Wednesday, February 27, 2008

For the Birds



This morning my husband asked me the name of the orange and white-breasted bird on the feeder. It was a towhee, the one bird who uses his feet to scratch at the ground for his breakfast, but this one seemed to prefer the Hot Bites we feed our backyard visitors. 


I don't know when I first started learning to identify feeder birds, but my mother taught me the skill. We keep binoculars by the kitchen table, pulling them out to more closely examine the nuances between the Carolina Wren and the House Wren, or to watch the red-tailed hawks landing on the highest branches of our wintering trees. Years ago our backdoor neighbor was a retired doctor who spent hours, it seemed, sitting in a lawn chair, looking up at the warblers in his trees. 

While I enjoyed birds then, two little children swinging in the back yard kept me to busy to look beyond them and into the trees. I'll never be so old as that, I thought. Well. I have been known lately to pull up the deck chair and watch.

Most of the birds are frequent visitors here, but occasionally I do see a rare sight: cedar waxwings devouring berries on a bush; a scarlet tanager whistling in the spring, a Baltimore Oriole who stopped to rest in our yard for a day or two. I set up my office desk so I can catch a flit or flutter here and there as I write.

Today, in the span of only a few minutes, one of the largest hawks I have seen in this area landed on a bed of leaves high in an oak that wavers in the February wind. He started picking at the leaves — a squirrel's nest — his wings flapping as his giant talons searched for a mid-morning snack. Down below, the bluebird couple that had been eyeing our house decided on taking a tour.
 
They might be the same couple who raised three clutches last year, the first eggs laid in March. I counted six eggs — fretting during the hard freeze that followed, then missed the fledg
ing. I fed them meal worms, Papa Bluebird watching closely from a nearby branch as I sprinkled breakfast on the top of the house. The second clutch was also six, the third five, and I was home the day the last three babies took flight, wringing my hands like a grandmother watching her grandchild's first steps. 

I've been used to the fledgings of our house wrens, who each year tuck their nests of pine straw into the tight corners in our garage. Last spring mom made her nest in the nest of beach chairs on top of the fridge, eyeing me each morning when I came in from my walk. One of her babies flew into the house one morning when I left the back door open, ending up in my daughter's room on the third floor of our house, clinging to the curtains and trying to fly out of the skylights. 

I love the activity, how the birds gather their colors in the dogwood to wait their turn at the feeder like party guests gathered around the dip table. The mothers nudge, the fathers feed, the babies fly away. Just like real life.
wtmch

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Of Sons

This morning, my heart was heavy as I headed to church. A former neighbor of mine, I learned yesterday, was mourning the loss of her 19-year-old nephew, killed the night before in a car crash near his home. The son of one of my best friends from childhood is in his seventh week at boot camp at Parris Island. He wants to drive a tank. Another friend tries to work through her son's drug addiction. My own son just turned 21 a few weeks ago; already he's lost two friends, one to a wreck, the other to drugs. Good boys, good families all, families who have brought their sons up to have faith in God and  hope for making a mark on the world.

I knelt in prayer for all of these sons of ours, some whose lives are so filled with promise, others cut short of knowing what that promise could be. Praying that God wrap his arms around all of these parents, comforting them in their losses, in their worries, and providing them with hope for their sons in the middle of all their uncertainties.

Then I sat, opening the bulletin to find that for our prelude, we would have guest bell ringers, a group of moms and dads, all of whom have lost children, but who have used their commonality to seek solace in the music, and in reaching others as they perform.

Among them was a member of our parish who lost her son 11 years ago at 21, in a college fire that is now legendary in North Carolina. She has channeled her grief into a crusade for sprinkler systems in college residences, traveling around the country, speaking before Congress. And she rings the bells.

I wept as she and the other parents rang their beautiful notes, their arrangement of "Lord, Make Me an Instrument of Thy Peace," filling them — and the church — with such joy, as they honored the children who no longer sit at their supper tables. Two families who had lost two children each — two — a situation incomprehensible to me. My friend — pregnant with her third child due in a month — sat next to me and wept, too, the quiet grief of mothers who know that our tether to our children is so tenuous. We watched, as the mothers and fathers in our midst drew themselves through their grief and into that joy that surpasses all understanding, drawing us with them, until our hearts felt full, too.

Later, when my son called home for his weekly check-in, I found myself wanting to reach through the phone, tighten the tether, as close as he would allow. wtmch

Thursday, February 21, 2008

The Benefits of Tears

I'm reading The Best American Non-required Reading for 2007, edited by Dave Eggers, and among the treasures I've found is a writing exercise worth trying.

Write your memoir in six words. 

I'm trying my hand at it, but so far can only up with this:  Crybaby wrote the why down, then stopped.

Only I haven't stopped being the crybaby I was born, and I have not stopped writing, either. But I tell my students that as a fairly legendary crier during childhood (and thereafter), I recall that one day someone — I wish I knew who — said "Susan, why don't you just write it all down, and hush."

I did, and writing appeared to give me a power crying did not. I seem to have been born with an acute ability to put into words what my crying jags never can convey.

I remember the first time I asked my husband (also a journalist by training) to read a story I'd written about our dog who had recently died. I wanted to send the story to the newspaper, in hopes that it would be published. He read the story, handed it back to me and said: I don't know why anybody would want to read a story about a dead dog.

Now he loved this dog as much as I did, but he is not an emotional man. I took the paper back, cried, then mailed it (with a stamp and envelope — this was a LONG time ago), to the editor, a faceless man who sometimes wrote columns about walking his dog.

