Ode To Joy

The more I know, the less I know.

That's the way it's supposed to work. If you have a question that doesn't lead to way more questions, you're not doing it right.

Take this whole subject of birds. I don't feel like I know much about them, even though the average citizen knows even less. I've accumulated some knowledge. But even the birds I know on a personal level, the ones I've observed closely and avidly, are mysterious.

So I don't know what's been going on with Studley Windowson this year. But it hasn't been a normal year. Just as I think I've got him all figured out, he changes it up. Since I started keeping records a few years back, I've discovered he and Marge start flirting, building the mattress, and sending baby Windowsons down the production line on pretty much the exact same days each year, or they don't miss by much. And whatever I don't observe directly (their front door is inches from my window) I can intuit by the interest level Studley shows in mealworms. That is one fine hard-working bird and provider, and although he will happily consume three or so mealworms himself at a time all fall and winter, there comes a day he flies off with them instead, and that's when you know wooing has begun. The mealworm intake ramps up when Marge is on the nest and he brings her lunch. And when the little Windowson goobers poink out of their shells, he grabs a ride on the Mealworm Express. He's zippeting back and forth all day long from wherever we are to the nest, and even later on he waits to grab three at a whack before he takes off. He looks like a dang puffin, fully herringed.

2011, possibly young Studley

This year, though, I was confused. Seemed like things were going along fine, but he wasn't taking as many mealworms, and at least once I saw him take over twenty of them and stash them in a crape myrtle. Every time I thought he was on schedule, there'd be a pause.

When I trimmed Dave's hair and beard, I hung up a bag of it near the nest box. And although I thought I heard Marge hammering the mattress together at about the right time, I didn't see a lot of activity. Just as I decided they were nesting somewhere else, I'd see one or the other of them pop in and out again. Seemed like the thing was happening, but the day the babies should have pecked themselves out of their shells and started squeaking came and went.

Later I watched Studley go into the house empty-beaked and come out with a soggy worm. I saw that a few times. But well past when there should have been little Windowsons. It was almost as though he was using the nest box as a pantry.

2018, first year with bum foot

He was hanging out in the hibiscus with a younger model, but I think that was a kid from last year. The younger model is very interested in this mealworm thing, having observed Studley score plenty, but every time he got a little closer and looked like he might give it a whirl, Studley ran him off.

And he'd still come by for his own personal worms. Not every day, but pretty often. He looked skinny. He always looks like shit this time of year what with the molt and all, and skinny because he's worked his little wingies to the bone. But I finally concluded he did not have a family this year.

On August first, after a few days' absence, he stopped by the back porch for a few worms. Something made me note the date, which I'd never done before. Something was off. He came by August 2nd. And August 3rd. He hasn't been by since.

Most chickadees don't die of old age, they say. They can max out somewhere around eleven, but most make it only two or three years. Something gets them. I've seen how cautious Studley can be. He is constantly looking around. Hides from hawks. Hides from us, if he sees Tater Cat in our window. And he's got experience. Something nipped off part of his foot. Something took out his tail, last winter, although it grew back. It shows he's either good at this survival business, or just the opposite. One of the things I don't know.

And I don't know how old he is. I was checking back, and chickadees have been renting out the nest box every year since we put it up in 2011. I couldn't tell one from another until the year he hurt his foot. Which makes him at least four, and possibly eleven.

A few days ago, I took down the nest box. Didn't know what I'd find. And what I found was a complete new grass mattress, untrampled, with Dave's beard woven in, and with twelve unhatched eggs. Doesn't seem likely Studley was shooting blanks after all this time. Maybe his sweet Marge met an untimely end. I don't know if a chickadee can die of a broken heart.

I know I can't. I'm still here.

See Spot

I'm not sure my eyes are working properly anymore. Of course, they never have. All I have to do is take my glasses off for a moment to realize how lucky I am to be alive now because in another era I would have blundered into a tar pit. I would have been stomped into salsa by a mastodon. I would have died young but at least I would never have seen it coming.

I should have my eyes checked again. But it's been less than a year since the last exam and I can wait. It isn't any one thing, anyway. Seems like I'm always trying to navigate around the smudgy bits and exploring my trifocals for areas of clarity in any given situation. Supposedly I have a cataract that no one is in a hurry to do anything about. I also have enough floaters that in certain lights it's like I'm living in an aquarium, which isn't so bad. The only place it's really annoying is at the piano. I wonder if I can get sheet music the size of the old Dick And Jane book we learned from in first grade. We sat in its shadow. Four kids could make a fort out of that sucker without even using blankets.

I like to think of my eyes as having "let themselves go." That's the expression people use to describe old people who have flat-out given up on trying to be something they're not. I guess it's meant to be derogatory. Seems to me if you're an old woman who rolls out of bed and into a muumuu and scuff slippers, you've got a good grip on things. Mostly no one describes me as having let myself go because it implies I was holding it together before, and there's not a lot of evidence for that. Comfort, Sloth, and I are a mighty team, and Vanity doesn't have a shot against us when we stick together.

