Sundog and redwings

3/4
I am not making as much of this day with its built-in bold imperative to march forth, as I have in years past. We just had Leap Day a few days ago, which I did not write about at all, despite this being the first one since I began this blog in 2009. Instead, I idly wondered: Why a leap? For one extra day? Is it a Neil Armstrong leap? "One small step for a month, one giant leap every four years." Maybe it's a leap because it's not a leap: it's just a rare day that casts a long shadow.


Anyway, the day before Leap Day—call  it Look Day—was another one of those mild days we've been having a lot of this winter, and I had a good excuse for a bike ride. It was the end of February, when one might expect to see red-winged blackbirds, a welcome early arrival in the raw, gray days of late winter. So around 5:00, as the sun was taking aim at the horizon, I set off to see if there were any redwings in the marshy area near the duck pond beside the bike path out at Arlington Great Meadows in Lexington.

As I passed Spy Pond, I saw something rare. A sundog. It's a small shard of rainbow caught in a cloud an arm's length from the sun, often both left and right. It's a trick the sun does with hexagonal crystals or "diamond dust" in an icy cirrus cloud. The sunlight hits these little prisms, bends and separates into seven colors. Roy G. Biv. Or Vib. G. Yor. It's a badge, an effect, a sign, a trick. It's fantastic and vaguely annoying (a rainbow wannabe), and short-lived. Three minutes later I couldn't see it anymore.


Then I was past Spy Pond and doggedly pedaling through Arlington Center to the continuation of the bike path, and on past the well-known landmarks—though it had been a while—Mill Street; the back of Arlington High School; the three baseball fields; the two underpasses; the sign for Trader Joe's, the back of Mal's Towing--the Lexington line--and Arlex Oil; then the little park where I saw a big red-tailed hawk and a sleeping drunk; Then crossing the last street, Fotler, before the Meadows. And moments later I can hear them, the overlapping teetering trill of dozens of male redwings, sounding like ringing telephones. I am cheered. Nice when nature validates your guess, or hope.


The males arrive first, I think. They occupy the treetops, full of declarative "I'm here" energy, rolling out their name-calls like excited conventioneers. I listen to the euphonious roll call with a Henry Higgins-like scrutiny. I recently read a bio of Harriet Tubman that casually refers to her listening to "the cherokee of red-winged blackbirds." I like the confidence of the common noun, but not so fast. I have variously heard it as konk-la-ree in the bird books; O quilcheeena (a Squamish Indian word meaning "many waters" because it suited a pourquoi tale I was writing about how the redwing got its call); and just plain "Booker T." The important thing is to get that gurgly syllable before the boldface trill: the look before the leap.


This time I was hearing it a little differently—maybe the call was evolving. It was a three-step run-up that sounded like what it said: "Oh vocal..." Oh vocal what? After some consideration, why not chi? The old life force thing? "Oh vocal chiiiiiiiiiiiiii!"


Welcome back, old vocal life force thing.

Right in the Knishkies

February is signing calendars in a bookstore, writing February with a flourish across the replica of a 1920s travel poster. "I pictured you differently," I say to the stout, elderly woman behind the table. "I change my appearance from day to day," she explains. "Today I am Monrovia Gates, the Jewish landlady with bunions the size of Idaho potato-toes. Oy!" she protests. "Right in the knishkies." "First of all," I tell her, "There's no such thing. It's either knishes or kishkies. And if you're going to attempt a Jewish accent, you can't say kuh-nish or kuh-vell or kuh-vetch. There's got to be no daylight whatsoever between the k and the next consonant. Knish. Kvell. Kvetch. And finally, how can you be both February and Monrovia whatever?" But she's already changed. Now she's a tall pallid neurasthenic Chinese gentleman who is an expert in marionettes who perform martial arts. He replies to every question, "Mind your own business," with a wink and a smile, as if he were imparting a humorous piece of wisdom. I believe this shape-shifter to be no February at all, but an impostor. However, the line is long, the people seem grateful, even starstruck to meet a month. They pose in front of their cell phone cameras held at arm's length, the other arm embracing "February" in presumptuous famiiarity. They think they know him/her it, don't seem fazed by the phases. Now he's a schoolboy with plastic tortoise-shell glasses, shifting in the chair like he's got to go, and go he does, turns into a bird...a...saur. A birdosaur. This it explains two-dimensionally from the calendar page for February/Fevrier: not a pterodactyl or an archaeopteryx but a silly-looking dinosaur with a fake beak. And in the picture, animated, it attempts to fly, flapping its muscular arms and by gum, gaining altitude—you can see the ground dropping away beneath it, rivers, forests, roads, an ever-diminishing Google Earth that is finally signed February by a large tin-can robot smoking a thin cheroot that may or not be a peruche of licorice. And I'm starting to miss Monrovia Gates, fake Jewish accent notwithstanding. "I missed you too, dollink!" she says, smiling broadly.

