by James Brush
Year: 2010
The return of the chipping sparrows is the first real sign that autumn is coming to central Texas. We know it’s here, has been for a month, and the occasional flirtatious cold front suggests that winter might make an appearance, but the chipping sparrows come about the time the leaves begin to fall from the cedar elm out back.
They’ll be regulars at the feeder the next few months, poking for the small seeds the white-winged doves and house sparrows aren’t interested in. They’re less skittish than those two year-round species as well. When I open the back door, the house sparrows and doves fly off immediately, but the chippers stay put as if to say, “Dude, what’s the deal? That’s the ape that brings the food.”
Through the winter I’ll usually see a dozen or so in the mornings and evenings, but come late March just before they fly north, I’ll see massive flocks in the backyard. Seventy or more birds poking around in the grass and to a colorblind guy like me who has trouble seeing brown birds in green grass, it seems the very lawn is writhing and wiggling awake after the winter. Then, one day, they will be gone and summer will be just around the corner.
—
I started my Project FeederWatch counts last weekend. Here’s who showed up for the first count. Mostly, the usual suspects:
- Chipping Sparrow: 4
- Black-crested Titmouse: 3
- Carolina Wren: 1
- Carolina Chickadee: 1
- House Sparrow: 8
- Blue Jay: 2
- White-winged Dove: 17
The only no-show was the Bewick’s wren, which I see pretty regularly, though I didn’t see one on my official count day.
Enfolding dust swirls silent
gray and separate,
the magnificent desolation
of night casting in unnoticed.
Beyond the glass,
a shadowless plain, illusion of silence,
the killing emptiness of absence,
countless broken stones,
the bones of unformed worlds.
Tiny pockmarks reveal bites,
the wind’s invisible stone teeth,
nibbling us all down to nothing
beneath the bad moons rising.
Who looks to these for love songs?
That dread moon waxing in the east?
This moon of fear rising again in the west?
—
Mars has two moons: Phobos and Deimos. Fear and Dread, the dogs of war. They’re little more than asteroids captured by the Martian gravity. Due to their diminutive size, they appear only as bright stars from the surface. Phobos moves so fast and orbits so close to the planet, it rises in the west and sets in the east. Because of its orbital speed, it rises and sets several times each night.
“Magnificent desolation” is the phrase Buzz Aldrin used to describe the surface of the moon.
When everyone else is asleep, he listens to rats scurry across the roof of the house. His stomach rumbles, and he tries to remember when he last ate. He struggles to remember other things he isn’t supposed to forget. Fearful that sleep might steal what he knows, he creeps out of his bed to the kitchen where he empties packets of ketchup and mustard onto a blue-lined plate. Using a thin carrot as a stylus, he writes in red and yellow script his products and sums, the genealogies of silent gods, and the names of animals long gone. When the plate is full, he carefully rinses it into a glass and drinks down the mud-colored water and the knowledge suspended within. He returns to bed and drifts to sleep as numbers multiply in his blood, extinct creatures rumble in his belly, and all the while rats and cockroaches sit on the roof counting stars dropping below the horizon.
Today is Phoebe’s 7th birthday. We got her a little over five years ago. When we met her, they said she was almost three and that her birthday was in January. I looked in her ear since racers have their birth dates tattooed in their ears and found an extra 1 buried under a tuft of black fur. She wasn’t born in January 2003, but in November. This dog we were getting wasn’t even two yet!
One-going-on-two is young for a racer to come off the track, but since her owner was apparently a true monster (as anyone who would involve themselves in the exploitation of greyhounds must be) she was lucky to be getting out alive at any age, and we fell in love with her immediately. Having a 65 pound puppy does have its challenges, though. On day one, she tore down the blinds, ate the corners off the coffee table, and shredded all the paper she could find.
It wasn’t long before she was eating windowsills and a giant hole in the middle of the wall. She even tried to eat Daphne once, though it’s clear they were just playing. Phoebe has always been a rough and tumble dog: she’s well known at animal emergency and even owns her own cone of shame.
She was afraid of me for a long time, but we went to school and while she didn’t learn much, she did learn to trust me. Over the years, she’s mellowed into a great dog. She’s spirited and full of energy and no matter how down one of us might feel, it’s almost impossible not to smile at Phoebe.
Living with dogs is one of the most natural things in the world. I couldn’t imagine life without these guys, and so today, happy birthday, Phoebe, and many happy returns of the day.
[saveagrey]
This is mostly an experiment with Flickr. The poem is one I wrote back in April and I took the picture with my iphone a few weeks ago in New York. I used Flickr’s editing tools to add the text and touch-up the image. I was able to do everything I wanted to do without Photoshop, which makes me wonder if I really need to upgrade. The more I play with Flickr, the more impressed I am with it. It’s crazy I’ve had an account for 4 years, and I’ve never used it until about a week ago.