Some things I can see more clearly now, in this life pause we've been given. Our isolation is not without its blessings, especially with the stripping-away of diversion and trivial pursuit. So much of what we do is designed to distract us from our eventual, unimportant demise. We acquire mindlessly, we manufacture conflict. We're desperate and diligent in filling up our lives, we feed our rage and our fears. We complain about our busyness and yet we feed that too. We don't like to think about our lifetimes contracting. But there's no getting around that. There's something to be said about knowing what's important, and a lot of unimportant stuff needs to be moved out of the way to see it.

What we need to do is let ourselves go. We're the ones in our way. Every best joy is simple. We all need things for simple survival, and we should do our best to see that everyone gets them, because right now the winners and losers are determined by a game of dice. But we don't need much--not nearly as much as we imagine. Rejoice in good food. Rejoice in food at all. Go outside. Stay inside. Play music. Play at all. Make art. Make out. Make up. Everything is bigger than we are, and that is the biggest comfort and joy of all.

I rejoice in weak eyes that can still see, and I rejoice in you, and in everything that still wings and still slithers and still sprouts on a still-green earth. And I'll fight for all of these tomorrow, but today I'll let my thankfulness for it all roll through me. Gratitude is another word for peace.

That much is clear.

We, Like Sheep

Every year as Christmas begins to look more and more inevitable, I go out in search of a Sing-Your-Own-Messiah. It's not as daunting as it sounds; generally a whole lot of other people show up to help. A Lutheran church within walking distance has been pretty reliable about throwing this particular party for a while now. Folks converge on the place and there's an attempt to group us into the component voices as though we were a regular choir, but people want to sit next to their spouses and friends, and the balcony is a total catch-all for the latecomers, and what with this and that, we resemble less a force of standing armies than a rag-tag assortment of conscripts. This does dilute the sopranos somewhat, which is helpful, because otherwise they would totally kick everyone's asses.

Most of the people who show up are either in choirs now or they used to be, like me. And everyone who is now or ever was in a choir has sung Messiah. The choir director perched herself on a big box where we and the organist could keep an eye on her. This was meant to be an ecumenical outing, but just for fun, she started out by saying "the Lord be with you." Whereupon the 400 assembled bellowed "and also with you" while I antiquely hollered "and with thy spirit." She smiled. "I thought there were probably some Lutherans here," she said, to chuckles.

Well. And one fossil Lutheran.

Then it was down to business. Anyone interested in glory to God was in the right place. We thundered. We roared. If goodwill toward men was in short supply elsewhere, it was not our fault. We sounded awesome. Everyone was in spittle-flinging distance of at least one knot of sopranos, which meant there was no reason not to give it everything you've got, because no one is going to hear you anyway. The effect was electric. We were very pleased with ourselves. It could be said we were in need of a cleansing dose of humility, and that was not long coming: for He shall purify.

The challenge is a little greater if your voice, like mine, is no longer the one you learned Messiah with. This means you have to sight-read your part, and that works fine for a whole lot of it, but sometimes your sheep go astray, and you have to sideline yourself and figure out where to hop back in, like a kid doing double-Dutch jump rope. And the sad truth is, it's not as much fun being an alto. No one can hear you. Your glory is less glorious. So, once my vocal cords got as stretched out as they were likely to get, I occasionally jumped the curb over to the soprano line to see if I could hold on.

I might as well have had an amputation. There's only so far this valley will be exalted. I reared back and prepared to bellow but all I got was phantom notes: I could feel where they used to be, but they weren't there anymore.

It was a different phantom I experienced when I went to my first Sing-Your-Own-Messiah, some thirty years ago. I'd read about it in the paper and thought, what the hell. I'll just hold it down to two beers and go give it a whirl. Sounds like fun. I used to know this. And off I went. I slotted myself optimistically in with the sopranos and we let 'er rip. Before long I was weeping. I felt the phantom: it was what used to be my life. It was everything that was missing now.

I'd had unanticipated trouble in college. I was buffeted by panic attacks for which I had no name. By my junior year my self-confidence had sheared off in sections and tumbled away. I couldn't come up with a reason anyone would love me. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, but beer magically made it all better. Every night for fifteen years I drank enough to muffle both pain and joy, and then Handel went and tilted his wigged head at me and said, you know? Here. It's right here. Here's the joy you used to feel.

I didn't go home and take a hatchet to the keg. But I started to remember things. I remembered beauty. I remembered gladness. I started to do some of the things that used to thump my heart. I drew. I played piano. I read books. I couldn't do them very well if I was drinking, so gradually that fell away. The spontaneous ecstasies of my childhood came back. Not religion, but beauty and joy that sometimes share its path. There is more than one way to be born again.

