vaudeville
Ride velocipedes on the vindowsill:

Ah, men!
Ahh, vimmen!

There's a temptation to look up these mementoes on Google, but when you do, as I just did, you risk knowing more than you wanted. Yes, you get your memory validated, but instead of being your personal "Rosebud," redolent of the time it came from, your time, you henceforth have to share it with a lot of other children who had a sled just like that.

Or you can ignore those other children shouting in the snow and close the door, you're letting in the vind.

The reason why I bring this up? Because today is a day worth marking, the beginning of winter, whose cold, dark, modus operandi have been with us for weeks, but now it's officially culpable.  Easier to lay it at winter's door than to assign it to autumn. This has all the signs of Wintah's woik, says the detective bitterly, rubbing his hands nd checking the falling dark against the time on his wristwatch. Damn it, curses his excitable partner. Wintah's back.

Except that there's good news in it, too. It's the longest night, sure. But tomorrow the light allotment starts to swing the other way. Something to do with the sun, the angle its rays strike the earth, and the position of where we are in our orbit. It's like some myth in which the Gloomy Gus on the black horse has to tolerate the company of a troubadour seated behind him, playing hopeful airs on his lute.

And on that note, I leave those tiny ladies to pedal their tiny penny-farthing bicycles on the vindowsill while the wind buffets and rebuffs the windowpane affectionately.

Amen. Ah, vimmen.

Tempus Fugit

That's how this last week of my month (the one I was born in, that ends with my last name) started, with a coded message from a crossword puzzle constructor who embedded it among all the numbered x's from the past week's six daily puzzles:

TEMPUS FUGIT

It was even more clever than that, with a different riff on the theme of time in each puzzle, but the final message was timely enough: time flies. And to hammer the point home, I could apply it immediately to my annual visit with my birthday on Monday, good old October 27.

Not just mine, of course. Most years, I spare a passing thought to some of my birthday-mates, like John Cleese and H.R. Haldeman. But this year I was proud to let one of them hog the limelight. Dylan Thomas was celebrating—or we were—his centennial. October 27, 1914 in Swansea, Wales.

Tempus, tempt us! On Sunday at 3:00 p.m., I connected to a live-streamed broadcast of DT's then just-written radio play Under Milkwood from the 92d St. YMHA, where it was first performed back in 1953. The following day I carried a copy of his collected stories, none of which I read, but it was good to have him around. I like to tell myself that we have certain things in common: love of language; self-absorption. ("Among other things, he knew himself very well," says Leslie Norris in the Foreword, citing all his brilliant letters of apology as evidence that he knew his own faults very well.  Uncanny—I'm always apologizing!)

Anyway, I visited my birthday on Monday. I only had a day to spend with it; that's the way these things work. When you're very young, it's a very long day, and I spent a long anticipatory month of days getting ready for it. But by the time you've called on that day 66 times, it doesn't feel much different from most days. Still, it is your day. You're entitled to one by tradition and personal history. If you let someone know, even a stranger, he or she is practically obligated to wish you a Happy Birthday, and pass along a mental image of balloons, cake, people in conical party hats around a table. Only a practiced cynic, after years of diligent study, can pull off the observation that bumping into the day you were born is hardly reason for a big whoop-de-doo.

People take it seriously. Tempus fugit or tempus fuggedaboudit. Which brings me to my sister's birthday card. That is, Dotch, who's four years older than me and whose birthday is 25 days after mine. We had this little ritual as kids. We'd ask each other on the day, like a couple of novice interviewers, "So how do you feel? Are you sad? Glad? Mad? Bad?" And  because it was a kid's thumbnail way of taking stock, the other person would sometimes take it seriously. And because we are so used to the tradition, we refer to it as adults, too.

She wrote: "I would really like to be in your mind to know how you're looking at life these days. Are you mad, sad, glad, scared, accepting, curious?" In large part, I know she's talking about this disease I'm carrying around with me. It's just humble old Parkinson's, diagnosed five years plus ago. And I think she's probably also talking about our mutual health issue—old age.

