THE GRIM REAPER

          When I first saw the house, last year, decorated for Halloween, with ghosts, skeletons and wispy webbing, I thought the inhabitants must have children.  But this is not the case. A single, middle aged, woman lives there. A few days ago,   walking Walter, a red Explorer pulled into the driveway.  The resident came out the front door and greeted a young woman who reached into the back seat and extracted a baby.  I could not hear them but it seemed this was Grandma watching Baby for the day.

          I found the image fascinating: the baby in a pink sweater, the pink-cheeked young mother, the trim grandma, and all those images of death.  

          In the nine days since I wrote my last blog, my mother fell, broke her hip, had to wait fifteen hours to be admitted to the hospital, waited four days to have surgery because she takes blood thinners, had the operation, and has been transferred to rehab.  During this time I received word that a very dear friend, my boss of fourteen years, passed away. He and his family live at the top of my mother’s dead-end street.

          A few houses down from my ex-boss, a seventy-year-old friend moves her ninety-two and ninety-four year old parents into a convalescent home on

Ocean Avenue

.  She writes to me that the poolman has been “let go” since the house will now sit empty.  I met this man last summer. He is my mother’s pool man. Elderly, Asian, smiling, in a straw hat, he pointed to me, then my mother and nodded his head at the resemblance.

          He’s never been able to keep the pool leaf-free. A massive four-hundred-year-old oak hangs over the pool dropping leaves and pollen.  Orange trees shed their leaves which drift into the cold turquoise water.

          My mother’s house is empty while she’s in rehab, having nightmares and hallucinations, waiting for her doctors to try to alleviate her misery. The elderly couple settles into their small apartment. The husband turns on Fox TV. I don’t know what the wife is doing. I believe she has lost her short term memory. So perhaps she’s wondering where she is.

Did You Ever Covet?

          Do you remember how grocery stores used to give away a free book or volume of an encyclopedia, with a minimum purchase?  Well, there’s a touching piece in the current New Yorker called “Off the Shelf” by Patti Smith in which she eventually shoplifts Volume I.  I started thinking this would be a good assignment to give to my adult writing class – was there anything you coveted, that you just had to have? 

          I never stole anything, but I do remember falling in love with an orange mohair sweater when I was twelve or thirteen and having to wait for Christmas for it, which made it that much more wonderful when it was finally mine.

THE ORANGE SWEATER

When I was thirteen

what I wanted

more than anything 

was a mohair sweater

bright as a blood orange

a huge cocoon

to cover my skinny frame

protect me

make me appear

bigger than

I was.

I remember the feel

plush like nothing in

our house of

glass and terrazzo

every surface sleek

Danish Modern

white and beige.

The sweater was magnificent.

The fibers retained

a wild animal vibration

split hooves

eerie green eyes

curved horns like

a cornucopia.

I knew goats

loved to climb

the way I loved to climb

into the canyon

by myself

and hear nothing

but my heart

and the trickle of springs.

The enormous orange sweater

blanketed my skinny arms

my small sore breasts.

The cable-knit pattern

would bind me until

I was old enough

to emerge into womanhood

and no longer need

to hide.                                               

BIRDS

                                                                    

            Last Saturday I went to the Riverside Nature Center for the first time, which is pretty shameful because I drive by it several times a week. I went to hear a lecture called “Raptors, Those Awesome, Intriguing Birds of Prey” presented by John Karger, a master falconer and wildlife educator from Last Chance Forever, a sanctuary in San Antonio.  In thirty-five years he has helped rehabilitate and return to the wild more than 3,000 birds. 

            Many families with young children, as well as plenty of old folks like me, packed the room.  Karger, a scruffy Santa Claus in denim shirt with white hair curling out from his brown cap, talked about the importance of protecting wildlife, not just because it’s a nice thing to do, but because birds in particular are “indicator species.”  They indicate problems in the balance of nature, such as when birds started dying off after DDT became so popular as a pesticide in the 1950s.

            “And so children,” he intoned, casting his clear blue eyes over the upturned faces of seven to nine year olds, who indeed looked like chicks waiting for morsels from their mothers,  “because these birds died, we understood what was going on and protected you!”   

