Feeding Birds

2012, Mom's birthday 

I began feeding the birds for my mother. Housebound by the frailties of age and the attitude that going out was too much trouble, she needed a connection to the outside world, I thought.

My earliest memory is of my mother and her mother wielding garden hoes in an attempt to fend off a snake attacking a nest of baby birds. I'd awakened from a nap and stretched myself taller than the windowsill to watch the drama unfold outside her bedroom. "Get him, Ethel!" my grandmother shrieked at her namesake. "You get him, Ethel," my mom yelled back, addressing her mother by her given name instead of calling her mom. The two Ethels wacked away, and as I recall, emerged victorious although the senior Ethel's askew babushka made her look something like a pirate. My mom probably lit herself a cigarette right there in the bushes while coo-ing over the baby birds before they went on to whatever task they'd meant to do in the first place.

my babushka-wearing, gun-toting grandma (the gun and the old car was staged by one of my uncles)

We lived on the backwater of the Mississippi then in a town known for its lax liquor laws and an easier attitude toward certain recreational pursuits that were frowned upon on in its sister city on the other side of the river. I was too young to know about any of that, but I knew about the birds. Cranes soared over the water and we raced out the back door to watch them, and if flocks of geese were winging and quacking overhead, we tilted our faces skyward until they were out of sight. Cardinals and red-headed wood peckers provided breathtaking displays of scarlet against the dark bark of a big tree where my father had nailed a wooden fruit crate. It was my mother and I who kept it stocked with seeds and nuts and bread crusts.

Indoors we kept a green parakeet named Jerry. "Jerry is a dirty bird" was his only attempt at conversation. Or maybe his line was, "Jerry is a pretty bird," and it was my mother who tried to pressure a confession from him while she cleaned up his messes after a free-flying afternoon. I wonder now about our kitchen hygiene since it was there he was allowed out of his cage, an old bedsheet tacked up in the doorway to the living room to keep him from pooping on the upholstered furniture. But nobody died--except Jerry of course, eventually.

Jerry didn't make it to the next house which was on the more sedate side of the river--a good thing, probably, since we became cat fanciers and often had a half-dozen kittens and cats prowling around. My brother and I found a baby owl on a sidewalk there. My mother couldn't locate the nest it might have fallen from, so she put it in a box padded with an old towel on our back porch. I'm sure she took some measure or another to nurse it back to health, but in the morning, it was dead.

Years later when they were both widows my mother and her twin sister had an apartment with a patio and fed all kinds of birds--including a large vulture that was attracted to a suet cake meant for a pileated woodpecker. I'd had some experience feeding birds by then, but I specialized in finches that I fed from a feeder suction-cupped to my breakfast nook window where my young daughters could enjoy them. Decades later, when my mom moved in with me in a different house, I bought a similar feeder and stuck it to our kitchen window. We remarked on the birds nearly every day. Some red house finches, some orange. We welcomed the sparrows too--the white crowned sparrow, the diva of an underrated species with its flashy striped head, and the house sparrow so dapper in its dark cravat.

One of my daughters lived with us part-time then while going to grad school. She might have been the one to notice the blind finch being fed by a bird with two good eyes. Over the next few days there were more and more blind finches. "Poor things," my mother said. "How do they fly?" Fearing that I'd unwittingly committed this horror of an avian Equus, I examined the feeder and the potted tree next to it for sharp edges only to find nothing. It was the internet that educated me about bird conjunctivitis and proper feeder hygiene. Jerry the parakeet could poop in the kitchen sink with no apparent ill effects on us humans, but I had to wash the bird feeder with soap and a drop of bleach in hot water every week.

My mother and I both took to the new regimen. She could clean anything with the same fervor she employed to dispatch a marauding snake, and over time no new blind finches appeared. Occasionally we spotted a different bird--a towhee, or a warbler, and once we glimpsed a bird such a bright yellow, it might have been an escaped pet canary. The first ring-necked dove appeared some weeks or months after my boyfriend Dan died. It was one of those moments when you think your deceased beloved has re-appeared or at least delivered to you a sign that you should not despair. The bird watched us with its big dark eyes. Friends were here for dinner, as I recall. "Look who wants to come inside," someone said.

Sometime later the dove began bringing a mate, and I'd take a handful of food and lay it atop the wall between my house and the neighbor's since these birds seemed too big for the feeder. If I was upstairs and missed their arrival my mother would call, "Your doves are here!" as if dinner guests had just rung the doorbell. The doves would probably still be enjoying my handouts even though my mom is no longer here to announce them, but a squirrel began terrorizing the bird feeder just after the 2017 presidential inauguration. It was a tumble-down of decline then, as we well know. First one squirrel, then another, and the squirrels could not be dissuaded so I removed the feeder before I went away to a month-long writer's residency. When I returned my flowers were infested with some kind of a worm despite the best efforts of the friend caring for them. Since we all know that the early bird gets the worm, I put the bird feeder up again. The doves, the sparrows, and the finches  came back--but so did a hoard of pigeons, making Jerry's efforts to defile the kitchen look like child's play. While it's true the pigeon poop was outside, on some surfaces it took a putty knife and boiling water to remove it, and the pigeons' constant coital-sounding cooing had me wondering if the neighbors should maybe soundproof their house until I realized this birds and bees thing was really just birds.