I don't mind settling for the alto part. Handel, that other fossil Lutheran, is still winking at me from three hundred years away. He says I can still have beer.

Pootie's Christmas

We always got a balsam fir for Christmas, because Daddy thought those smelled the best, but even if we picked it up early, he leaned it up against the back porch to keep it cold and fresh until we put it up, which was never early. My parents were firm believers in moderation in all things, even though in some things, like swearing and spending money just because, they were more abstinent than moderate. It could have been put down to a Depression mentality at work, but I now believe that my father was a Wise Man who fully understood the damage that excess and extravagance can do to a kid and her ability to be joyful. So when the tree did come indoors, it was well freighted with anticipation. There was a routine. Daddy was in charge of making the thing stand upright, which took a lot of frowning and dagnabbiting, and then the light strings were laid out on the floor. There would be that moment of hope just before they were plugged in, dashed annually--another tradition--and then we'd unscrew the bulbs one by one until we found and replaced the culprit. Ornaments would be hung by all and later redistributed higher on the tree, and then we draped the tinsel on. Ours was a wrinkly tinsel family. The tinsel was gleaned and packed away every year. Dad put one modest string of light bulbs out on the porch and one modest electric candle in the window, and that was that. Every year I lobbied hard for extra lights, with the same result as I got begging for a dog or a house with a rec room. I didn't even know they made unwrinkly tinsel.

But our modest tree filled the bill for joy every year. Overdoing it would not have increased it. In fact, when it comes to joy, you get less bang for every successive buck, which I did not learn for a while. Christmas is famously for the children, and I was the last child, the one my mom charitably referred to as a "surprise," showing up at a time my folks might have preferred grandbabies. "You're what's keeping me young," Mom would tell me, although the exact opposite case could have been made, especially during my teenage years, but I took the charge seriously, and every year I mustered as much enthusiasm as I could credibly pull off. But each passing Christmas pushes us further away from our childhood, no matter how we try to hold on. Mom and Dad were faithful to our little traditions and that helped. That's why the first Christmas away from home has the potential for bleakness.

I got lucky. I spend my first Christmas away from home in Bavaria with friends, and there were stars and snow and castles and picturesque tipsy Germans and goose for dinner. We were studying abroad, and none of us roommates had much money, so we decorated our one house plant and bought each other  as many presents as we could manage without spending more than £2.50 all told. It was challenging and very, very fun, something that acquiring more money allows one to unlearn.

The next Christmas on my own was spent at a boyfriend's house and was a riot of excess. I'd never seen more gifts in my life, and that part seemed good, but we opened them on Christmas Eve, which was so wrong: abandoning Santa snaps the final bond. But you get over it.


When Dave and I moved in together, we got our first tree, without a lot to hang on it. Each year the tree got a little bigger and more crowded. One year I asked Dave if we could fit a grand piano in the house. He eyed a bearing wall thoughtfully and allowed as how we probably could if we had to. Oh goody, I said, because I just bought one. That Christmas I scavenged a large windblown branch from a fir tree and Dave stapled it flat to the wall that he now had to take down. He stapled harder and louder than might have been strictly necessary. We bought each other flat presents to lean up against the wall: books, record albums.

But Dave was often gone for holidays, working a shut-down boiler at a mill out of town. One year I bought a one-foot plastic tree and decorated it with tiny plastic hard-hats and a small cement mixer for the star, and I wrapped about twenty one-dollar items for him and his crew and mailed it all off. They had to guess which presents to pick. There was an airplane bottle of Jack Daniels and a similarly-shaped bottle of hair goo. There was a rolled-up porno magazine and another rolled-up Woman's Day. It was the most fun I'd had buying presents since Bavaria.

Other than that year, every Christmas tree went up about the same way Dad's did, only Dave had a more emphatic vocabulary. Pootie showed up at Christmas in 1989. It was no accident. He no doubt had a scouting report that confirmed we had no spawn that might dilute our attention, and he moved in and began arranging things to his liking right off the bat. Pootie is, technically, a stuffed dog, and the fact that he generally gets his own way around here is a sign that we were wise not to have children. Pootie indicated he needed his own tree--fine, whatev--so one year we got him a small one, and he jammed it full of tasteful ornaments. His taste, sadly. There were basketball players and ceramic jock straps and a skinny Gumby-Santa and M&M lights and a star so garish that the nativity story had to be rewritten with the little lord Jesus's manger set up at a strip mall, attended by the Three Car Salesmen and a flock of possums. It's da Tannenbomb. Our own tree got smaller and smaller through the years and Pootie's got bigger until now all we get is Pootie's tree, and we don't have one at all. Because nobody wants to see what happens if the Poot doesn't have his Christmas.


After all, Christmas is for the children.