LOCAL VIEW –Chickidea–

from cdn.birdwatchingdaily.com

With so much dour news emanating from The Swamp, I’ve found little reason to be optimistic and hopeful recently, and I always find I have to make a concerted effort to cling to my belief life is beautiful, when in fact life looks downright ugly.

This immediately brings me to a subject some object to, which is that our sense of beauty tends to be very subjective, and downright fickle. It also is quite personal. I recall, as a tender adolescent, being somewhat astonished by how my face looked pretty good in the mirror on some days, but on others looked ghastly. As a young scientist I understood it was the same face. How could it appear so different, and in some ways completely opposite?

Usually it seemed to involve whether I felt loved or not. If Nancy (or Betsy or Debby) smiled at me in the high school hallways, the face in the mirror looked handsome and debonair, but if the same female sulked, the face in the mirror was blotched by acne and had a vile, shit-eating smile. It was absurd, and on some deep level I recognized the absurdity. My boyhood diary at one point sardonically comments, “I looked bad in the mirror this morning. What’s it mean, Froid?” (I did not know how to spell “Freud”.)

Yet the passage of a half century hasn’t changed things all that much. When you are smiled at, you feel beautiful, and in fact are beautiful. You become radiant. People want to draw close to you. But when you are frowned at, you become depressed and neurotic, and people avoid you like the plague or corona virus. As Ella Willcox noted in her 1887 poem “Solitude”, and O Henry noted again in 1907, “When you laugh, the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone.”

In a better world we might show more sympathy, and obey the more ancient Roman proverb which ended, “Weep, and the world weeps with you.” But, sadly, a great deal of emphasis in the modern world involves whether you are accepted as politically correct, or cancelled by Cancel Culture; whether you appear on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter with lots of “likes”, or have been censored and banned from such platforms. If you take all this nonsense too seriously it can involve how you look in the mirror. If a collection of idiots and Karens call you praiseworthy, you appear charming and lovable, but if the same idiots and Karens disdain you, the mirror states you are deplorable, irredeemable, and a bitter clinger.

I knew this was nonsense at age sixteen, and nothing that has passed in the last fifty years has changed my mind in the slightest. I have always been a counter-snob to all snobbery. People who we now scoff at as “virtue signaling” were mocked fifty years ago as “slaves to status symbols.” For there has always been a deeper awareness that true beauty is not a shallow and superficial thing. True beauty is the reflection of Truth, and Love.

That word “Love” is crucial. As we age we discovered that Nancy (or Betsy or Debby) was not God. (I assume women discover the same thing about men.) We move on to discovering that owning a 1966 Mustang is not love. And so on and so forth. In fact, if we truly progress spiritually, we pretty much call all status symbols garbage, all positions of fame and power garbage, all political correctness garbage, and tell Hollywood, psychologists, and all bossy law-makers to go get screwed, for there is only one true author of Love, and that is God.

But if we fail to make such rapid spiritual progress, (and most of us fail), then we tend to get hooked on some worldly thing that makes us feel beautiful. Maybe it is heroin. When we take it we feel beautiful, and are actually attractive when high, so people want to draw closer to us, but later, when withdrawal sets in, everyone makes themselves scarce. Or maybe our hook is gambling, and when winning we feel beautiful, and walk with a woman on either arm, but when losing our complexation becomes green and everyone avoids us. Or maybe our hook is winning elections or writing hit records or appearing in blockbuster movies, and success makes us feel beautiful, but there is a down side as well. But for most the hook is less extravagant, and is more modest, the simple successes of a good marriage or a small business, but here too there is a down side. The good marriage will be wrecked, because one spouse will die. Must this make what was beautiful become ugly? In like manner the owner of the best small business, which succeeds with amazing compassion for both employees and customers, faces mortality, for he or she too must die. Does that make what was beautiful ugly?

No. I asserted this at age sixteen and I assert it at age sixty-eight. Beauty is beautiful. It doesn’t matter if you are a heroin-addicted, male whore of a Swamp politician who will throw you under the bus tomorrow, the glimpse of beauty you saw in your rise and fall was the real deal. Beauty is beautiful.

Ugly is ugly because it in some way denies the fact beauty is beautiful. However this is foolish. It is like shadows denying they exist because of light, and instead attempting to congregate and plot ways to attack the light, ignoring a glaring fact: The moment shadows step from the shadows to attack the light, they cease to exist.

