Black on black

   The tower in the East Wing of the National Gallery features a handful of Rothko’s late works – a series of black-on-black paintings – and, in the adjacent room, a short video that explains how he got there.  His early, colorful paintings of urban figures and scenes, which gave way to his famous paintings that comprised “just” panels of color, which over time contained fewer colors, and then ultimately just one, and then just black.  Or black on black.

A lone man sits on a bench in the tower gallery, contemplated the work.  A family walks in, talking loudly, walking back and forth and standing in front of the man.  Disregarding him.  His face clenches, but he remains still.  The family moves on, in just a few moments, as of course they would.  What is there to see here, after all, in these black paintings? 

I go into the room next door to watch the video.  The man remains on the bench, calm again, seeing what he sees.    

My Verona

College Tour 2010 begins with a four-hour drive west on I-90 from Wellesley to Verona, New York; actually, to the Fairfield Inn just off the exit for Verona, a village the charms of which we have not yet seen.  An easy ride on a blustery, mostly overcast, occasionally rainy, occasionally sunny Sunday in April afternoon.   The ride through Massachusetts to Albany is familiar enough, but from Albany west is new and pleasing.  Plenty of old farms, some still working, some just falling down barns.  The grass everywhere is green.  The fruit trees are in blossom.  The hardwoods are budding.  We follow the Mohawk River for a good long stretch and cross the Erie Canal.  We cruise past a few old towns with grand old homes and main streets and small industrial buildings along the rivers and rails, which would be fun to explore and photograph.  But not today, which is for getting where we have to go. 

The Fairfield Inn is on Willow Place.  The window of our room looks out across the parking lot and the street to an old field, the front edge of which is lined with motor homes and the inevitable piles of old bikes and toys and other things that are in various stages of the transition from belongings to junk. 

On the other side of the Inn, just across the main road that comes off I-90, is the sparkling Turning Stone casino and resort, which is owned by the Oneida Indian Nation.  A steady, heavy stream of cars turns into the winding drive and races toward the vast parking lots.  It is as if all the white people, who not so long ago took the land of the Oneida and the Mohawk and the Iroquois to turn it into farms, and saw the farms turn into sad trailer parks, realizing what they had done, believe that some offering to the Indians may save their souls in the end. 

What nothing tastes as good as

   The bony British model Kate Moss recently repeated the mantra that she did not invent but lives by nonetheless:  “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”  I suppose that could make sense if you felt that your reason for being on this earth is to have your picture taken wearing clothes you do not own.  Happily for me I am not one of those people and I can tell you that nothing tastes as good as cold beer.  

Sunday chores

Mid-day on a Sunday in November.  Home from my softball game.  Sandwich and beer consumed, it’s time to clean the gutters.  I haul my aluminum extension ladder out of the garage and have at it.  I balance the ladder on its feet, straight up, wrap the nylon cord around my right hand a turn or two, and pull the rope to extend the ladder up a few steps.  It makes the familiar, sliding and clanging sounds of all aluminum ladders. 

My gutters are done in about 20 minutes, and that’s it on my chores for the day.  Except for cooking dinner, which is more recreation than work for me. My father’s chores took all day most Sundays, like they did his Saturdays as well.  On a fall day like this, with all the leaves finally down, we would spend hours raking them into piles, then spread out one of my father’s drop-cloths, rake the leaves onto the cloth, fold it up into an enormous dumpling of leaves, and drag them down the edge of the garden.  Then my father would drive the lawn mower back and forth across and through them, chopping them up before spreading them over the garden, where they would break down over the winter.

Like so many things he did -- a lot of physical labor, but always with technique and care.  The last bits of leaves were always raked up.  The drop-cloth always carefully shaken out and folded neatly and put away where it belonged.

Hard-working, thorough, and thoughtful in the simplest of chores.  I wish I was more like that.

In the absence of wolf willow

I think about writing a memoir, or a maybe just part of one –- a long piece about growing up in Vermont.  I have thought about it before.  I think about it more lately, as I have been reading Wallace Stegner’s excellent Wolf Willow, which is not entirely a memoir, but is roughly equal parts memoir, history of the Canadian plains, and fiction based on both.  The memoir portions concern the six years that Stegner spent as a boy in Whitemud, Saskatchewan, where his parents struggled as homesteading wheat farmers until they ultimately acknowledged the defeat that they had suffered from bad weather, ignorance of better farming techniques than the ones being practiced in that place and time, and ultimately the simple fact that the plains of Saskatchewan are a crushingly hard place to grow wheat with nothing more than the physical exertion of horses and men.  It is a damn fine book.