When I first wrote down my answer, on my birthday, I was sitting outside the Kickstand Cafe (formerly Jam 'n Java) with a hot cider and an open notebook (and a ship to steer her by) and the day was warmish for late October, so I wrote: Glad. The day has cooperated and a day can define a life, temporarily, but time doesn't know it's temporary.                              

Then I thought about the other days. I needed some new designations. Like Vlad. As in Vlad the (self) Impaler, when I'm mean to myself. And I can be Dad, which is mostly a form of Glad, seasoned with Bad and a little Vlad. On rare occasions I am Strad, the perfect instrument, apt to be left on the back seat of a taxi, but usually found and returned. Too often I am Chad, as in Hanging Chad, half-in and half-out, half hole, half paper, half negative and half positive. There I am trying to dismount my bike, unable to swing my leg, either leg, over the bar. Fortunately I'm in the backyard, so if I fall, it will be on grass and earth. Finally I recognize what I need to do: rest the bike on its side and step out. Easy. 

But I am also optimistic despite evidence to the contrary. For want of a better term, let's call that Plaid, a pattern to be on good terms with, adaptable, mood-suiting, Black Watch tartan flannel, which I am lately apt to misbutton, have to start over, and my fingers are not as effortlessly deft as they were for decades. And tucking the shirt in and cinching the belt is laborious, too, But if it's a shirt you like, then it's worth it.

To sum up, I am Glad, Vlad, Dad, Strad, Chad, and Plaid. And Bashful.

Wow, November already? Tempus fugit, dude! 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Bareback Writing

So jump on. No saddle, just straddle the withers and away we go like a trick rider, standing up, flipping over to one flank or the other while the mount canters around the ring and then, at full gallop, charges out of the rodeo palace like in The Electric Horseman when rhinestone cowboy Robert Redford decides enough is enough, this animal needs to be free, and he propels the horse up and down random streets in this dusty Western town, pursued by police cars until he finally breaks out of the grid into the open prairie outside of town and outdistances his pursuers.

Sometimes it works that way. And sometimes the horse takes charge and ambles up into the nearest clump of tall grass and weeds, like a horse named Tennessee I once tried to "steer," yanking ineffectually on the bridle, in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, in my teens, while it ignored this inconvenience on its back. Metaphors do not come with a guarantee of performance. But the idea is just jump on and see where the words take you or you take the words—out into the starry night, up into the weeds, or—c'mon horsey, giddyup, c'mon horsey (while a Mr. Ed laugh track underscores the indignity)—nowhere.

And at three o'clock, the hour up, the wrangler wipes down the horse, who hasn't broken a sweat, and asks, "How was it?"

Magical. Exhilarating. We were one animal. The wind in my hair, the wind in his mane. Next time we go full Pegasus. Pega-sus, Pega-sus...pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty Pega-sus...

Fifteen Minutes

I'm here, in the morrow. Pushed it to the last fifteen minutes of the day, which being the morrow, is Wednesday's share of Tuesday. Except the morrow is actually Thursday now. So I guess I missed the train to Morrow. As the Kingston Trio noted in part of the soundtrack of my boyhood, "Morrow is the hardest place I've ever tried to go." That song was a little exasperating to me in a just-kidding way. I often tried to figure it out, which was probably a fool's game. Yesterday, aka today, wasn't bad, but if I don't put the concertina back in its box, I'll be none too fit for today, aka tomorrow.

Staring in the mirror

Not quite sure what I intend with that title. Probably a statement of contemplation: visiting this blank white space for the first time in more than two months. It often starts out with staring in a mirror, writing does, but pausing at it now, the phrase seems a little disturbing. Staring. Not looking, gazing, or even peering. A fixed look, a bit nonplussed, discovering something, perhaps. It reminds me of one of my son Matt's early films, which he co-directed with a friend, called Solitude. Partners were given a stock script often used as an acting exercise, and asked to interpret it any way they chose to. He thought of staring in a mirror.