What I just wrote was profound, if I do say so myself, but I confess it is not obvious, at this moment in the history of the United States. Currently the shadows are gathering, but haven’t yet fully stepped out to attack the light. Ugly is ugly, at the moment.

With what is ugly currently seeming triumphant, I seem to have chosen the wrong side. I haven’t. I know beauty will win, in the end.

But, in the meantime, a fellow like me has to run a small business and be patriarch of a small family, midst a global ugliness, and I can’t expect to see much beauty in my day-to-day dealings. Yet I crave beauty. I need to inhale some beauty, if I am expected to exhale any in my day-today dealings.

In order to inhale beauty in an ugly world, I do what I did in school in 1959. I look out the window, and not at the black board. I remove my nose from the grindstone and sniff the roses. I shut off the news and walk out into the view.

God made that view for us to enjoy, and even in rotton weather there is usually something beautiful to see, if you look for it. In the springtime it becomes easier. People refer to it as “communing with nature.” I was describing it in the comments of a recent post:

I was out with the children at my Childcare and watched a bald eagle battle the north winds. I get a thrill seeing eagles, for there were no bald eagles to be seen around here the first sixty years of my life, but the kids are rather ho-hum about such occurrences, for eagles are just an everyday bird to them.

Today the eagle was pretending to fish but the ducks knew he (or she) will eat a duck if need be, so they were zinging all over the place as he (or she) innocently looked for trout. But the chaos of thirty ducks and lone eagle was occurring in a thirty mile an hour gale from the north. What amazed me was that the birds behaved as if the wind was a minor matter, like the “temperature at game time” for baseball players.

A few weeks back I got a crick in my neck watching an eagle battle his (or her) way upwind in a fifty-mile-an-hour gale. At first I thought he was being battered, because he seemed staggered, lowering first one shoulder and then the other, like a boxer getting pummeled. But then I noticed he wasn’t being beaten backwards. In fact he was making remarkable progress, moving north at around fifteen miles an hour despite the winds whooshing south at fifty. It seemed that (and I’m guessing) that when he lowered first one shoulder and then another he (or she) was expertly tacking upwind with a swiftness and dexterity all skippers of all sailboats would envy.

One might wonder if birds are superior to humans, considering the remarkable things they do. They do what they do without a college education, utilizing some thing we do not understand, but pretend we understand by calling it “instinct”.

Considering a lone eagle can tack upwind better than a billionaire with an expert crew of twenty on the most lavish yacht can, one might wonder what is the use of human endeavor. We cannot even match a bird.

However there is an equivalent of instinct in birds, which does occur in mortal humans. It is something we do not understand, but pretend we understand by calling it “intuition.”

It has occurred to me that when I am feeling uglified by the world, and go out for a walk and wind up feeling beautiful, it is because I have been loved. When “communing with nature” my intuition (whatever that is) is communing with the Creator, and the Creator doesn’t want us miserable, and will rain love down upon us if we only allow it.

Thinking along these lines got me a little cross-eyed the other morning. It is a bit humbling to go for a walk and think the Creator is right there. I couldn’t quite tell if I felt tiny or enormous. But I was feeling loved, as the north winds had ceased and the sunshine was kindly. It occurred to me the spring birds would have come out from hiding, with the wind ceasing, and I should listen for harmony.

Rather than spring birds, a couple of winter chickadees came flitting out to serenade me. They are tiny birds, and very perishable in cold winds, yet they don’t fly south and survive extreme cold by avoiding wind, and becoming balls of fluff in calm places. You will never see them at a feeder in a cold wind, and even in a light breeze they will always face upwind, to keep the chill from getting under their feathers. But this morning was mild, and with winter behind them they were attending to some sort of territorial discussion, singing their “spring soon” call back and forth at each other. It seemed a bit like dueling banjos.

The call is two notes, descending, but these two birds were not agreeing on what key to sing in. The first sung an A followed by an F, and the second sung a G-sharp followed by an E. I was listening to the sequence of notes, telling God it was sweet and wondering if I could write a song with that sequence in it, when I noticed their calls were coming closer together. I knew what was coming, and with a sense of dread awaited hearing A sung with G-sharp, followed by F sung with E. They did it, and the discord made my fillings hurt. Perhaps they noticed my pained expression, for they only sung the discord twice before flitting away. I looked up at the sky and said, “Oh Lord; that was absolutely horrible!”