Several weeks later when I hadn't heard anything from the editor, with pounding heart, I dialed his number. "I sent you a story a few weeks ago," I said, hoping he hadn't lost it in the piles of things on his desk.

"I'm glad you called," he said. "I was going to call you, but I had to wait until I pulled myself together to talk to you."

Hummm.. He ran the story, and in the coming days and weeks my mailbox filled with letters from people with their own dog stories, thanking me for mine. What followed were a series of personal essays, and later a real column with my photograph (that took up far too much word space.) But I learned that when I put myself words there, people did read them, and respond.

The other day, when I asked my husband to read the blog before I posted the first entry, he said: I don't know why anybody would want to read about a broken refrigerator.

I've grown up a little since that first story, so I just rolled my eyes this time. Maybe somebody out there has had a broken fridge before, and can relate.
wtmch

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

The Tale Begins

They tell me these days that a writer without a blog won't ever be noticed in this digital world, but I come here kicking and screaming. I have not had a blog until now because 1) I doubt anyone except my parents and one or two friends give a flip about what I have to say; and 2) When I hit the 'save' button, I'm a little bit afraid that my words will float around in the air like the flu bug, and I have no idea whom they'll bite. 

As the author of a regional history, a book of essays — and a former newspaper columnist  — I've been here a few times before, wondering where these words of mine will end up. Though I have not had a 'blog' until now, my essays, posted on paper in a reasonably large daily newspaper garnered more than a few emails now and then. I show up on Google, which in and of itself is a thrill, so long as I don't read anything terrible about myself, or my books, for that matter.  In the hits I do find, my name isn't always spelled right, though.

I read blogs sometimes, most often to see what's going on out there in the writing world, as I sit in front of the computer, writing. Recently The Red Room had a first post for author Amy Tan, who wondered why in the world anyone would want to read her everyday ramblings. So even the best writers out there wonder how that works. 

As I write the blog, I have no theme in mind, just an idea that since I've not written much in the form of personal essay/observation in a few years (a real job has kept me from that), it's time I got back to it. I hope from time to time to post a few excerpts from the novel I am writing, just to see if anybody is paying attention. (Not my mother, of course.) And it is one more thing to distract me from cleaning my house.

Today finds me waiting for a refrigerator repairman to come between the hours of 1-5 p.m. (in theory), to replace the computer board on my three-year-old appliance. In the mornings when I come to the kitchen to make coffee, the click and groan, click and groan of the ailing fridge greets me. At 50, I click and groan in reply. 

How can this happen to my refrigerator in just three years? (I know how it happened to me) The very same years when my children have left this nest, and the fridge no longer gets that much use. Maybe she's feeling neglected, since I don't cook as much as I used to. No doubt the old fridge, which now stands guard in our garage holding cold drinks and extra ice for when the kids do come home, has let that fact slip through the wall to Mrs. New.

This is the third refrigerator in my 26-year marriage. My parents, in 56 years, have also had three I think, the first a small model with rounded shoulders like a grandmother, ready with arms filled with treasures, like frozen chocolate pie and cold fried chicken, just for your taking. 

We moved into a new house when I was five and brought that chubby grandmother with us, our fingers sticking fast to the metal ice trays when we filled glasses for our tea and Kool-Aid. In my memory she stayed with us for many years, until my mother bought her first side-by-side in the 1970s, though I'm sure that can't be correct. Now my mother has a giant fridge with ice and water on the door, where she keeps tiny jars filled with leftovers from the suppers she cooks for my father. Sometimes when I'm home, I look through them, searching for her stewed tomatoes, leftover meatloaf or broccoli casserole, hoping to steal a bite or two to capture a moment, once more, of home.

My children never really liked 'layovers to catch meddlers' as my mother always called that supper when she tired of cooking. When my kids were small, they didn't like foods that 'touched,' so out went the casseroles and conjealed salads my mother used to make. I loved her layovers to catch meddlers, much more so than the shad roe she used to scramble on Sunday nights, or the corned beef hash that showed up on occasion. (My mother-in-law used to tell my husband and his sisters when they balked at her food to 'Stick around. Something you like is bound to come around in a few days.')

So as I cooked for my own family, I calculated just enough to cover the meal and rarely more. These days, though, when I make spaghetti or soup, I make large batches, freezing them to send back with son to college or my daughter to The City, or to pull out for my husband and me when I am too busy to cook. That's why I bought Mrs. New, with her bottom freezer, so those quarts of soup and stew could fit (and so I could feel a little bit more hip, like Rachel Ray.) I should have consulted my own clicks and groans before I decided on a freezer that required bending down to clean.

Let's hope it can be fixed, and with little outlay of funds, since I thought I was buying an expensive enough fridge as to avoid repair at all for at least 10 years. Already I've had to replace the vegetable bin because the plastic broke. I can't help thinking that plastic might not have been the answer for The Graduate after all.

++++

The repairman showed just minutes before I should have gone to my workout (to add to my store of clicks and groans), setting his tiny toolbox and computer on my kitchen counter. A computer? He didn't have to open to door to hear the click, diagnosing the problem in two seconds, typing the serial number in on the keyboard and telling me the date I had bought my Profile. I couldn't remember which year. She is not as old as I thought. It is a good thing living in the digital age, that GE (so many others) can refresh my memory should I lose it completely.

And so, there is no more click and groan, except in my bones. I'll miss the company in the morning. My profile hums a little like she always did, just waiting for me to go back to the grocery store and fill her up. She may not be as stout as the one my family owned 50 years ago, but she does like a few layovers to catch meddlers to keep her company when the lights are off.

I'll end now, hoping to post again in a few days. And if you don't like what you see, hang around. Something worth digesting is bound to show up before too long.

wmch