But as Lewis Carroll demonstrated, a looking-glass can be an opportunity, a portal, a conveyance, The white space, it turns out, may start out as a mirror, but often becomes a screen, alive with pictures that are conjured with the concatenations of words. It can also go back to being a mirror.

I will leave this mirror/monitor for now because it's nearly one, my butt hurts, and I haven't stacked the dishes. But I will return on the morrow, also known as Tuesday, and see where this goes.

Adventures in Writing!

Time to tune into an old radio program from a bygone era...

Jonas!

Aye, Captain?

Fill up my Loomis, lad; I've a tale to log!

Aye-aye, Captain!

Loomis Fountain Pens, the leak-proof, smooth-flowing pen preferred by more explorers for making  entries in their journals — presents Adventures in Writing!                   

Then the real program begins with young Tommy Pinkus sitting at his kitchen table, the clock ticking, an open notebook in front of him, trying to come up with an idea for a story. Occasionally, his cat, Falconflick, leaps up on the table, knocking over the ink and sparking an inspiration.  But however it happens, the boy writer always gets an idea, his pen begins to scratch, the narrative unfurls in an authoritative voice-over by the narrator, Philip McAdoo, and tonight's adventure is underway.

Of course, before that could happen the real scriptwriters labored that week in a painful, drawn-out, hit-and-miss, process having more to do with deadlines and desperation than magic. Or else a distinctly manual kind of magic. 

Sorry to say, you won't find any evidence of that radio show if you search for it, except perhaps in this blog. (But wouldn't that be a cool thing if I'd conjured it into existence, in a Twilight Zoney manner. Take note, Tommy Pinkus.) 

Obviously I'm trying to conjure a little ironic magic for myself, as if the title Adventures in Writing, declaimed by a sterling-voiced announcer, could make words flow spontaneously through the nib of my own version of a Loomis fountain pen:

...whilst rounding Cape August, in the fog-chilled valleys of West Marin, California, at the hidden beginnings of the Perseids meteor shower...

You gotta work with what you got, what matters, which may be too boring and everyday for Tommy Pinkus, but constitutes an adventure nonetheless, just as the meanderings of an ant on a sidewalk constitute a journey. 

I thought about the meadow we had cultivated by benign neglect, in front of our house. More public than the unmown grass bordering the driveway and the unmown, weed-choked, jungle of a backyard, it took over the house-wide strip of grass with the sidewalk on one side, Allen Street on the other.  At first it was just tall grass, then clover, then it got interesting. A meadow's-worth of Queen Anne's Lace. And a companion weed, unknown but standing at attention like the Queen's Own Guard, three feet tall. Bees and wasps and butterflies visited. 

Opinion was divided in 32-34 Allen as to whether it was beautiful or an eyesore (that wasn't how eyesore it); a wildlife preserve or an unkempt embarrassment.

The neighbors shuddered. The neighbors admired. The neighbors didn't even notice, much less care.
It wasn't our responsibility, it was the Town's. Not so, or true in theory, but not ever in practice. 
Pay Matt to mow it and the side strip. Let it stay till the summer's end. 

Finally, it came down to what Charlie thought—Carol's dad, who lived on the ground floor and was our gardener-in-residence emeritus. And Carol maintained that he didn't care for this opportunistic weed patch. Not even the Queen Anne's Lace? I tried to see it through objective eyes. One minute it was a sweet oasis, a caravansary for travel-weary meadow seeds, a habitat where once lay a featureless, anonymous, border that had supported our noble maple tree, felled in the great microburst of 2012. The next minute it was a tattered remnant of a household that didn't shower, ate out of cans and left them lying around,  let the newspapers pile up and tumble down the front steps, and whose doorbell the neighborhood children dared each other to ring before running away.

Fine, I said to Matt. But you have to take a photo of it before you do the deed.

The meadow lives!

Trawling

There have been a few doorways I've stood in since my last post. Not sure where they would have led, maybe to a familiar vestibule, maybe to somewhere else. 