Like the squirrels, the pigeons wouldn't be dissuaded either, so with strips of that rubbery stuff that you can use as shelf lining or rug padding and some packing tape, I constructed a barrier around the my bird feeder that allowed only the smaller birds inside. When it came time to wash the feeder, I had to un-tape all the strips, wash them as well, and start over. A few weeks of that led to a splurge on a feeder with a cage around it. The new feeder, though I called it bird jail at first, is working well. The pigeons are feeding at my neighbor's unsecured feeder on the other side of the house and pooping over there. But I feel terrible  about the doves. They can't get into the new feeder either. They still arrive every couple of days, fluttering around the bird jail, confused. I look into their deep black eyes staring into my house full of worldly comforts and think of Dan and my mom and how we all were here just a little more than four years ago. Four years is a long time.

Christmas, 2012

I want to say something political here. About the elapsing of time until the next presidential election. And something about jail. Who belongs inside and who should be let out, but maybe it's best not to stretch the metaphor. I'll just quote my dad when he began to worry during my teenage years. "Birds of a feather flock together," he told me.

bird jail

The Ways We Miss the Dead

I had a dream last night too muddled to recount. In it was a young man--the friend of one of my daughters. He was shot and killed at a party when they were in high school. In my dream he was playing the guitar and I was trying to explain to a friend that he was dead and had come back only for this one special evening. No matter how I tried, I could not make her understand.

Friday night I went to the mall to buy a purse and to have three dead watches checked out to see if batteries might revive them. One of the watches was my mother's. I had a snappy red leather band put on it along with the new battery, wondering if some day I might wear this watch, its pulse beating on my wrist now instead of my mother's and somehow this might make me feel her presence in my life in a physical way. While I waited for the work to be done on the watches, I walked through the mall and found myself in Sears, walking in the very same aisle I once walked regularly with my mother to get to Miracle Ear.

The other day I told a friend how my father often spoke in tired and true old sayings and how he didn't even have to deliver the whole saying because he'd said them so often that we kids knew what came next.  Up too late? "The early bird," he'd say. A friend got in trouble for running with the wild kids? "Birds of a feather," he'd say.

On Thursday night, my regular night out to hear music at a local bar with friends, the musicians played a song we'd never heard them play, Sweet and Shiny Eyes. Bonnie Rait recorded it and I think Willie Nelson put out a version too.

Your sweet and shiny eyes are like the stars above Laredo
Like meat and potatoes to me
In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
Drinking salted Margaritas with Fernando

Young and wild, we drove five hundred miles of Texas highway
To the Mexican border as the day was coming on
We crossed the Rio Grande river and we swore we'd have things our way
When we happened to walk into Nuevo Leon

Your sweet and shiny eyes are like the stars above Laredo
Like meat and potatoes to me
In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
And we're having our picture taken with Fernando

In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
And we're having our picture taken with Fernando

The version I know best was sung to me live. The way I remember it, it was usually after dinner at my place. Dan would pull his guitar out of its case and carry it back to the table. We'd push our chairs far enough from each other so he'd have room to play.

In my sweet dreams I'm in a bar, there are people playing the guitar, and the dead are back for a visit, their eyes sweet and shiny. We know, just by being in their presence how lucky we are, and they know that they were lucky, in a way, to leave this life first because we were here to hold them, to mourn them, to keep them alive in our dreams, to tell their stories--and they can never do that for us.

Here's an essay about that by Donald Hall from the New Yorker.

Wednesday Morning Beach Report: Found Art, Summer in Paradise, and News from the Wizard of Many, Many Jobs

the minotaur

The Getty's is below.

It is summer here in paradise. There  are 33 people in the cluster of beach-goers pictured below. But I think it might be that some people are getting an early start on 4th of July weekend and the "crowds" will be gone next week. 

Report from the Wizard of Many Many Jobs: (currently wearing Ministry of Death hat):

I received this message from my brother's wife in Iowa yesterday--

.....in the mail today we got mom's death certificate . Came from XXXXX (the credit union) of Baltimore. No check. No note enclosed.

I sent the credit union the death certificate. It was required in order to close her account. I sent two other copies of the death certificate to Baltimore as well. I forget why, but I could remember if you insisted. I'm just not in the mood right now. It seems that it should be easier to wrap all of this up that it has been. The dead get mail, they haunt our dreams, the possessions of the dead fall out of closets and onto our toes. Sometimes we almost forget that the dead are dead. I can walk the beach for hours now if other obligations permit, but instead of feeling the pull of the waves out to sea, I sometimes feel the tether of my mother here in my house, sitting in her room or at the dining room table, reeling me back inland.

