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adiva_calandiaThis may be a terrible post for Mother's Day, I realize, so I'll cut it.
After my last post, I went to get lunch, and then to return a book to the campus library. There are downed branches everywhere, and it's cool and windy but not raining any longer. From the campus library, I headed for Forbed via Purnell's promenade.
At the street end of Purnell there's a sign that flashes the titles of the shows being presented this season, plus whatever art thing is in the Miller gallery. There's a nest in it, of house sparrows, I think.
I noticed something on the sidewalk just past the end of the building, and couldn't figure it out for a while as I was approaching it. The part pointing towards me looked like bird legs, but I couldn't make that make sense in my head for a minute.
It was a dead bird -- a fledgling, small and so soaked that I didn't recognize it for what it was right off. Me being me, out came my camera. I got a couple of pictures from different angles, feeling sad as I did so, and then I left, headed for the library to return my other book.
I couldn't get the bird out of my head. What if someone stepped on it, like I almost did? They'd feel awful. It'd be a terrible mess. It didn't bear thinking about, but I thought about it. Well, what could I have done? I didn't have gloves or any other way of picking it up and moving it.
Dummy, I thought, all you need to do is slide some paper under it and move it that way. And, I added, because I'm me, then wash your hands like crazy.
Which is what I did. I moved it over to the edge of the sidewalk with a bus schedule from my bag and a stick, and I put the stick there to protect it a little further, maybe. I wondered if maybe I should try to bury it, but even as gently as I'd handled it, I felt barbarous; dumping it into a hole seemed like it would only be worse.
This is one of those times when it's simultaneously great and awful to have Epimetheus character-bleed. On the one hand, seeing a little bit of creation splayed on the concrete like this is so much worse when some writer-ly part of me feels ownership of it, feels like this is part of my work that's dead. On the other hand, Epimetheus is fully aware of the facts of Nature; sometimes the babies don't make it, and it's terrible, but it's the way it has to be. It's the way it's made.
On the third hand, I'm pretty sure the thunderstorm blew this fledgling out of the nest before it could fly, and the fall killed it. So Zeus is kind of a bastard, once again.
The thing that really struck me, though, was that twice -- the first time when I was taking pictures, and the second when I was trying to maneuver the bus schedule underneath the body -- other people, women, walked by and saw what I was looking at or doing and exclaimed "Oh my God." They didn't stop, and part of me resents that they couldn't take thirty seconds to slow down and consider what they were seeing. There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, said Hamlet. Come and see that fall. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.
But at the same time . . . a part of me takes those exclamations, and examines them, and finds in them a desire to connect with the sparrow, and with me. They were affected by the sight, obviously. Oh my God -- that's almost a prayer. And if there had been no one else there, if I hadn't been crouching there with my camera and my bus schedule, would they have said anything at all? I doubt it. But I was, and they did, acknowledging me and acknowledging what I was seeing with them and acknowledging a connection.
This is all getting very Zen, I realize. The moral of the story is that I'm glad I went back and did something, instead of walking on with nothing but an "Oh my god" and a few pictures and a story to tell on my journal. And the moral of the story is to stop and look. And the moral of the story is that life is oh so delicate, and if we the living see it ending, even in the smallest way, we owe it to ourselves, to everything else, to acknowledge it, to let ourselves be affected by it.
Thus do we defy augury. Thus do we defy entropy.
In more cheerful news, I do want to wish a Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers and caretakers on my f-list (I know there are a couple of you!), and to share the goofiness of a Dipolodocus in a pink scarf (the Race for the Cure was today, see).
After my last post, I went to get lunch, and then to return a book to the campus library. There are downed branches everywhere, and it's cool and windy but not raining any longer. From the campus library, I headed for Forbed via Purnell's promenade.
At the street end of Purnell there's a sign that flashes the titles of the shows being presented this season, plus whatever art thing is in the Miller gallery. There's a nest in it, of house sparrows, I think.
I noticed something on the sidewalk just past the end of the building, and couldn't figure it out for a while as I was approaching it. The part pointing towards me looked like bird legs, but I couldn't make that make sense in my head for a minute.
It was a dead bird -- a fledgling, small and so soaked that I didn't recognize it for what it was right off. Me being me, out came my camera. I got a couple of pictures from different angles, feeling sad as I did so, and then I left, headed for the library to return my other book.
I couldn't get the bird out of my head. What if someone stepped on it, like I almost did? They'd feel awful. It'd be a terrible mess. It didn't bear thinking about, but I thought about it. Well, what could I have done? I didn't have gloves or any other way of picking it up and moving it.
Dummy, I thought, all you need to do is slide some paper under it and move it that way. And, I added, because I'm me, then wash your hands like crazy.
Which is what I did. I moved it over to the edge of the sidewalk with a bus schedule from my bag and a stick, and I put the stick there to protect it a little further, maybe. I wondered if maybe I should try to bury it, but even as gently as I'd handled it, I felt barbarous; dumping it into a hole seemed like it would only be worse.
This is one of those times when it's simultaneously great and awful to have Epimetheus character-bleed. On the one hand, seeing a little bit of creation splayed on the concrete like this is so much worse when some writer-ly part of me feels ownership of it, feels like this is part of my work that's dead. On the other hand, Epimetheus is fully aware of the facts of Nature; sometimes the babies don't make it, and it's terrible, but it's the way it has to be. It's the way it's made.
On the third hand, I'm pretty sure the thunderstorm blew this fledgling out of the nest before it could fly, and the fall killed it. So Zeus is kind of a bastard, once again.
The thing that really struck me, though, was that twice -- the first time when I was taking pictures, and the second when I was trying to maneuver the bus schedule underneath the body -- other people, women, walked by and saw what I was looking at or doing and exclaimed "Oh my God." They didn't stop, and part of me resents that they couldn't take thirty seconds to slow down and consider what they were seeing. There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, said Hamlet. Come and see that fall. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.
But at the same time . . . a part of me takes those exclamations, and examines them, and finds in them a desire to connect with the sparrow, and with me. They were affected by the sight, obviously. Oh my God -- that's almost a prayer. And if there had been no one else there, if I hadn't been crouching there with my camera and my bus schedule, would they have said anything at all? I doubt it. But I was, and they did, acknowledging me and acknowledging what I was seeing with them and acknowledging a connection.
This is all getting very Zen, I realize. The moral of the story is that I'm glad I went back and did something, instead of walking on with nothing but an "Oh my god" and a few pictures and a story to tell on my journal. And the moral of the story is to stop and look. And the moral of the story is that life is oh so delicate, and if we the living see it ending, even in the smallest way, we owe it to ourselves, to everything else, to acknowledge it, to let ourselves be affected by it.
Thus do we defy augury. Thus do we defy entropy.
In more cheerful news, I do want to wish a Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers and caretakers on my f-list (I know there are a couple of you!), and to share the goofiness of a Dipolodocus in a pink scarf (the Race for the Cure was today, see).
