Intermittently, in Squalls in Everyday Ramblings

Is that not cool, hidden in the word intermittently is a mitten? Which is kind of where we are headed in the wet overwhelming dark of the transition from fall to winter.

Not that I am counting but only 5 weeks until the solstice. I know those of you on the other side are savoring the waning days of spring.

Did you know that all birdsong that currently fills our world originated in Australia? They have been able to sequence the genome of passerines all the way back to what they think is the beginning.

There have been astonishing breakthroughs in the understanding of how birds’ function over the last 10 or 15 years, not the least of which is that we now have a lot more female ornithologists who have discovered that duh, female birds also sing.

I am listening to the audiobook version of “The Bird Way” by Jennifer Ackerman.

When I first met Mr. Finch, I was about to go to a women’s writing retreat called “Flight of the Mind” where I met Grace Paley and Ursula Le Guin. He was constantly muttering under his breath about “The Bird Brains”. I was a bird brain, or they were a bird brain or the bird brains. I mostly just laughed at this and in time it kind of became a weirdly affectionate nickname because over the course of our long tempestuous relationship he came to understand that there was nothing small or instinctual or inadequate about my brain at all.

The new science shows that bird’s brains are amazing. That say the family of jays’ function at a comparable 4-year-old-level and corvids, the amazing raven and crow, magpie family at a 7-year-old-level. I knew a lot when I was seven. :) Here is how they do it, they pack those neurons into a much smaller denser space. It is like the next generation computer chip.

And although there have been horrific die offs in the last 200 years because of environmental degradation and exploitation, the birds are remarkable adaptable.

Remember the dinosaurs?

I named Mr. Finch, Mr. Finch when we were looking for diary names back in the Open Diary days because he had at an earlier time in his life lived with captive finches and whenever we went into a pet store that had birds that is where I would find him.

When my family and I started to get involved in birdwatching after Most Honorable and I went on the most illuminating Wild in the City tour of a small wildlife refuge directly across the river from where I live now Mr. Finch was always interested in what we were discovering and encouraging of the whole venture even though he didn’t participate.

Smoking and tramping around in the woods aren’t a good match, particularly when it turns out one has lung cancer as was the case with him. He is the one that pointed out, much to my astonishment, that almost all my poems had birds in them. I suspect this comes from being a keen observer of birds in a former life as a cat.

In the last months with him we were looking for books I could read aloud that were not dark or distressing and I went to the bird section at Powell’s and found a couple of small books on the science of birds. I read to him a whole book on the songs of birds, particularly chickadees written by an author that had done most of his research here in Oregon. We loved that book and used to tease each other with the limited human approximation of chickadee calls.

I have been thinking a lot about my remarkable relationship with Mr. Finch these days in lockdown and quarantine. These days in a country divided. We were so different, so divided, in our political views, in our class, in our gender assumptions and acculturation. He was often mean-spirited, bigoted, and at times unconsciously cruel. And yet, as those of you who knew him here know, he was brilliant, handsome, appealing in a rich boy gone bad way.

In spite of all our differences, this huge gulf, we found a way from the very first day we went on a solo walk together around the neighborhood, to find common ground. In our case through poetry and a familiarity with the tenants of 12-step meetings and Buddhism. From that we built the richest relationship either of us have ever had, in lifetimes of rich relationships.

I look forward to meeting him again on the next round but in the meantime this reminiscence gives me hope that in some fashion we as a people, as a country, as a species, can find a way to adapt, put in the hard work and survive.

Let’s look to the birds as our teachers. Nobody said this was going to be pretty. Or easy. Or comfortable.

People, our nests are rocking in a big wind. A little cooperation might be necessary to survive.

Last updated November 18, 2020