Then I burst out laughing, for it really did seem a great joke: A couple of chickadees attempting to be as ugly as Washington D.C. I laughed so hard I slapped my knee, but then I noticed a lady coming down the road walking her dog.

I set my lip. One needs to be cautious, when communing with nature in public.

LOCAL VIEW –Leafstrippers and Eagles–

The storm is up in Canada now, and the winds have died down, but the trees were not so pretty at daybreak today.

Notice the shutter hanging from the neighbor’s house. We got blasted by a leafstripper.  We moved from summer to winter in a roar.

Friday the wind was mild and southerly,  and the storm was brewing up over the Great Lakes, and for a time it seemed the heavier showers on its east side would move south to north to our west, over Vermont, and never progress east. I went to watch a grandson play a high-school soccer game, and a misty rain ended just before it started and then the entire game was played in various sorts of mild fog, ranging from thick and deep purple, as if thunder was coming, to light and colored like honey, as if the sun was about to break out. I was thinking a storm had to be coming, or else I was coming down with something, as my old bones were aching like crazy. It was foolish to stay out in the damp, but the game was well worth watching, especially as my grandson’s team won 2-1, with a heart-stopping shot by the opponents, in the final seconds, that squirted past our goalie and was dribbling towards the open goal before a frantically dashing defense-man  booted it away inches short of the goal line.

After all that excitement I just wanted to warm up by the fire, and sip some beer, and focus on writing, but the beer didn’t sit well in my stomach, which is not a good sign. I was starting to suspect my aching muscles might not merely indicate storm, though the Friday night sky filled with more pink lightning and sky-thunder than we got all summer. “So maybe it is the weather…” I suggested to my suggestible mind, trying to talk myself into being better.

I was incredibly stiff and sore Saturday morning, but it was my turn to cook at the Church’s men’s breakfast, so I dutifully trudged off and likely infected everyone there. I had no appetite, so I can’t have infected myself. Then I dutifully did dishes and dutifully trudged back home with one thing in mind: Going back to bed. However as I trudged up the stairs my wife’s lilting voice cheerfully reminded me, “We have to go to our CPR and First Aid re-certification class in half an hour. Goodness! I see no need for such language!”

Seldom have I been so dutiful and downright noble as I was, going back out into the rain to go to that class. Especially noble were my smiles at people as I entered the classroom. (Hopefully they weren’t too skullish). Then the minutes seemed like hours as I dragged through learning the same old stuff once again. The only amusement I find is noting where they change things. For example, tourniquets are back in style, after being frowned at for a bit. I suppose they figured the risk of choking off blood to an extremity was worth it, if the person didn’t bleed to death. Also teaching people CPR has been somewhat successful. When people collapsed of a heart attack, 98% of them used to die, but now only 85% do. Heart attack remains our leading cause if death.

The idea one should stop chest thrusts, and breath two puffs into the mouth of the victim, during CPR, is fading, as apparently people were getting brain damage from too much oxygen. This was learned from compating the results in cases where good Samaritans out on the the streets did the formal CPR, with cases where good Samaritans only did the chest thrusts because the idea of meeting lips with the patient seemed too yukky.

Instead in today’s classes  you pound the chest of the dummy twice as fast as you were suppose to in the old days. In the old days you were suppose to do it to the timing of “Another one bites the dust” (but never saying the words aloud) but now you are suppose to pound the chest 120 times a minute, pushing down two inches, which can break ribs, but only makes a little clicker click in the dummy, and also makes an old coot like me feel about ready to keel over, after 360 chest-thrusts or so. I wondered if maybe they’d have to practice CPR on a genuine specimen. All I can conclude is, if anyone’s heart ever quits on my watch, they had better revive in five minutes or we are both goners. However if you do the pounding that fast there is no need to breath into the mouth of someone who may have ingested poison,  as the commotion apparently stirs the air in the lungs enough to keep the blood oxygenated, even if no one in the class can pronounce the word “oxygenated”.

I didn’t get out until after 1:30, and by then the rain was cold and starting to drive. I was cold and wet by the time I got to the car, and as we drove home my wife didn’t much want to hear my opinion about bleepity-bleep state officials in nice warm offices, who never have to perform CPR, mandating others risk pneumonia by going out on a rainy Saturday when they ought to be in bed.

