I’m not sure, but I think I have what it takes to become a birdwatcher. A few years ago I would not have admitted this. But lately I’ve been drawn to birds, and I spent a lot of time watching them last week.
Chincoteague is a birders’ paradise, especially in spring and fall when migrating shore birds and song birds — warblers, vireos and indigo buntings — stop in for a day or two on the way to their final bough or branch.
Last night as I was coming home from work I heard the most beautiful bird song. It was a mockingbird, I think, perched on the upper level of the Metro parking garage, and the little creature was unspooling such a ribbon of song that I thought more commuters would lift their eyes to find the source.
Making it through another day often requires that we keep our heads down, and bird listening (if not watching) is a good antidote to that habit. If I don’t become a bird watcher, at least I will become a bird listener. Guess I already am.
Because I have little faith in the power of my memory, I often scribble thoughts down on whatever I have on hand. A scrap of paper, a napkin. From a “post” Monday while stopped at a traffic light: “Because so little had happened, so much could.”
Cryptic, to be sure. Profound? Hmmm, maybe not. But it seemed so at the time. Perhaps it was the soundtrack. “Liebesleid” or “Love’s Sorrow” by Fritz Kreisler was on the radio. It’s a schmaltzy, tender piece that reminds me of having tea at the Plaza in the glory days of New York. That and the traffic noise and the sun low in the sky — it could have been any of these things that brought the half-formed thought to mind. It may take some time to figure out what it means — if I ever do.
For years I was ridiculed for my earnest photos. A bird, a cloud, a sunset. It was the dorm room poster. It was Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Remember that 70s classic?
Now aspiration is out of fashion. Instead, there is irony. There is the slender slice, thin to translucence. But sometimes I aim my camera at the sky, and I wait for a bird.
A slow turgid morning. Pink streaks in the sky. I sit on the deck to write, the air clammy, just a hint of coolness.
I look over at the table and remember the fun we had last night at dinner, all the girls here and a boyfriend, too. Laughing, talking all at once. There were grilled kabobs and rice, a simple, tasty meal. The mosquitoes were getting full, too. So we talked about our puny little citronella candles and how we have to find more powerful stuff.
As darkness grew, lightening bugs flashed and I plugged in the little white lights around the pergola. It was too bright. People started swatting at their legs, talking about how they were being eaten alive. It was time to clean up and move on. This morning I look at the table and remember it all.
This year Memorial Day falls on … Memorial Day. In its honor, today’s post is an article I wrote a few years ago, an essay about my father in World War II.
Fighting With Fear A Daughter Learns A New War Story
By Anne Cassidy Special to The Washington Post Monday, May 31, 2004; Page C10
In the spring of 1944, my father was a tail-gunner on a B-17 bomber. Sixty years later, he was present as the National World War II Memorial was dedicated on the Mall. As he watched I was thinking of a day in 1978 when the war came alive for me, the day my father and I drove to his old air base near the village of Horham, England.
Ever since I was old enough to listen, Dad had regaled me with war stories: meeting girls under the clock at Victoria Station in London or pedaling through the countryside on a bicycle to buy strawberries from local farmers. He would mix the berries with milk and take the concoction up in the unheated B-17 on missions, freezing it into a passable strawberry ice cream he would share later with friends. These were the happy war stories. Dad never talked about what it felt like to shoot and be shot at — until the day we visited Horham.
Like many of the old air bases scattered throughout East Anglia, Horham was no longer in use. And were it not for the aid of a friendly couple who ran the local post office, we would have missed it entirely. “It’s a mushroom farm now,” they told us. “But the owner won’t mind if you look around.”
I was disappointed, expecting something more than mushrooms — a museum, maybe, or a small plaque. Dad, on the other hand, was cheerful. He wanted to explore. At first we found nothing but an overgrown runway and some crumbled hardstands, where planes had awaited takeoff. But a few minutes later we spied a real treasure — a couple of Nissen huts. We couldn’t get inside but we walked around them.
“These are the primitive dwellings of a lost tribe of American GIs,” Dad joked, posing in front of one of the chipped, dirty doors. He jokingly held a bouquet of wan daisies. He seemed to honor a fallen comrade with those limp flowers. He had made it to a funeral everyone else had forgotten.
He told me then of friends who had left from this field and never come back. He talked about how terrified he was to be crammed into the tail-gunner’s seat at the rear of the aircraft. He was sure that one particular mission, the one he flew on his 21st birthday, May 12, 1944, would be his last. I guess he figured that fate would end his life evenly and ironically on the day it began. But he returned from that mission; returned to find empty seats and vacant cots left by those less fortunate; returned again to find battered huts and barren runways and mushrooms growing where so many lived their last days.
It’s been half a lifetime since we took that trip together. Since then Horham Airfield has been bought and preserved. Volunteers are restoring the Nissen huts and the hospital has become a small museum. But I’d rather imagine the place the way Dad and I saw it: sodden, abandoned, peopled with the ghosts of frightened young men. One of them was my father. He was not just the happy-go-lucky, ice-cream-making GI we’d always heard about. He had fought fear and won.
So when the World War II Memorial was dedicated, I first thanked God my father was alive to see it. Then I thought of Horham. I smelled the air there, with its hint of the sea. I imagined the roar of engines. And I remembered the day that I, a child of peacetime, received a taste, just a taste, of war.
This year I am determined to know their voices, these birds we live with early and late and which come to us without cost or solicitation. Up early today I hear the first sounds of morning and quickly visit the “bird jam” site I’ve found (“know the birds you hear”).
It is the cardinal who leads the way, at least today. It is the cardinal up early and singing his heart out. What wakes the first bird? What character of creation gives dawn this soundtrack, makes it so that — before we see, taste, smell or feel morning — we hear it?
I read that birds sing most during mating season and often from a high perch, that cardinals sing year round, and that some birds, larks for instance, sing while flying.
As for the larger question, I’ll turn to literature rather than science: “Why do birds sing in the morning?” said British author Enid Bagnold, author of National Velvet. “It’s the triumphant shout. We got through another night!”
Yesterday I went for a walk in the suburbs of Lexington, Kentucky. Growing up I didn’t think of them as suburbs; we called them “subdivisions.” If pressed, we could walk downtown from our outlying area. But suburbs they are, with the wide lawns and good schools to prove it.
I squeezed in yesterday’s stroll before the rain, and the entire walk had a sense of fullness and portent that sharpened the sensations. I have a circle route I walk when I’m here, and it takes me through an older neighborhood, into a new one and then back into the older one again. I noticed the locust trees, their fallen petals dried in piles on the street. Phlox is blooming here, and roses in profusion.
A circle walk is a calming practice; it brings you back quite naturally to where you started. Not unlike a visit home.
The last two nights I have been watering the new plants as the last bit of light left the sky. It’s a pleasant way to see in the evening: the stilling dark, the birds with their last full trills of the day; the gentle sizzle of the water as it leaves the hose. I can feel my shoulders loosening, my jaw muscles, too. The cares of the day peel away. My heart is full; I’m ready to sleep.
If I’m lucky my day begins with daylight. But often it starts much earlier. For some reason I wake up at 4:14 or 3:35 or some other random, bleary number that’s seared into my sleep-deprived brain by that first glimpse of the digital clock.
It’s then that I wish for the soft landing of the analog timepiece. Yeah, it’s early, a little after 4, or half-past three. But just how early it’s difficult to say. Maybe I looked at the clock wrong. Maybe it’s almost 5. I like the fuzziness, the offhandedness of such a beginning. I’d rather not know exactly when I started my day.