One was during the early stages of the World Cup. The field of colors and emblems, order unraveling into momentary chaos and raveling back to order, reminded me of stamp collecting, back when I was a bedroom globetrotter, making colorful rows of peasants from Osterreich, King Leopolds from Belgie/Belgique, and musicians from Magyarorszag. That was when the world was mainly a map, with the British Commonwealth countries in pink, the French countries in green, and Greenland was by far the biggest land mass in the world. Geography forgave history. World War II had happened, but it had retreated to playing army in the Kligermans' back yard. Now we had the Good Neighbor Policy, Japan made our Crackerjack prizes, and the news was a mix of stories with faraway villainy, like the Iron Curtain, balanced by reassuring happy tales, like singing Israeli children.

A week or two ago I lingered over another portal, a product ad in the mail with the hook, Hearing Loss or Just Earwax? which turned out to be a promo for a diagnostic tool called the Video Otoscope. Something about the intrusive familiarity of the word Earwax appealed to me. Good name for a lowly character in a crime novel, or one of Dick Tracy's foes, like Pruneface. Good rainy-day time-waster: check out the list of Dick Tracy villains on Wikipedia. There must be hundreds, from 1931 through 2014. And if you're also a fan of old-time radio and have 46 more minutes, I recall a Dick Tracy radio broadcast from 1945 featuring a cast including Bing Crosby (as Tracy), Dinah Shore (as Tess Trueheart), Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, etc. etc. It's amazing what a little earwax will lead to.

Most recently, a phrase floated by. I caught it in my butterfly net. Here it is: creative hope. I'm not sure what it means, but I like the way it teeters its wings back and forth. I think it can stand up to some pondering.  

There's regular hope, which was the last thing in Pandora' box after all the evils had escaped. It's a good thing, regular hope, but it seems kind of overmatched, pitted against all those scourges bent on sowing terror and suffering. (Though it must have driven the evils crazy when they were all living in the box together.) Practically speaking, it seems to me most effective as an attitude. To remain hopeful. A hedge against defeatism. Hope springs. Fingers crossed. Hoping against hope--which sounds contradictory, but maybe it means like pressing hope against itself, doubling it. As ardently as it's invoked, it still strikes me that hope is kind of passive, if hardy. Emily Dickinson called it "the thing with feathers" and marveled that it never stops at all, nor asks anything in return for its willingness to sing in the storm, as it were. 

But what about creative hope? What would that be?  As I fill this white space with letters, words, sentences, perhaps I am employing hope creatively. Hoping not for something, which may be an investment in disappointment. Investing, instead, in possibility. With creation as your part of the bargain. I create, therefore I hope? No, dude, the other way around. This is delicate. I could be mistaken. 

Maybe it could be hoping for something--change, a non-specific pleasant turn of events--but not just waiting for it. Doing something. Making something. 

I'll ponder on it some more.

Three Birds

So I went back, looking for bird truth, whether in the form of elusive birds, capricious birds, theoretical birds, vocal birds, no birds, too many birds, not enough birds, cautious birds, hidden birds, bird coalitions, independent birds, beautiful and drab birds, mellifluous and strident birds.
—Henry David Thoreau (not really)

May, that spring concoction with a pinch of winter and a sprig of summer, is a matter of record now. For me it was mostly defined, as usual, by the influx of migrating birds and the success or failure of my attempts to see them, whether in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge or in the woods of the Brooks Estate in Medford.

I began a post two weeks ago representing three stages of that event. First, whetted by my frustration with not being able to match the bird movement in a given spot with the same spot seen through my binoculars—I looked instead for the elusive "truth of birds": the reality that birds inhabit as birds, as distinct from the celebrity spotting that is the birder's game, fueled by the lure of, say, the throat flame of a Blackburnian warbler in a treetop or the sweet sweet chew chew of an all-blue indigo bunting.  