When I got home I couldn’t stop shivering, even under a warm blanket in a warm room, and I didn’t need a thermometer to know I’d got a fever spiking, despite gobbled aspirin. All I could do was set my jaw and prepared myself for the ride, which is never fun for me, as fever causes despairing to dominate my brain. Despite the wet weather, crimson leaves were swirling by my bedroom window and sticking to the glass.

In church we’ve been focusing on how those of faith will soar on new pinions like eagles. It seems a sort of Biblical version of the Phoenix, the mythical bird born again from its own ashes, but I was of so little faith I could only think I was getting the burning-up part right, but not the rest. After all, one of these days we will get sick and go down for the count, and when you are shivering and feeling worse and worse, and there is no improvement in sight, you hope for the best, but maybe part of you prepares for the worst. In any case, if I had to compare myself to a bird right then, it likely would not have been to a soaring eagle, but to a dead duck, blasted from the sky by a hunter.

I kept being woken from strange dreams by leaves spatting the window, and was confused it was daylight, and unsure what day it was…still today or already tomorrow? A long list of Saturday chores was being neglected. Out the window read and orange leaves kept blowing sideways, first one way and then the other, which let me understand the storm was growing into a leafstripper, and also brought Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem “The Last Leaf In the Tree” traipsing through my head. I memorized it long ago, and now it wouldn’t quit:

I saw him once before,
As he passed by the door,
And again
The pavement stones resound,
As he totters o’er the ground
With his cane.

They say that in his prime,
Ere the pruning-knife of Time
Cut him down,
Not a better man was found
By the Crier on his round
Through the town.

But now he walks the streets,
And he looks at all he meets
Sad and wan,
And he shakes his feeble head,
That it seems as if he said,
“They are gone!”

The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom,
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.

My grandmamma has said–
Poor old lady, she is dead
Long ago–
That he had a Roman nose,
And his cheek was like a rose
In the snow;

But now his nose is thin,
And it rests upon his chin
Like a staff,
And a crook is in his back,
And a melancholy crack
In his laugh.

I know it is a sin
For me to sit and grin
At him here;
But the old three-cornered hat,
And the breeches, and all that,
Are so queer!

And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring,
Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough
Where I cling.

Pretty sad stuff, and the violins of my self-pity might have nursed a few tears down my cheeks, but if I was going to going to cry about anything it was about my goats needing to be fed. That was one chore I couldn’t skip. But one joy of farming is that you get to go outside when others stay in, so I went out into the bluster and saw a few lava-like cracks in cloud-cover to the west, and also put up with a lot of nagging by seven goats who do not approve of late meals. Then I headed home to some hot soup, which I didn’t much feel like eating, and a granddaughter, who I didn’t much feel like watching (and who may have given me the ‘flu), and a movie about a pig I didn’t much feel like watching either, “Babe”. However as I sat I begrudged that I liked the movie, especially as the hero is an odd, old farmer who, in the end, is victorious, soaring on new pinions like eagles, albeit in a rather low-key and nonchalant way.

I was starting to shiver again and knew it was time for more aspirin and more bed, and so I handed off the sleepy granddaughter and took a dive in my pillow. Next thing I knew it was ten hours later. (I never sleep like that.)

I felt a bit better, so I took a long, hot shower and then tottered off to my duties as an elder at a tiny church, (listening with a certain, less-than-faithful cynicism to the stuff in the sermon about soaring on new pinions like eagles), and then tottered home and again dove into my pillow. I knew I had a long list of Saturday chores to catch up on, but if I am a eagle I am a recuperating eagle. Anyway, Sunday is suppose to be a day of rest. I concluded that actually I was spiritual to loaf, as I listened to the wind roar and the leaves, now drying, hush and scour by the window. I knew I’d have to eventually feed the goats, but drifted through dreams about last leaves on the tree, and people of my generation who are leaves who have already left the tree, and other morbid stuff, until I wondered if my life was passing before my eyes, and also was getting a tad fed up. I should be getting better by now. I should be soaring like an eagle by now.