And so I think about writing a memoir, although I don’t particularly like the idea of it.  I spend enough time at my computers, and enough time being self-absorbed.  The trick is to write about one’s own experiences in a time and a place, with self-awareness and reflection, but without sentimentality and cliché.  Without it being too much about yourself.

While I am thinking about all this, the death of Frank McCourt, the author of Angela’s Ashes, triggers a wave of commentary about the state of the modern American memoir.  Jay Parini, the poet and novelist who teaches at Middlebury College, goes so far as to claim that “memoirs have always been the central form of American literature.  From Governor Bradford’s memoir of the original settlers in Plymouth, Of Plymouth Plantation, through Benjamin Franklin’s fabulous autobiography, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Mary Antin’s Promised Land or Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington or any of a thousand wonderful immigrant memoirs from the 19th and 20th centuries, this has been our most essential form. … The reason for this, I suspect, is that the United States has always been about singing one’s self, as Walt Whitman might say. The individual stands in for society.”  Parini also notes that novels “are, quite often, simply disguised memoirs, and people read these novels for the same reasons that they read ‘true’ narratives: it’s always bracing to find out how other people have managed to live their lives, to endure them, even to take delight in them.”

Gerald Howard, an executive editor of Doubleday, rightly says that the best memoirs “are works of literary art.”  The “twin massifs of the contemporary American memoir,” he says, are Angela’s Ashes and Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, while “[t]he foothills leading up to them were the two masterpieces by the brothers Wolff:  Geoffrey’s The Duke of Deception and Toby’s This Boy’s Life.  The noble ancestor and progenitor of these books is Frank Conroy’s immensely influential but now under-acknowledged memoir from the ’60s Stop-Time.”

William Zinsser, an author and an instructor in memoir writing, would add Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life to this list.  Zinsser says this about his students:  “I’ve taught memoir writing for two decades at The New School, and most of my students are older men and women trying to make sense of their family narratives.  Memoir has to be an honest transaction with your memories and your emotions.”

Trying to make sense of your family narrative.  Or maybe just yourself.  That seems a worthwhile endeavor.  But writing a memoir requires one to actually sit down and write it, instead of thinking about writing it, planning to write it, outlining it, preparing a format for it, and all of the other preliminary, peripheral, procrastinating things that I am prone to do.  This would include writing about writing it.  Like this.

Eventually I do make a start.  But after plowing and working ten pages or so I admit –- like Stegner’s family finally admitted about wheat farming in Saskatchewan -– sometimes the land just isn’t worthy of the enterprise.  My family history, how we ended up in Vermont, the small town where I grew up –- it just isn’t that interesting.  There is no compelling landscape, no brutal weather, no great adventure.  No cowboys or Indians or Royal Mounted Police.  No one who bet the family home or a month’s wages on a poker hand or a horse race.  No great deprivation or hardship or addiction or abuse.  Nor even any wolf willow –- a plant the smell of which transports Stegner back to the Indian-watching, gun-toting, muskrat-trapping adventures of his youth in Whitemud.

But I’ll take my childhood over Frank McCourt’s any day.  He was in his sixties when Angela’s Ashes was published, and was often asked what he was doing all that time before he finally wrote the incredible memoir of his childhood.  His answer was, “Recovering.”

Nantucket in April

   Nantucket in April is quiet, restful, almost devoid of tourists, but stirring in anticipation of the hoards to come. Flowers are going into all the window boxes. Out of delivery crates come piles of new sweatshirts and t-shirts that will be sold down by the wharves.  Shopkeepers fuss with the placement of their old pieces of scrimshaw and new batches of Nantucket baskets.  The woman who runs one of the bike shops is overheard to say, "If you know anyone who can work mornings, send them my way."  Shops and houses everywhere are being scraped and painted. The workmen -- all these men who in another time would have been climbing the rigging of ships, setting sails and looking for whales -- now climb their aluminum ladders.  There is, about the entire town, a festive air of getting readiness. Walking the streets feels like walking through a great room of pretty girls getting ready for the dance.

Merce Cunningham

   Merce Cunningham, the acclaimed avant-garde dancer and choreographer, died    week at the age of 90.  The Washington Post had the best obituary, by Sarah Kaufman, although she felt compelled to add to her thoughtful essay the odd reporter’s note that “no cause of death was reported.”  Sarah, please, he was 90.  For anyone who makes it that long, and was as vibrant until the end as he apparently was, we should be wondering not about the cause of death, but rather what allowed so long an active life.  In Cunningham’s case, the question answers itself.  He was physically active, intellectually curious, constantly engaged in creative pursuits.  And someone who loved and was loved.  All that, a good ticker, and dodging the cancer bullet is what gets you to 90 in one piece.           