Y

...as in "the end of January." (Cracking wise, eh?) 
Sorry, Y... We will pile on some farewell gifts to you: a used VHS of "Captain January," with Shirley Temple and Buddy Ebsen; a little silver pendant of Janus, the god of knock-knock jokes; and a wanted poster for Old Man Winter, last seen on Halloween.


Why, as in Yes! We have qualified for month number two. We have spoiled the year. Peed on the lamppost. Rolled in the cold leaf littter. And only four weeks ago it was pristine. Untrodden as the road less traveled by in a Robert Frost poem.  


Bon voyage! 


Thanks for the ice fangs in the weeds around Spy Pond one cold day, and the common mergansers at Sandy Beach off Mystic Lake yesterday, their white sides as white as fresh paint, and the sunset. "Waterloo Sunset," by the Kinks. A guy was strumming it at Davis Square today. I thought it was a George Harrison tune. He agreed it had that same touch of melancholy. Then, for my 45 cents, he played a Harrison tune: "Don't Bother Me." Very nice. (What?) Very nice! 


January shakes its head. Can't hear us against the titanic BLANT of the liner sigalling its departure.


We have boarded this cruise ship before, leaving old January at the pier, waving at us, holding up the scottie dog and waving his ittle paw as we slip the moorings and the steam horn intones several deafening blasts of farewell.


The captain's name is February.

Later...

i'm writing with just my right hand, the left being occupied with holding a cell phone whilst i wait for an apple techie to tell me how to access a Word doc--any Word doc--without going through this Office setup hell involving dumb web sites, surveys, and updates that won't let you see your Word doc. very frustrating. very boring. i never knew till recently  that brits say whilst rather than while. I am whilsting away a saturday night in the worst way...


Well, that wasn't much fun. Apple help guy (real) kicked me over to Microsoft help line (virtual) who told me first that call volume was unusually high--even though I wasn't speaking that loudly--and then that the department of My Problem was closed for the day. So the hell with it.


Speaking of "hell": Had a dream last night in which my son Matt and I were on a game show (this game show element has been appearing frequently in my dreams lately) as a father-son team. We were pitted against two other pairs. One pair was Rudolf Giuliani and Sarah Palin. The other pair, non-celeb, like us. The object of the game was to keep talking coherently on a particular topic and then lob it over to your partner, who then lobs it back to you, etc. I muttered "Baseball and Art" to Matt before we went on. I introduced us, on-air, to the judge. Apparently doing so broke a rule, but the emcee, slightly embarrassed, laughed it off, noting what a spontaneous fellow I was. Then we began, desperately trying to keep alive a narrative about a shortstop who became a pitcher and then someone hit a ball straight up, sky-high...somehow it ended. I don't think we did well, but we were still in the game. Then one of our opponents introduced himself as hailing from Arkansas, and in another burst of spontaneity, I affected a southern accent and said, "The hell you say!" and immediately realized I had blown it as the emcee turned pale and then bright red and said that that was wrong on so many levels and I knew the show would have to go off the air. Feeling ashamed but taking the bailout of waking up, I did so.


So it's come down to telling my dreams, has it? Well, whatever fits. My resolution to pound out a half-hour entry per day didn't gain much traction, diverted as I was by a pair of manuscripts this month, one about Frederick Douglass, the other about Pompeii. Good topics, but wearying and not leaving me with the kind of clean, beckoning half-hour I required, notwithstanding the time I was devoting to reading the Boston Globe comics and other guilt-making fripperies.


Anyhow, the flat rock has come down for its second skip on the lake's surface, even if it took a phone queue and a dream to guide it. So we'll see where the next one lands.


Meanwhile, here's to the pursuit of happiness. May the whistle be worth the whilst.


HO

No idea

So I wrote to my sister, Doris, after the last rust-in-the-pipes entry, that I would henceforth find a half hour in the day, every day, to bang out an entry in this lately untended Almanac. Why? Because I need to exercise my writing voice as well as my extremities, and because the ground is fertile for good intentions this week, in this first blast of cold air that's sending everyone bundled up into the nearest glasses-fogging tea or coffee shop to make an authoritative to-do in our new 2012 to-do books.


10:30 p.m. is late to be doing this tonight, and I don't have a narrative of any kind, except the poor griot's story of: the day, one half a whirl of the planet, with the promise of a waxing moon. My day was full of minor stressors that didn't do more than bare their teeth and utter guttural growls, but still. Let's see: woke up around 6:50 am, lurched around aimlessly, made Matt's lunch (PBJ and an unready banana), drove him to school because it was cold. (Bad dad? Good dad?)  Had an appt. with a pulmonologist who reassured me that the tiny nodules in my lungs are too small and whatever to worry about. Then back home by way of picking up a copy of Huck Finn for Matt, and into a snarl of little tasks and responsibilities--a doctor's appt. for Matt clashing with a meeting on Friday, but whattyagonna do?--a maimed email account that's too full because I hate deleting stuff, especially George McLean's nature photos--dishes unwashed--work that felt a piece of cake yesterday looking tall and stony today.