Bird truth is an ascetic pursuit, the equivalent of munching Essene bread. It requires a broad consideration of the bird's environment or a deep consideration of the bird's behaviour—with a u—the impulse driving the catbird's beatnik colloquy, for example, or the nuthatch's nervous but dogged energy (even though you'd trade a Talmud of catbird truth for a momentary gander at an indigo bunting turning from turquoise to ultramarine in changing light).

But then there is the parable of the three birds—on a morning when I went to Brooks, third week of May, the bushes and trees still lousy with warblers. And I saw one, and it was good!— a common yellowthroat. Little bandit with the black mask, skulking in a bush, olive and yellow, being furtive but allowing itself to be seen. So I continued to the pocket meadow and along the trail through a copse of trees and shrubs called Warbler Walk and lo! I beheld a magnolia warbler in good light, among the leaves, and it was very good—brilliant yellow, etched with black streaks and marshmallow white. High definition, sufficing for a treeful of barely glimpsed rarities. So, emboldened by the good yellowthroat and very good magnolia, I betook me to the Lounge, a clearing where two trails T and many species of  passing passerines are known to hang out, and behold! there was a black-throated blue warbler at the end of a twig, inky head tipped back, singing its arcane rising zoo zoo zoo zee, not any competition for a thrush, but giving its all. And it was enough. Three good birds can a merry May make.

There wasn't really a third stage to my Birder's Progress, except maybe a reconciliation of bird truth and celebrity spotting: See what you can see. Which may be what a lot of those warblers are singing. See...see? (Get it? Got it?) 

Good.

Mais oui!

Here it is May. Already the eighth day, a fast week since Mayday, which somehow became ship-to-shore code for "Help!" One might have legitimately radioed it that way this past winter—"Mayday!" as in,"Get me the hell to Mayday!" or "There's no place like May...There's no place like May!" But I'm pretty sure Mayday is a respelling of its French homophone, "M'aidez!" or "Help me!"

May we? ask the yielding landscape, the spring migrants, the testing flora. And the reply, hesitant in April, is finally a welcoming "Mais oui!" Dare to change your wardrobe; pump up your bike tires; guillotine your storm windows, dare to go sashaying along Spy Pond in shorts and T-shirt, and acknowledge those airborne stirrings of puppy love, poodle kanoodles, boxers-in-briefs.

Mais oui! But of course! And in the Truth of the bird, this run of days is when it's time to fly a long distance, from here to the other here, also known as northern America, which is very exciting to us terrestrials, who have a kind of album of living experience with spaces for each FOY (first o' year) kind: Baltimore oriole flashing orange on a treetop,  wood thrush singing the Song of the Forest that Pan taught its oldest ancestor, dipped-in-blue indigo bunting, and twenty-odd kinds of warblers teasing us with colors and peewee cadenzas from the trees, especially the Blackburnian, Canada, Prothonotary, Hooded, and Chestnut-sided I will once again fail to see. But then again, I may. And if I don't, I won't dis May. Much. And dat's all I got to say.

Loose Change

Thirty days hath...that Aprille with his shoures soote....in England now that April's... the cruelest month...come she will...and she did, and now she's leaving, the bard of months, Shakespeare's month, taking her poems with her? Maybe not.

It's a rainy night, even rained out the Red Sox, and I'm looking back at the calendar page like a five-story building, about to exit through the lobby door marked 30, with a polite doorman in a rabbit suit or maybe it's a white rabbit in a doorman's uniform, ready to let me out.

I should have chronicled the transformations of this blue-gray civil war of a month, but its spring cavalcade lacked momentum, seemed like a street magician running rapidly through her repertoire of tricks, the uprising of green happening accidentally through cold days, raw days, days of crocus, days of matzo, days of wind, rain, and sun, of brillig daffodils and mimsy florets in the maples and blossoms in the magnolia trees, and another night of cold and wet authored by the same April.