            Oh no, I thought, this is going to be all about how horrible human beings are, an opinion I assumed the khaki-clad crowd shared.  But his lecture was merely an overview that let us appreciate how all creatures – even the dreaded skunk who eats bugs that destroy the roots of trees – have their roll to play in keeping our world healthy, so we all may thrive. 

            “Don’t let the Humane Society tell you hunters are evil,” he said. “Hunters are not wasters. They eat what they kill and the animals do not suffer.”  He told how he hunts with his falcon who sat on a little perch behind him, wearing a hood to keep it calm. Falcons, he reminded us, have been used to hunt food for humans for thousands of years. Kublai Khan fed his hordes with the help of thousands of falcons who retrieved rabbits and small creatures for their nightly stews.

            Karger explained how he hunts with his falcon and his dog, a pointer. He releases the falcon who flies overhead as the dog sniffs out a rabbit and when she finds one, stops dead in her tracks and points.  The dog glances up at the falcon but waits until Karger gives the signal “flush!” The dog moves, the rabbit runs and the falcon dives at 200 miles per hour and plucks the rabbit up in its claws, quickly breaking the neck with a pinch of its talons, between two vertebrae.  The falcon drops the bird at Karger’s feet and he  rewards it with a nice bite-size morsel of raw meat.

            The second bird we got to see was a gorgeous black hawk. Hawks can’t move their eyes, so they have to turn their heads to see in different directions. Hawks and eagles eyes are small but incredibly strong: if they could read, they could read a newspaper from a mile away. Falcons have much larger eyes. They dive quicker, too, because they often catch birds in flight, whereas hawks and eagles catch animals on the ground.

            The third bird was a great horned owl.  All three of the birds, by the way, were once wild, but came to the sanctuary after being injured. Most birds are kept in captivity until they heal and then are released, but because these birds became too tame, they are  used in lectures and demonstrations such as this one.     

            Owls have huge eyes so they can fly at night and not bump into things. They are silent because they have so many feathers that act as baffles to diminish sound.  Before a helper took the owl out of its carrier, Karger demonstrated some owl sounds, to which the owl responded.  Karger said, “Who is the most beautiful owl in the world?” and the owl said, “I am!” At least that’s what he told us it said.  He made varying sounds of different types of owls and we learned the difference between a happy sound and a sound of distress.

            What should we do if we seen an injured bird?   Deprive vultures and ants of an easy meal or call a sanctuary?   Because there is no waste in nature, sometimes it’s a difficult call.

            Before the ninety-minute talk/demonstration ended we were told we would get to see one of these critters fly. A communal nervousness ran though the room. We all imagined one of these hook-beaked, sharp-taloned birds of prey deciding to shake things up a bit by diving at one of us.  But Karger assured us we were perfectly safe.

            One of the helpers took the black eagle to the back of the room. Karger took from his pocket what I feared was a dead – or worse, live – bird. But it was merely a bird he had made out of leather, on a string, kind of like a cat toy. He affixed a little piece of meat to it. Then, on a signal, he asked the helper to release the bird as he flipped the fake bird up into the air.  The eagle swooped over us and grabbed the morsel. After it landed we felt a whoosh of air pass over us.  The eagle “mantled” over his prey – spreading his wings to create a tent to hide it, as he ate the meat.

            I’ve always loved watching birds fly. Last week before the rain, with the sky churning and the wind blowing, I took Walter out for his walk. Several turkey vultures were riding the thermals overhead.  One of the birds toyed with us, swooping low.  I tilted my head back and shouted, “Hello bird!”  as Walter pulled at the leash and barked.  I remember how, in Coarsegold, every spring and fall, John and I would watch the migration of the raptors. We’d stand in awe as dozens of the magnificent birds circled in huge loops overhead, moving gradually further north – or south – on their way to or from Mexico.

            The demonstration in the Nature Center is the closest I’ve come to that transporting experience, being part of nature, not an impersonal observer reading a book or watching TV. My eyes, ears, skin, pores were engaged in a way that reached deep into me and soothed my soul.