Let Nothing Ye Dismay

I don't know how you parents do it.

I don't know how you're supposed to have this little tiny being that you love more than you've ever loved anything in the whole wide world and then you're supposed to just let it grow up and go away. It's got to be the hardest thing. I mean, sure, it's one thing if it's annoying, but otherwise, how are you supposed to stop worrying?

And then what if it's not annoying at all? What if it has always been perfect in every way and not once given you a moment of sorrow? What if it's Studley Windowson?

You get yourself your own personal chickadee and you've got a twelve-gram portal to everything important in the universe. Maybe you're a little down, and you've sort of lost your way, and you wander outside and your chickadee lands on your finger and all of a sudden everything makes sense again. Here, he says, your way is over here. And maybe could you bring a mealworm on your way back? Studley thinks I'm a terrific cook, which makes him unique in the world. He thinks I get the temperature and liveliness just right, every worm al dente, but it's nothing, really. It's all in the presentation.

I don't see Studley every day, but every couple days he'll show up outside my writing room window and chikket at me. I'll put up one finger--to let him know I'm on it--go downstairs to the fridge and get the mealworms, and he'll still be right there waiting when I get back. But I haven't seen him in two weeks.

I worry. I know some day Studley will not reappear but I am not ready for that now. I want to see him through next spring's nesting season at least. Fortunately for me, our chickadees don't go anywhere in the winter, or so I've always thought. Now that I have one I can recognize, I was looking forward to seeing if I was right.

Every time in the last two weeks I see a chickadee at the feeder I run out with my tub of worms and it's never Studley. I can't see his tell-tale bum foot until he's real close, but Studley is never standoffish, and no one's come close. I've started to think dark thoughts. I've started to refer to my neighbors' unauthorized outdoor cats Boo and Anjali as "Coyote Chow." Maybe out loud.

Sometimes when you've gathered all your big griefs and little griefs and boxed them up neatly for transport without spillage, it doesn't take much to tip the scales. Twelve grams, maybe.

"Oh Studley," I think, when I'm refusing to think worse things, "are you seeing someone else?" So  it is not without gratitude that I received a bolt of grace today. I moved on.  I started seeing other chickadees. We're not intimate, but it's still exciting. Today we got two new birds at the feeder. They're chestnut-backed chickadees. Most of y'all don't have any of those. They're common at the coast and probably some Portland neighborhoods but this is a new Yard Bird for me. I thought: they're not Studley, but jeezy peezy they're snappy-looking. I decided to quit yearning and be happy with what I've got.

And that's when one of the regular black-capped chickadees came to the feeder. They always take one seed and run, but this one paused, and looked directly into the window at me, and didn't even bother with the seed. Studley?

Yes.

Merry Christmas, Studdles, and to all a good night.

Meet My Tweetheart: Studley D. D. D. Windowson

I have mealworms. Let the seduction begin.

I have mealworms, two industrious chickadees, and a box of beebling baby birds at the goober stage, all ready to assemble. Marge and Studley Windowson did find the mealworm stash near the suet feeder on the other side of the house, or someone else did, but still I yearned for intimacy. I did not want to attract scrub jays. I gave it some thought. The mealworm store lady probably couldn't guess how much time and care I was willing to devote to this project. I cracked open the window close to the birdhouse. When I was certain only my chickadees were around, I eased a worm out onto the windowsill. Nothing happened. But when I turned my head for a moment--okay, I went to the toity--it was gone.

The next day I edged my palm out onto the sill with a mealworm in it. Studley definitely saw it. Studley definitely wanted it. He made feints at my hand, hovering. Then he landed on the sill, weighed his responsibilities against his fear, stabbed at the worm and rocketed off like he'd swatted a tiger's nose on a dare. A half hour later he was landing on my finger. Then on Dave's finger. On two hearts at once.

They say there are wormholes in space-time. Portals to other universes. I was already smitten, but it wasn't until the next day that my entire soul tipped into that gravity well. I was outside weeding and stood up to stretch, and there came a flibbet of wingbeats, and there was Studley, on a twig eight inches from my face. He tilted his head, back and forth, sent me one bright black eye, then the other. And I fell through the mealwormhole into Studley's world.

I wasn't anywhere near his window. And I was wearing a hat. But he knew me. Had he been looking at me for years, even as I was looking at him? He's paying attention, that's for sure. Dave stands in the garden with his hands relaxed at his sides and a small grown bird tucks into the cup of his fingers. I get out of my car and a bird lights up the closest branch, and dips over to my hand, his feet as important and small as punctuation. He doesn't weigh any more than a held breath.