I've been saving the title phrase, loose change, for too long. It refers both to the dilatory timetable of spring and in particular to the bright proclamation of the song sparrow, melospiza melodia, delivered from a singing perch and resembling the dispensing of new-minted coins from one of those silver coin dispensers the Good Humor man wore on his waist, a unique piping cadenza: dime! dime! dime! centime, ha'penny, nickel nickel nickel nickel, centavo, franc.

I've missed the rest of the avril aviaty—the tail-wagging palm warblers, phoebes packing a species vocabulary into their repeated names, maybe a brown thrasher, no telling who else. Maybe May...she will stay, but I must away!

Out Like a Wet Simile

It's a raw rainy night out there. Evocative. I'm afraid crimes are being committed as the clock nudges toward midnight. Maybe not, but it suggests footsteps behind you, matching your gait, someone comfortable in the pages of a whodunit.  Reminds me of the night I was walking around Chestnut Hill Reservoir when I lived in Brighton. I heard a noise behind me. I walked faster. So did whatever was behind me. I began to run. It matched my pace. Faster—same. I finally stopped and turned around, stiff with fear. I had tangled up with some cast-off fishing line and a few noisy items of junk, all hitchhiking along.

"I am the viper! I'm here to vipe your vindows!"

This is March going out like a lamb who should be in a warm barn snuggled against some fleecy hay-mate, dreaming of certified public accountants vaulting over a cubicle, but instead is picking its way along the rainy street, bleating piteously. Not pitiously, more piteous than that. Wet wool. What's worse? I'll tell you what. Woof! Lamb pursued by the Hound of the Baskervilles across the dread moors. Finally, exhausted, it turns to face its dogged pursuer, get it? hoping to find a fishing line tangled up with a read-aloud baby book of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, read by Benedict Cumberbatch, whose name makes baby laugh. Instead—worse. Lamb faces a lion, whom he/she/it must somehow persuade that they are one and the same, that the leonine days of early March have evolved quite naturally into the docile temperament of a lamb, and furthermore this is lamb's territory, this is late March, the last day, what are you even doing here, you maned interloper? And it works, the lion backs away, embarrassed, feeling cub-foolish, while the lamb advances, fleece dripping, having found its Inner Ram. But do not push your advantage too far, young ovine, for there is a joke circling overhead about pulling the wool over your eyes, and it's I must now be going to beddie-bye.

So enjoy your moor, even if it's a dream and you're really in that cozy barn after all, and it's the CPA's who have to make it home in the dark and the wet. 

Good night, flock, and good luck.

Daylight Savoring Time

Hope stopped by for a visit today. Winter had a senior moment. The dribs and drabs of March were rearranging into the birds and bards of April. What released this new surge of optimism? Milder temperatures; and a dividend of daylight we pay ourselves this time of year as part of the Spring Forward and Save Daylight Sale!

Daylight is an almanacky word, slightly herbal, smelling of woodsmoke, and good for you. It shines with almost the same brimming beam as delight. However, its allegiance is divided between the day and the light, and it wanders into other contexts—the living daylights (sense and sanity) that are knocked or scared out of you; the daylight you put between two things that were too close together; the dawning awareness of something formerly obscure.  

Twice a year, daylight is a commodity, a natural gift we can seemingly control like a tap or a dam or a lock. In pre-spring we save it by cutting an hour out of the day and putting it in the bank, to be redeemed in the fall. Somehow this game of self-deception works. The twilight that only yesterday belonged to 6:00 now belongs to 7:00, and 6:00 basks in the bronzy late sun that used to be the property of 5:00. And so on: natural light flooding new windows of time with brighter, newly-appreciated, luminosity.

There' s something charmingly old-fashioned and Groundhog Daylike about this formula of turning clocks and watches ahead or back twice a year, revealing "our" time as the malleable stuff it is. Ironically, this tick-tock tactic is meant to give us more time for nature's time, the planetary orbit (or bit thereof), the energizing earth and atmosphere, wind and water, "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower," to quote Dylan Thomas's powerful poem about youth and aging.

I'll buy some of that juice, Bruce.

march forth!