Margaritaville: The Christmas Report

The tree, complete with my mom's crocheted snowflakes

Front hallway lights and unintentional selfie

The Christmas lights went up late this year due to the sore throat and cold. It was a joy to be feeling well enough to snare a tree and pull down the boxes of lights and get to work. I was feeling the satisfaction of the season as I stepped down the ladder, admiring the last string of lights atop the armoire in the dining room, when what to my wondering eyes should appear...well, pretty much nothing. When I opened my eyes, I was on the floor next to an overturned dining room chair with the ladder on top of me.

My friend Pete was here, a few feet away in the kitchen, baking cookies. I explained as quickly as I could that I hadn't hit my head, that I hadn't fallen from the top of the ladder, but simply missed the last step and probably would have managed to keep my balance if I hadn't collided with the chair. In those first moments I felt worse for him than for myself, having tended to a few emergencies with my mom during the years she lived here and knowing all too well those initial moments of pure panic and  the awful scenario of spending the holiday in the ER. 

I was lucky enough to forgo the sleigh ride to the hospital, but I've got some bruised ribs and a sore tailbone. And I'm sort of thankful for the reminder of how life can change in an instant. I know that. We all do. And I suppose it's good to forget it now and then and just be caught up in those times of joyful ease, but we also need to know that it can all come crashing down.

And so here I am this Christmas Day, thinking of my mom and hoping she's having a good Christmas in Iowa, thinking of Dan as I struggle for a good deep breath since the site of my injured ribs is exactly where his incision was from his lung cancer surgery, and last night I told the story of my dad and our family rituals protecting us from  Christmas tree danger. We love the distant, the dead, the living, and the light, and the darkness.

And speaking of light and darkness, I happened to catch this from my bedroom window as it streaked past.  

O star of wonder, star of night,
Star with royal beauty bright,

Guide us to thy perfect Light.

Of course, I didn't think of that at all at first. I thought the worst--plane on fire, alien attack, end of the world. That's the way I am. And I wish you a very Merry Christmas. 

Friday Morning Beach Report/ Report from Pillville

Sometimes I smell the bodies before I get close enough to the water to see them. A couple of days ago, I came upon four in a walk that was barely a mile, one so emaciated it looked like a sea serpent.  Sea lions are starving. Last year I saw quite a few pups and juveniles awaiting rescue. This year it's mostly bodies. Someone told me about the northern elephant seal pup that washed up yesterday. It was alive, she said, but didn't look good. This morning I came across the sign and the orange tape. Normally, elephant seals aren't this far south.

Also on this morning's walk, I saw a back hoe dig a big hole and mound up some sand. I guess this is how the dead ones are buried. It being Easter weekend and all, I suppose there's some concern about freaking out the tourists. Maybe we should put up signs marking all the spots where sea lions died. So people know and we can all freak out communally. There's a large sea lion colony in the islands. Maybe they'll survive this crisis.

As for life in Pillville, we have an assessment scheduled with a hospice nurse. Nothing has changed dramatically with my mom, but her slow motion slide inches downward. A walker instead of her cane. More pain. Less energy. But odd as it may sound, we're happy enough here in Pillville. Yesterday friends came by to drink champagne. They're all so pretty, my mom told me afterwards. She wanted to know if they all had husbands. No, I said, oversimplifying things quite a bit. I knew where the discussion was headed, so I changed the subject. I think if I hadn't, she would have told me once again I should have a husband--or at least a man in my life. I'd love to fall in love, but I don't think I'm ready. And I absolutely can't imagine how a man would fit into life here in Pillville. He'd have to be a saint. That's not exactly what I'm looking for.

"I'm no saint. I got papers to prove I ain't."-- fragment from one of Dan's songs.

So thanks for visiting and taking time to read about the dead and dying.

Here's a pure white dove for you. Peace.

the wind whipping the waves into weird shapes

The Santa Ana winds had already kicked up by the time I woke this morning. The water in the marina was blowing backwards, and I felt twitchy and weird. A couple of hours later, I had literally developed a twitch in my left eye. The twitch abated from time to time, but always returned. What am I not seeing, I asked myself. What don't I want to see?

Tonight after dinner, walking in the dark, the twitching lessened and almost stopped. Relief. And then two streetlights blinked out just as I passed them. Stopping, I turned around and watched as they flickered for a few seconds, then sputtered into black.

Is the left eye different from the right? I googled. Then I searched for eye twitching superstitions. Suffice it to say that there are many. All I've determined for sure is that my right eye is my dominant one.

courtyard at the Ventura County Museum on Sunday afternoon

The winds have mostly died down, but the twitching is back. A half-hearted gust rattles the dried palm fronds from time to time. They clatter like bones as if perhaps a few dead souls have forgotten to return to their world and are still walking about in ours.

a detail of one of the altars at the Dia De Los Muertos exhibit at the Ventura County Museum--the "sugar" skulls are actually eggs

At dinner on Sunday night, the man who loves me, M, and I told my mother about the Day of the Dead. The skeletons are happy, I told her. There are parties and food and drinks in the cemeteries. She said that sounded marvelous. But tonight I feel as if there are ghosts lurking just beyond the edges of my peripheral vision, and when I try to spot them they disappear.