Marge hasn't taken the plunge. That's okay. I worry about habituating Studs to people, although he's only stalking Dave and me, but he did land on neighbor Anna's teacup. It's white, just like the ramekin I carry mealworms around in. Maybe it's because I've zoomed in on so many photos of Studley, but even now, when I see him through the window, he seems larger than he really is. Substantial, even. He's not. He wouldn't tip a scale with a peanut in the other pan. He is a tiny, tiny bird. But he's smart.

He's damn smart. He's probably known me for years before discovering I'm useful. When I'm too slow to get him a worm, he knocks the hat off my ramekin and helps himself. He goes off to a branch to subdue it for a baby's gullet, whap whap whap. When we call it a day and go inside, he figures out where we are in the house and hovers at that window.

He knows when beer-thirty is.

I know what he likes me for. But is it love?

I want to get this right.

The sober voices say all love is self-interest. The sober voices are measured in their assessment. They manage risk. Keep their own hearts on a short lead, safe from disappointment.

I choose headlong.

Because I don't know just where a love story begins. But maybe love is the name of the charged ether that joins our worlds. I do know I've got the trust of the smartest, bravest, most valiant chickadee in the whole world, a world that can be frantic, and grabby, and barren. Does he feel a lift in his little gray chest when he sees me? Does he love me too? It might not matter. I've got enough love for both of us.

Pin lovingly fashioned by Amy Weisbrot, amyweisbrot@gmail.com

Friends Tour 1: Pittsburgh

Well we packed our bags and grabbed our passports and set sail for Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh doesn't make everyone's list for destination cities. One imagines it to be filled with smudgy turn-of-the-century steelworkers in helmets and sturdy pants who keep themselves from jumping into the three available rivers by drinking industrial-grade beer. Probably it's the "Pitts" part that colors the picture, but Pittsburgh was not meant as a descriptive name. It was named by a British general named Forbes who was sucking up to a British statesman named Pitt and he got the honors by doing well in the French and Indian War, so you're not going to get an American spin on it. Otherwise it would be Steel And Sandwiches, Pennsylvania.

The point of the trip was to check up on our beloveds and make sure they weren't living in catastrophic conditions. Pittsburgh is one of fifty or sixty cities that is currently being touted as "the next Portland, Oregon," which is a fine thing. Ideally, we would discover that our friends are thriving in an agreeable town, but not one so fine that they don't want to come back to Portland where they belong.

Pittsburgh native

"Friends" is accurate enough, but Dave (Big Dave, to distinguish him from Little Dave, Store Dave, Homeless Dave, Republican Dave, and my own Old Dave) is more like our son. He is the man we greatly flatter ourselves to imagine that we could have turned out all by ourselves, assuming of course that he got only our finest traits and none of our parenting skills, which remain unproven and unlikely. Lucky for him, he was born to and raised by others and delivered to our care only when he was nearly ripe and needed just a few more spins in the polisher. He then doubled down by marrying Vivi, a miracle match he was able to find only after scouring the intertubes all the way to Brazil. Now they are together and demonstrating the meaning of love and marriage to the rest of us. In Pittsburgh.

So, well, shit. Pittsburgh is pretty fine. It has an Aviary and a Conservatory and a huge bunch of forest and eight million bridges and a swell little ballpark temporarily hosting the World Champion Chicago Cubs (I like to say that just to see if I get hit by lightning), and spiffy houses in cozy self-contained neighborhoods, just like Portland, except in brick. Also, there's a Church of Beer.

They tailored the tour to our tastes. And that is how one day we found ourselves in the very room where Hannibal Lector murdered those police officers, on the very day the director of Silence Of The Lambs--Old Dave's favorite movie--died. And that is how on another day we walked through Frick Park where I promptly located two salamanders. This is a pretty good city, I thought unhappily, tucking the amphibians back under their logs. Perhaps it was my troubled look that led two Park Conservancy employees to ask me if I needed help. Do you have any red efts? I asked, naturally, and they weren't sure, but suggested perhaps I could take a look in Salamander Park.

What the sequin-studded chocolate-coated gold-plated pudding-filled Heck did you just say?

Salamander Park. They said Salamander Park. Pittsburgh has a Salamander Park.

I give up. Dave and Vivi are in Pittsburgh. They'll be fine in Pittsburgh. The beer isn't as good, but they don't even drink. They'll be fine.

Crones United: No Trump

Friday morning, January 20th, 2017, before dawn, millions of us woke up to a now-familiar bolt of dread, the sleep-stealing quicksand of despair, the certainty that all is lost. That everything we cared about, from our fragile democracy to our tortured planet, was to be sold for parts, or discarded. That the train of progress that had, before, seemed so inadequate and slow had been yanked off the track altogether, had pitched into the ravine.

But on Saturday there was a climate change.

On Saturday there were enough of us to hold up the sky.