It's March's version of Groundhog Day. No furry critter looking for a sign, but the day itself delivering  an invitation to launch, a kind of call to arms, and feet. 

Interesting how many months have a first-week day that launches its particular 4+ week trek with vigor, introspection, or festivity: New Year's Day, Groundhog Day, March Forth, April Fool's Day, Mayday...July 4th...Rounding Cape August (not widely known), Labor Day...Day of the Dead...and "the first of December was covered in snow..." To say nothing of exclaiming "Rabbit, Rabbit!" for luck on the first day of every month, if you remember.

Back to March Forth. Like most wordsfolk, I believed I alone discovered this remarkable sound-alike coincidence back in the 1980s. I remember working in an after school care program in Newton, Mass., and on 3/4 I organized a parade through the empty halls of the school building we inhabited: a half-dozen or so kids and me, banging rhythmically on pot lids and other noisemakers, chanting "March forth! March forth!" after I assured them that it was indeed a real holiday, even if they'd never heard of it.

However, word has spread, probably disseminated by those same kids, now in their mid-thirties, although somehow also trapped as eight-year-olds in my memory.

A quick swoop into Google yields such evidence as the terrific March Fourth Marching Band, the March Forth Fun Run in Seattle, the March Forth With Hope Foundation to cure cancer and the"How to Celebrate March Fourth" website, with instructions for throwing a celebration of setting goals (4. Choose your food based on a marching theme, such as trail mix, shoestring potatoes, "lettuce march" salad, rocky road, etc.)

Me? I'm writing about it. Isn't that worth something? Isn't a blog entry a marching forth? You wish, pal, says my judge, who's that guy of indeterminate age on the treadmill next to mine, who sets his speed to Intimidate, making my 3.5mph look sedate by comparison. Except I didn't even go to the workout place today, of all days. And yes, a message on the talking drum is a marching forth of sounds. It just seems a little like "talking the walk".

So, fine, I'll march 4th to Walgreen's to pick up a prescription, at least, knowing that the real test is not March 4th, but March sixth, which doesn't command anything, says the gravelly voice echoing in the empty gym, except a little attention, maybe? If that's not too much to ask?  

Nail Clippers

What can I say? This was an icy month. I slid all the way from the Beatles to the end of February, almost into March.

March! That's a serious gear. You got your Ides. Your Daylight Savings Time. Your red-winged blackbirds. Your Purim. Your spring.

But February did its job, built the bridge from January to March in just 28, spanning a considerable gap when you compare New Year's and the vernal equinox.

I started the day trimming my fingernails with very tiny nail clippers that seemed to lack the bite for my right thumbnail, so I put it back in the medicine chest and spent the next ten minutes searching for a bigger one, knowing there were probably ten hiding in various catch-alls around the house, not finding any, and settling again for the little weak-jawed one, which at least didn't have one of those annoying little chains that get in the way. It required an assist from a pair of blunt scissors ("Look, pal, I won't lie. You got some horny nails. I mean, I've seen toenails that were more cuttable.") but it did the job.  And I'm not saying February is like a pair of weak-jawed clippers that gets the job done, I'm just saying the metaphor is available.

Anything else to report? Red Sox lost their first Grapefruit League game to the Twins.  February delivered baseball. More snow due on Monday. That's on March's watch.

Discussed with my therapist, Jack, the gulf between my nocturnal and morning self. Concluded they need to coordinate. Morning guy glances at the ambitious to-do list penned by energetic night guy when all seemed possible, fed by some untapped well of dopamine I can only access after eleven o'clock. Sometimes he even identifies what task to do first, second, and so on. Morning guy, however, feels like reading the Boston Globe, fairly exhaustively, including the obituaries and how Jeremy Lin did for the Houston Rockets last night. Or chooses a finite but meaningful task like wiping off a drip spot in the refrigerator that's been there since the first Bush administration. Or trimming his nails, which becomes a 45-minute saga. Night guy holds no sway in this noisy, bright domain. Perhaps John Kerry can broker some kind of partnership, like the one between the clippers and the scissors.