Yesterday morning, I got to work unusually early. I didn’t get up any earlier; I just moved a little a faster getting ready. It wasn’t intentional, but sometimes that happens. I even stopped for coffee, and still I was at work before the sun was up, well, I would have been if the sun had come up, but it was a nice cold drizzly morning so there was no sun, just the good crisp early dark.
As I pulled into the parking lot, I saw a crested caracara swoop over the lot and across the road right in front of me. I slowed down to watch him soar out over the fields near the building, gaining altitude and quickly becoming nothing more than a dark point in the gray expanse of sky.
I don’t see caracaras often, and I’ve never seen one around where I work. I’ve seen a lot of interesting birds around the building, but this was kind of a treat. As I watched him fly away, I couldn’t help but think of the previous night’s election and wonder what sort of meaning might have been read into the appearance of such a beautiful raptor. Good omen or ill?
I’m not one to take stock in omens, but the idea of reading our hopes and fears and finding either solace or justification in some bird’s random passing fascinates me. Perhaps the crested caracara’s black and white coloration could represent the newly divided nature of our government. Perhaps the bird’s powerful flight could imply that with divided government we can soar over all our problems.
Or maybe it’s a warning about the modern conservative penchant for viewing the world in black and white. Perhaps I should have looked for some gray birds: a mourning dove or scissor-tailed flycatcher. Most of the scissor-tails have already fled the country, though.
On the other hand, this bird is known colloquially as the Mexican eagle. So maybe its northbound flight across the field symbolizes illegal immigrants, and predatory ones at that, sneaking through the dawn into our country to destroy our culture and do all the other horrible things the right wing expects.
Speaking of wings, the bird did have both a healthy and functioning right and left wing. Neither one was dominant, and that circles me back (hopefully not too much like a vulture which I also saw an unusual number of yesterday) to that divided government thing. I do generally prefer divided government. Perhaps that’s a function of having once been a debate coach playing with my mostly optimistic nature.
I watched the bird disappear, feeling a little sorry for the poor guy for all the burdens I’d just laid on his shoulders, I mean, he’s just a bird trying to find something to eat in a world where such meals must seem increasingly scarce to a hunter like him. I wondered if our newly elected Republican house had any member who would worry themselves over wildlife and healthy ecosystems. If that wasn’t such a heartbreaking thought, I might have laughed.
In the gray predawn,
a crested caracara
swoops over the road.
Today is election day, but I voted early as I usually do. I don’t know that I could say that I am more or less enthusiastic about voting than I have been in the past. Fortunately that doesn’t matter. Since I live in Texas and voted mostly for Democrats, my vote doesn’t really matter either. Such is the way of things here and I’m used to it. It’s why I don’t bother with my torch, pitchfork and revolutionary hat. We don’t throw our bums out in Texas.
My official for-what-it’s-worth prediction is that the Democrats will lose the house and hold the senate, which is pretty much conventional wisdom. Here in Texas, Rick Perry will win yet another term as governor, making him the longest serving Texas governor and one of the longest serving governors in US history. They say he has presidential aspirations, though I’m not sure if his aspiration is to be president of the US or a newly seceded Texas.
It is an odd choice for voters today. Vote for the Republicans who created many of the economic and budget problems we face or double down on Democrats who have demonstrated ineffectiveness in solving them. Here is the problem of a two-party system distilled: either/or without a pragmatic middle is barely a choice at all. I don’t know what the real answer is other than viable third and fourth parties. Maybe that isn’t an answer either.
As for me, I went with the Democrats this time out. I’d like to be able to take the GOP seriously, but it’s hard to get behind an anti-intellectual party that doesn’t believe in good government. It would be like going to a dentist who doesn’t believe in dentistry. Whatever happens tonight, though, I suspect I’ll be wishing for something stronger than Novocain.
Last summer while walking around San Francisco, I took a few random snaps with my iphone using the Hipstamatic ap. I liked the way they came out and so while we were in New York earlier this week, I made it a point to get some Hipstamatic shots from my walks around Manhattan. My favorite though is one R. shot of the Thelonious Monk car we rode up to Beacon near Poughkeepsie to visit some friends.
I think I should take a walk around downtown Austin one of these days and try to do some Hipstamatic Austin scenes.
I like this Flickr slideshow embed thingy. I’ve had a Flickr account for several years now, but I’ve never done anything with it. I think I may try hosting photos there instead of here, though I haven’t quite thought out the pros and cons of doing so.