We could feel ourselves rising. It's a five-mile walk downtown to get to the Women's March and everywhere on every block people were headed the same way, smiling at each other in recognition, daring to hope. Families gathered at bus stops. Busses arrived already packed. By the time we reached the river, the bridges blossomed with pink hats. We pressed into the crowd and cheered and chanted and sang for an hour in the dumping rain before the march began. Soaked, and sunlit from within.

One-sixth of the population of Portland was there. The entire march route had been filled, so it was slow going. It was wet. Buoyant. Peaceful. Majestic.

There were counter-protesters. Three, by my tally, standing on the traffic median with signs ("Not All Women Are Haters"), politely ignored by the loving masses flowing around them on all sides. They looked damp and dispirited, stranded in a dinghy on the ocean.

A crowd like this? It's all hairlines and hat brims from my angle. When you are a small person, you have no idea how big a march you're in. It's like trying to figure out where your home planet is in the Milky Way, just by gazing. Are you at the margins? In the middle? Toward the beginning, or the end?  Could this gentle gathering of humanity stretch the length of the waterfront? Across the bridges? The state? From sea to shining sea? If we all held hands, would our grip redound across the world?

Standing there, rocking a little side to side for warmth, in fearless contact with unknown thousands, we know we are all facing the same direction. We are corpuscles surging in a stream. We are the lifeblood of democracy.

So thank you, Mr. President. We're all awake now.

Safe At Home

Dave and I can't watch post-season baseball when the Chicago Cubs are doing well without thinking about his Mom. Murry was a huge Cubbies fan.

Right now, though, she's in a small ceramic pot. At least some of her is. We got custody of the pot of Murry after another death in the family, not that we asked for it: we did not. But we reluctantly took the jar in, and it was immediately followed by two good-sized golden cardboard boxes full of the rest of her, in case we ever need to top up the pot.

We don't want to top up the pot. We never wanted any ashes in the first place. We are rational people, and ashes are ashes and dust is dust. Once someone has been rendered to a vacuumable condition, we're pretty much done with that person, except for the love and gratitude and regret and maybe a good recipe. The problem with ashes is you can't just throw them out, unless you do so with ceremony in some meaningful fashion. So they're a burden.

And we know what we're supposed to do with Murry's ashes. We're supposed to sprinkle them on Wrigley Field. Memory is unreliable, and reality comes down to whatever you've managed to make up over the years, so we no longer know if we promised her a home in Wrigley Field or if we thought it up after she died. I'm quite certain we imagined the ceremony as a spray of fairy-dust in the breeze, a flick of the fingers, and not the bucket-dump in the ivy wall it would have to be. They frown on this sort of thing in Major League Baseball anyway, and if we were to let fly with both golden boxes and the pot, we could blind a fielder.

I resent the way inanimate things like bone dust or sorrow insinuate themselves into your life and start ordering you around. Streaks do the same thing.  They have power they shouldn't have. There is something sacred about a good streak, and the winless streak of the Cubs, who have not prevailed in a World Series since 1908, eight years before Murry was born, is as sacred as they come. My own Red Sox had a good streak going too, but it was snapped in 2004, and they've done rather well for themselves since. I'd be happy for Cubs fans if they win this year, but it would ruin the exquisite purity of their suffering. And they'd miss it. I know this. I still root for the Red Sox, but success has diluted my fervor, and now I don't care as much if they win, as long as the Yankees lose.

Neither one of us believes Murry is now in any position to celebrate a Cubs victory. We're rational people. That will not stop us from giving her credit for having some kind of influence if they win. And that is even though we never blame her when they don't. And even though we don't think she's anywhere inside the pot of ashes, we can't throw them away. Rational only gets you so far.

In 1989 Murry slipped out of the sphere too early, but with no struggle or fuss. She was found sitting up in her chair, the newspaper in her lap, her coffee cup by her side, and the Cubbies on the TV. That is either completely true, or we made some of it up. We don't know anymore. But sometimes you true a story the way you true a wheel, so that it rolls smooth. Murry loved us and her grandkids and coffee and the Chicago Cubs. We trued her life.

Go Cubbies.

How To Score

The thing is, Dave has had plenty of opportunity to kill me, and he hasn't done it. It's one of the things I love about him. And this is a love story.

For the record, this is also my annual baseball story. This is the time of year I start thinking about baseball, and also salted peanuts in the shell. It's a happy time. And I like every form of baseball. Including softball, which I learned how to play in my twenties. Dave went to my games. He always told me I was the best little softball player he'd ever seen who didn't have any actual skills. At all.

I listened.  I paid attention to my coach. I understood where to go and who to back up and how to run the bases smart. This made it very exciting to watch me play. Because I had a good grasp of the fundamentals, there was always the chance I'd be in the right place to knock down the ball and scoop it up, and would know where to throw it, and then there'd be that suspense while the ball loitered in the air on its rainbow trajectory. Would it roll all the way to the base before the runner got there? If she, say, broke her leg or something?