But the day ended nicely with "Winter Shorts," five one-act plays at Matt's high school including his, in which he plays an earnest, horn-rimmed psychic being dumped by his latest date because of his annoying habit of finishing her sentences and predicting the next minor event. Very funny. He's got good comic chops. Well, that was 1/4/12. And I went over my half-hour.

O is for Pumpkin

O is actually for October, but if you have an orange and black crayon and write it big enough:

O c t O b e r

—you'll color in those O's and make them pumpkins. How could you not? They are starting to appear on doorsteps, porches, front walks, as if they arrived by nightly migration, descending from the mackerel sky, circling over neighborhoods, and choosing individual houses to drop in on. 

They possess a calm, mysterious, spherical noumenon—thing-in-itselfness, if you will. But their essence is hidden. So what do we do? Cut into them, scoop out their wet, stringy insides, carve a face into their rind, animate them with fire, and set them out as lanterns.


Your mother used to admonish you for playing with your food, but pumpkins are different. They don't insist on being food. They tolerate Halloween foolishness like a small dog putting up with baby clothes. They will submit to the imposition of a leer, a grin, a frown, what have you, with the equanimity of the truly round. Even the invasion of a candle doesn't seem to bother them.   They give up their persistent vegetative state by posing as us. (I speak not of the 1700-pound state fair monsters that are more kin to the pump than the pumpkin. Bigger than any pumpkin has a need to be.)


I started this contemplation of the pumpkin in mid-October. It is now three weks later, in early November. Jacks are still riding the doorsteps with gargoyle masks of surprise, anger, craftiness, serenity, and puzzlement. They have submitted to snowhats after last Saturday's nor'easter...


and there's been barely a flake since. Hi, Old Hatch here, no longer in October; no longer in Nooooooovember (get it? No, longer?) In fact, neither Nov. nor Dec. ever got posted. Sorry, Nov., sorry Dec.  I have ridden the time tram over to January, and the number clicked to a 2, irretrievably. It's 2012, which looks better-guarded with those two black swans, fore and aft, escorting the binary prisoners to some unknown rendezvous. January 2, to be precise: 1/2/12, if you must, the sound of soldiers drilling double time. The first step forward into the big white calendar page. New Year's Day doesn't count, except for the inaugural walk in a festive 54 degrees. A cirrus circus. Tomorrow's a cold one, 1/3, and it's already skating out onto the big white pond. Ready? 
Ready.

Tobes

October! Tobes!  I'm late. I feel like Rufus T. Firefly in that early scene in Duck Soup, when, waking in the monogrammed four-poster bed, he hears the distant chorus of "Hail! Hail! Freedonia!" and quickly sheds his nightgown for the tailcoat underneath, slides down the pole to the royal assemblage waiting for him one floor down, and takes his place among the sentries, brandishing his cigar for want of a sword.


Of course, thanks to YouTube, I can just show you here (start at the five-minute mark) , but I kind of enjoyed describing it. Which is a similar appeal of October—Tobes!


We throw our arms about each other in a brotherly hug. There's no other month I so enjoy describing, following around, back in Nature Reporter mode (press ticket in my fedora). But I'm tardy, it's already post-Columbus Day. Sorry, Tobes. Part of the problem was this lingering summah. It put October in an overwarm limbo, like the delayed autumn in Chris Van Allsburg's The Stranger, caused by the temporary amnesia of Jack Frost (never named, but who else would it be?). Even a querulous screech owl in the maple outside my window was whinnying its unease. A seldom-heard sound that immediately puts you inside a kind of medieval litho.


Then today, a return to normalcy. The sky is mapped with altocumulus clouds, the temp back in the orchardly sixties. Summah, I think, is sashaying back to Bermuda, or St. Pete, or wherever she goes. And olly oxen free! the rash is loose in the maples, the amber in the honey-locusts, and the fool moon, due tonite (I saw its dress rehearsal last night) wears a knowing look, a canny, lemme tell you a story look, a third of the way into the month this moon owns. This moon. This noble leotard. (You mean leopard) That's what I said. A leopard in a leotard. We tolerate much from this canny moon, because it's serious, but in a funny way. Is all about costume, candy, voyages, rocket boys (October sky), corn mazes, cider, sweaters, desperados, bumper cars, ostriches, okay now you're just getting silly, corn silk! punkin Dunkin' donuts, cold nights, rugged individualists in plaid wool shirts splitting logs and hearing the split echo. The split echo.


These are the October crickets, carrying the threnody forward like a relay race, through the basking afternoons to the early-turning evenings. That code that may mean something or nothing, or a very meaningful nothing. Time chirps. (Tobes... How should I end this?)


Hail, hail, Freedonia! Land of the brave and free!


[long pause, filled with the sound of cascading silverware]


Groucho: I can't understand what's delaying that coffee pot!


[clunk!]