A Walker in the Suburbs

My walks around the city are a study in black in white. The white is from the buildings, their facades of marble, limestone and granite.

The black is from the coats. Long, short, open, closed. But black, almost always black. The puffy parkas of the seriously cold. The long topcoats of the multitasking and self-important (a lot of those around here). The dark suit jackets of those impervious to the chill.

Put them all together — the Hill types striding across the Capitol plaza; the office-worker at lunch — and you have a ballet, a choreography, a study in contrasts.

D.C. gets color from its tourists. But it gets its subtlety and its heft and its monochromatic harmony from its denizens.

I saw them yesterday as I left work, a flock of sparrows taking in the air, sunning themselves in the hedge at the end of the alley.

They looked so much like a painting that I had to stop, snap a picture — and appreciate the respectful distances they kept from each other, the way they blended in with their surroundings, a study in brown.

It was the sort of day when everyone was outside who could be.

And that included sparrows, of course.

We seem to live in a world based more and more on choice — what we read, hear, taste and see is preset to our likes and dislikes. News online instead of from a newspaper. Music from an iPod instead of a radio.

I thought of this on a recent long drive when I had only the radio for company. Suddenly I wasn’t in charge. The airwaves were. Depending upon the angle of my antenna and the pitch of the road I could be listening to a Chopin Nocturne or a local sports call-in show. Sometimes I was listening to both at once!

But the airwaves were kind to me that day. It was morning in the mountains of Kentucky when I heard Brahms’ Second Symphony and afternoon in the mountains of West Virginia when I heard Brahms’ First.

There they were — and not because I had bought and stored them in an mp3 file. (I already have them, in fact.) They were gifts from thin air, music at random — and all the sweeter because of it.

I don’t usually write postscripts, but today calls for one. I wrote yesterday’s entry hours before the tragic school shooting in Connecticut. It was a post about guns — not a topic I usually cover.

And now this.

There is everything to say, and there is nothing to say.

Could the tears shed over mass shootings fill an ocean?

I think maybe they could.

It’s a matter of perspective, I tell myself. Of angle and scale. I see the birds, their outline against the  sky, their large size and hulking shape not robin or jay-like. Their stillness predatory, dangerous. Must be hawks. Hawks in trees.

Three times in the last week I’ve seen them — twice in the suburbs, once in the city. Are there more of them or am I simply spotting them more often? Are they desperate for food this time of year?

I read a little about them, their exceptional vision, their annual migration patterns, their behavior — more peaceful than you would think (when you rule out what they must do to eat!).  Though I’m seeing them in trees, I’m imagining them in flight, seeking, soaring, alone among the clouds.

Allaboutbirds.org

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It’s a minor complaint, the doctor said, and the best way to treat it is
with warm compresses to the eyes. He told me this a year ago and I didn’t
listen. This time he had my attention.

My new resolution, then, is to spend 15 minutes a day with my eyes closed, a
warm washcloth spread across them, hopping up every five minutes or so to
reheat the cloth.  This is my new meditation time.

It’s strangely relaxing. The warmth of the compress, the blotting out of the
world, my mind wandering, me trying, trying to keep it empty but largely
failing. Still, it’s a beginning, an earnest attempt to spend a few minutes a
day in the mental equivalent of a warm bath.

When the compress cools, I re-enter the world reluctantly. Lights seem too
bright, noises too loud. My eyes are still sore;  healing them will take time. But my
mind is starting to crave its quiet time.

The last few days, Venus has brightened my dark drive to Metro. It’s been there for a while, but I notice it more now.

I notice, too, the low sun as it shines through trees on the mornings I’m here to see its rising, how it separates and illuminates the foliage.

Autumn placements. Angles of refraction.  So much to notice this time of year.
 

For the last few weeks I’ve been hiding, taking the long way to the office, pretending I needed a change of scene — when really I was just avoiding Gloria.

Have I written about her before? She’s the homeless woman who first annoyed me (never asking for change — only for dollars), then won me over one day in the rain. I had given her a few bucks by then, and she was writing the names of her benefactors on a piece of paper that she kept in a waterproof container she wore around her neck.  She was, I suppose, creating a family of donors, people she could count on, a flock of supporters.

For more than a year I’ve been a faithful contributor to the Gloria cause. “You look beautiful today,” she’d say as I slipped a dollar into her hand. “Stay warm,” I’d reply. “Take care of yourself.”

But one morning when I didn’t have a dollar to give, she was angry, menacing. I learned of other colleagues who were harassed when they held on to their money. One even asked me to walk with her past Gloria’s corner.

It all came back to me then, the way I originally felt about Gloria, the persistence in her panhandling, the requests that were almost demands. I’d been giving out of fear and not out of a genuine desire to help. There’s a fine line between charity and extortion, and Gloria had crossed it.

I’m not proud of myself for giving up on Gloria. I know I’m not the first to have done so. But now I walk free.

Sid and Dominique, our rescue parakeets, had been chirping to each other for days, but it wasn’t until yesterday that they met beak to beak. Early reports are positive and confirm our initial impression that Dominique is, in fact, a girl.

I wasn’t there to witness the first date (which quickly led to cohabitation), but it’s worth noting that they ended up in Sid’s cage. Dominique has seemed a little more interested all along.

This is all new to us. Our sweet Hermes, who died in January, 2011, was a coddled only bird. I’m not even sure he knew he was a parakeet, so thoroughly did he join our flock (he talked, he sneezed, he went to sleep each night with a bedtime story, Goodnight, Moon).

Sid and Dominique, on the other hand, are pure bird. They will be each others mates and best friends, we hope. We humans are just along for the ride.

Photo: Claire Capehart

His name is Sid and he has a noble profile. When I saw a picture of him in yesterday’s paper I knew I had to meet him. Luckily, Tom agreed.  We briefly considered and then dismissed memories of the last time we’d done something like this.

It hasn’t really been so bad, I said.

What do you mean? Copper is a jerk.

This is just talk, of course. Tom loves Copper, rambunctious and ill-behaved though he is (Copper that is, not Tom).

So we jumped in the car and drove to the animal shelter, and there was Sid, noble profile and all. We knew right away he would be our little birdie.

What we didn’t know for a few minutes was that two cages away was another parakeet, a canary yellow bird with banded leg and of unknown gender (under “sex” the word “unknown” was crossed out and “male” scrawled above it, though the final paperwork said “female”), and that she would be coming home with us too. Her given name was “Taylor,” but we are trying “Dominique” on for size.

Both budgies were strays, so we figured they are scrappy and familiar with the world. And they (in the two cages they came in) are now perched on our kitchen counter, listening to Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony. They are still shy and quiet and getting to know each other through the bars of their  cages. We don’t expect them to be anything like our beloved Hermes, who’s been gone more than a year and a half now, and we don’t pretend to be their all or nothing (hence the pair). But they have already begun to fill our house with twitters and chirps. It’s good to have birds again.

This (obviously low-res!) shot of Sid is what got my attention. Look at that noble chin!