Or suppose I was running the bases. I knew just how far to overshoot second, I kept my eye on the third base coach, I gave it everything I had at the "go" sign. Spectators could track me by the slowly moving dust cloud. Would I make it? Yes! The outfielder threw it home and the lead runner knocked over the catcher! The ball is squirting around in the backstop and no one can find it! And there I am, a minute later, on third!

I don't know why I run so slow. It feels like gravity has a much greater hold on me than it does on other people. I am pounding that ground like a set of sledgehammer pistons but there's not a lot of forwardness.

Of course, I had the benefit of playing in a league--the "P" league, as I recall--far enough behind the elite city leagues that our home field was somewhere in the Oort Cloud. But sometimes we'd get up a coed team at the post office and challenge another station for beer and glory. That's how I ended up playing on the same team as Dave. Dave was good. He wasn't a slugger, but he could crack that ball into the holes in the outfield. He ran bases like an electron. His glove was a vacuum.  And he could knock a honeybee out of the air from ninety feet away.

So there I am playing first base, and Dave is crouched near third, and the batter connects with a screamer that should have just nipped inside the baseline, but Dave is long and tall and quick, and he knocks the ball down. I'm in perfect position for the throw to first. I have my heel on the bag and I'm leaning hard toward third with my mitt out, my face lined up behind it. The runner is bearing down on first. Dave loses the ball in the dust for a few moments and then grabs it and rockets it my way. As he remembers it, he glanced at the base and saw the runner was still a yard off and he could still get him. Instinct kicked in.

As I remember it, an orb was streaking straight for my glove like a freaking meteor, and all I had to do was stand there and we win the game. And when that orb, with its little flaming tail of cosmic dust, was a foot away from my glove, the glove with my face right behind it, instinct kicked in. I called on my old friend Gravity and hit the dirt.

I could hear the ball searing the air over my prostrate form and the cheers from the bleachers as the winning run came in from second base and a startled zzzzup? from a flattened honeybee in the next county and I thought: shit. What's the matter with me? All I had to do was stand there. I am such a goat. This was for a keg, for God's sake.

And oh God, Dave was running toward me. And he picked me up and hugged me hard. "I'm so sorry. I don't know what happened. As soon as I let it go, I thought: I just killed my girlfriend! Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!"

Because Love isn't just for tennis.

Loving You Whether Times Are Good Or Bad, Happy Or Sad

There was a sweet feature in the paper about a married couple in their nineties. Carol Graeber is in hospice. Melvin Graeber's next door in assisted living, and visits her every day. He calls her "my baby" and she calls him "my boy." There's a photo of him kissing her as she lies in her bed. I had the same exact reaction as everyone else did. (1) They are adorable, and (2) eww. Wrinkly-lip kisses.

Dave and I go for walks holding hands. I think younger people out there look at our gray hair and relaxed skin and think we're adorable, too. There's something about affectionate old people that twists the part of the heart that longs for connection. We make assumptions in their favor. But are they still together out of devotion, or cussedness? Are they holding hands because they're in love, or because it makes it harder to take a swing? This is where the Graebers nailed it. They were both in agreement: the last thirty-five years of their marriage have been wonderful, but the first twenty-five years were touch and go. That's what they said.

If the young people do think we're old, they're just seeing things a little more clearly than we are. We're still looking at the world out of eighteen-year-old eyes and holding to our end of the contract by staying forever young, and wondering why the Devil didn't get the memo. Deterioration shocks us. Memory betrays us. We never saw it coming.

The love part is easy. I married a man who welcomed me with a blast on a bugle whenever I came home from work. Who tells me I only have to eat three carrot sticks, but slides in a replacement whenever I take one off my plate. Who is man enough to admit it when I get off a better fart than he does. Who has been telling me I'm beautiful long after it ceased to apply. Who has already made sure everything I'll ever need or want is on hand and running smoothly, and has done it so quietly and reliably that I probably don't even recognize the half of it.

Who can be irritable and anxious. Who can give in to despair. Who might have had a little drinking problem. His wife had one, too. His wife, who is amusing but self-centered. Who is more than willing to let someone else do the grunt work. Who can be dismissive and rude.

That's the real beautiful thing about a long relationship. Not that two people have lived a life of sunsets and chocolate and honeysuckle. But that they have learned to trust that their worst will be tolerated long enough for their best to emerge. That the gnarly bits as well as the rosy goodness will still be greeted by a bugle at the door.

Yesterday Dave and I celebrated our 29th anniversary. Some of those years were touch and go, but most of them have been wonderful. I've signed on for the rest. The best.


Dave makes dinner.