By the time I finally budged I knew I’d get more nagging from my goats, but before I could leave the house my wife mentioned the stove was on the fritz and the oven didn’t work. Another chore. Then, as I headed to the farm I clicked on the radio, and was annoyed that I had forgotten all about the football game. I must be sick or something, to forget that! And even more aggravating was the fact the Patriots were ahead 14-0 when I turned the radio on, but the tide of the game shifted and it was soon 14-7, and then, as I listened at the farm with the heater on and the engine running, it became 14-10. And if that wasn’t annoying enough, I couldn’t even listen to the game in the privacy of my truck without a bunch of goats looking at me indignantly through the glass and nagging at the top of their lungs, until I replied, “All right all right all right ALL RIGHT”. (Animal Rights Activists please note: I did not use a single bad word.)

As I got out and looked around the farm seemed a shambles. Bags of trash were still in their bags, but the entire bags had been lifted clear across the yard and plopped in odd places.  Plywood was flung about and lawn furniture rearranged, but I just didn’t want to deal with that. Feeding the goats was enough for now. If I just rested a little more  I could surely show up for work early on Monday, and face the mountain of chores. As I drove home the Patriots lead shrank to 14-13.

When I was a boy I was ridiculously superstitious about my power to influence sporting events through my actions. My older brothers could drive me wild by switching the Red Sox  game from the AM station to the FM station, and then holding me back from the radio and forcing me to listen to the Red Sox blow another lead and again lose. (They nearly always lost, back then.) I was convinced the Red Sox would have been a first place team, (they always came in 8th or 9th), were it not for my brothers listening on FM.

I blame the fever, but some sort of echo of that nature returned as I shut off the radio in disgust and shivered. I just felt I must be doing something wrong, when nothing went right. I felt this way even though I know the reasonable and mature outlook is to see we live in a time of immediate gratifications, and if people look at the cards they are dealt, and don’t see a royal flush, they tend feel fate is cruel and God is unkind and to start up their violins, and that behavior is downright infantile. However, though I can think mature thoughts, I confess I still have an immature heart.

In any case I hunched out of my truck and went slogging through a profound gloom, stomping up the the front steps dejectedly, and then took a deep breath and prepared a fake smile. At the door I was met by a laughing daughter with a funny tale, a granddaughter hugging a better tackle than the Patriots were doing, a jealous, wagging dog that wanted equal attention, and the sight and smell of a roast chicken. I asked my wife, “How can you roast a chicken with no oven?” She explained her craftiness as we sat down to eat.

I have heard chicken is very good for sick people. It seems to have worked on me. I went back to bed, (after turning on the radio and learning the Patriots did manage to win,) and again slept like a log. But there no way around facing the music of Monday morning, and the fact that one chore I didn’t do was take down the summer awning at the front of the Childcare. 

The awning was pivoted completely around on one leg, despite the legs being anchored by pins and bags of stones. One bag of stones was thrown ten feet away. Now that’s some gust!

It gave me something to do, and an excuse to avoid going indoors and perhaps spreading residual germs to children. I chased down some missing lawn furniture and tidied up, and then the small boys came out and wanted to throw a football around. (Among six year old’s I’m still a star athlete.) I was huffing and puffing pretty quickly, but the fresh air likely did me good. Then the bus came, nine trooped off into it, and I drove a smaller bunch to kindergarten, marveling at how the wind had changed the landscape.

Fully half the leaves are gone in a single blow, but there’s still some left, and I seemed to see the glass as half-full rather than half-empty, and even to see there were some views I couldn’t see before, that were revealed, now that there were fewer leaves in the way. As I drove back from the kindergarten one view stopped me in my tracks, and I got out of the van to click a quick picture.

And then, only because I was out of the van, I saw the big bird powerfully surging along the ridge-line. I was so awed I nearly missed my chance to take a picture.

It was a bald eagle. Not an old one, with silver hair like mine, but a young one, brown-headed, and strong like no other bird. Their wings are straight out when they soar (Vultures hang from their wings in a “V”) and when they power with their wings they can cut through a gale. I never saw one in New England, until five years ago, and still get a thrill each time I see they are coming back.

Maybe I’m too old to believe in omens, but you have to admit it was a rather nice coincidence to see an eagle, just then.

In any case, I’m back. Did two simple jobs today that gained great kudos. Fixed a plugged toilet at the Childcare, and replaced a fuse that got the oven working at home. I like the jobs that are done in five minutes and gain you acclaim.  But…our world is held together by those who work long and hard unnoticed. They are the true eagles on whose backs the rest of us fly.