Nail clippers, I told Jack, sounds like something I'd write a blog post about. Amd so I have.

Goodnight, February, that 28-ed.
Goodnight, nail clippers that collaborated.
Goodnight, pen that wrote this entry.
Goodnight, Night guy, standing sentry.
Goodnight, March, in half an hour.
Goodnight, snow and hoped-for flower.
Goodnight baseball, goodnight blog,
Goodnight Sid Caesar, Harold Ramis, 
and the old Groundhog,
who went back to sleep.
Smart.          

The Oracles

Feb. 7, 2014

As we mark fifty years today since the Beatles arrived in America, I'm struck by an observation I read: If we had been celebrating the music of fifty years earlier back in 1964, we would have been reminiscing about the songs of 1914. Not likely! 
Not all half-centuries are created equal.

The name Beatles and the old black-and-white footage of the scene at JFK (then just renamed from Idlewild) and even watching them on "Ed Solomon," as my grandmother called him, are scrapbook memories, but for some reason the songs and the esprit or whatever it was about those four time-travelers from Liverpool, are still relevant, still exciting, still necessary.

I'm not sure if that speaks to the steep acceleration of change between 1914 and 1964 (two world wars, the Depression, the atom bomb, the cold war, space, radio, TV, cars, jazz, art, civil rights, Samuel Beckett, Alan Ginsberg, Gertrude Stein, etc., etc.) compared to the less dizzying (but still impressive) seismic events of the last half-century (lunar landing, Vietnam, computers, 9/11, Iraq, climate change, Obama, and the Beatles).

It's possible that 1914–1964 did most of the heavy lifting to get us to the Beatles, and it's also possible that the Beatles don't seem to have ever been out of date because of who they became, together and individually, so we retrofit their relevance back to "Love Me Do." And it's very possible that they had the secret (of life, happiness, time, love, art) and we believed it. 

I remember hearing about Beatlemania on the news. I was fifteen, living in El Paso, Texas with my mother, sister, and grandmother. The news report on CBS showed these four European bandmates in Sweden, hurrying past a huge throng of screaming fans. I think it was December. I remember snow. 

It was mildly interesting, this phenomenon. But it was in Europe, which was a faraway land of Laughing Cow cheeses and peasant dances and cuckoo clocks. Still, there was a feeling that Beatlemania was something to know, or else why would Walter Cronkite be reporting about it.

Some weeks later, I was at my friend Richard Trejo's house. We were working on a science project, which involved lowering a negative and positive carbon battery rod into different water solutions to make a light bulb light up or not. It was a modest trick. Most of our energy was going into sanding the wooden mount. And at some point, we put it aside and Richard produced the record. He had it. "Meet the Beatles!" 

There they were on the cover: faces half in shadow, wearing solemn, inscrutable expressions like four moons or four oracles. They knew something I didn't know. Deeper than celebrity. Having been somewhere, and not just Europe. Richard took the LP out, set the Capitol rainbow rim whirling on the turntable, the needle obediently dropped in the groove, and the secret jumped into the room in a cluster of rollicking chords: "Oh, yeah, I'll...tell you something...I think you'll understand! And I'll say that something... I want to hold your HAND..."  

 It was a very simple secret if you took it that way. Or it could stand for—or lead to—or imply—something more complicated if you took it that way. Not that I was apt to hear sexual innuendo at the time. Mainly I could hear it was about energy, pumping and powerful, like the electricity that made the light bulb turn on.  Secret enough to not keep in: "I can't hide... I can't HIDE!!! 

Those four oracles were on to something.

And then a few weeks later we saw them in person. Beatlemania was in our country now. Ed Sullivan, the usually grim impresario, flung his arm wide and conjured "The BEA—" with the rest of it drowned out by a scream wall of excitement powerful enough to light up New York City. And they weren't solemn oracles then. They were enjoying themselves.  How could they not be?  

So—do we still need them, do we still heed them, like in '64? Maybe not like in '64. But like in '14. The new one.