   It is said that dancers in Cunningham’s company were among the very best, the most highly trained and accomplished, because that is what his extraordinary dances required.  One of those dancers, for eight years, was Vicki Findlayson, whom I met at Swarthmore when she seeing my roommate Bob Cooney.  (Seeing, dating, going out with.  Whatever.  She was Bob’s girlfriend.)  Cunningham’s company was in Chicago once when I was in law school there.  Vicki got me a ticket to the performance and brought me afterward to dinner with several of the dancers, Cunningham, and Cunningham’s artistic collaborator, and romantic partner, the composer John Cage.  I had no idea – except that Vicki told me – that these were living legends, giants of the artistic world.  

   I knew nothing about modern dance, or that Cunningham himself was a renowned dancer before he became a choreographer of seemingly bizarre modern dances, infused with elements of classical ballet, and set against, or merely and purposefully just performed in the same time and place as Cage’s odd music.  Although I watched the dancing with an untrained eye, it was obvious even to me that what Cunningham’s troupe was doing was extremely difficult technically, especially as it was combined – but not really – with the music, which made no sense either in its own right or in relation to the dance.  That night it consisted largely of water being poured back and forth, into and out of conch shells held close to microphones, and it had nothing to do with the dance, except that it was being performed then and there.  Vicky explained to me that even the dancers did not know exactly what the music would be until they heard it while they were performing, and that the dance did not change because of the music.  Nothing was improvised.  How hard it must have been for the dancers to perform their intricate sequences perfectly each night with, in some sense, entirely new and unforeseeably music, and, in another sense, without any music at all.  

   It seemed to me at the time, although I didn’t say this to Vicky, that Cunningham’s use of Cage’s music could only be explained by the fact that his lover needed a job.  But I suppose there was more to it than that.  As Kaufman explains in her essay, “Mr. Cunningham's works changed what a performance could be, questioning nearly every aspect. Typically, his dances had no central focus -- groups or soloists might perform simultaneously in various spots around the stage, facing the wings or the backdrop as often as the audience. There was frequently neither structure nor climax, but rather, a mix of impulses and dynamics, much as a Jackson Pollock canvas captured dripped paint rather than ordered brushstrokes.”

     It comes as no surprise to learn that Pollock was among the avant-garde artists from various fields who were Cunningham’s friends, collaborators and sources of inspiration.  What is a surprise to learn is that Cunningham saw no particular meaning in his work.  I would have thought that one who breaks so dramatically and completely from convention must intend to make some statement in doing so.  But apparently Merce Cunningham did not.  As Kaufman says, Cunningham “rejected the idea of dance ‘representing’ or imitating anything in life; his dances had no meaning beyond themselves. ‘What is seen is what is,’ he said.” 

     This makes me feel a bit better about my reaction to the performance I saw that evening in Chicago, some twenty-odd years ago.  I wondered what were all the meanings in the dance, and in its juxtaposition to the music, that I didn’t grasp.  It turns out there weren’t any.  It had no meaning beyond itself.  Still, I wish I remembered more of it, and of the dinner with Cunningham and Cage.

Toronto

Toronto for the 2009 NACUA conference.  A city of vast geographic scope, large and diverse population, prime lakefront location, obvious wealth, myriad other qualities of a supposed world-class city, and yet, when you get down to the details, memorable for its mediocrity.  The lakefront is well developed with fancy new condominiums, but lacks a fine harborwalk or lakefront park.  The harbor islands boast “yacht clubs” that look like they belong on Lake Bomoseen or Sunapee.  Even this city’s version of Union Station – which the guidebooks dutifully tout as an architectural gem and evocative monument to the glory days of rail travel – is weak second cousin to even Union Station in Washington DC, or 30th Street Station in Philly.

But there some good moments here.  Exploring the vast underground network of concourses that allows you to travel all over the central downtown area while avoiding, in my case, the pouring rain.  Jogging up University Avenue through the heart of the academic center of the city.  Walking down Queen Street, west of University, which is like a longer, younger, grittier version of South Street in Philly. 

And enjoying some of the finest of both high and low cuisines.  The former was had at Canoe, billed as one of the finest restaurants in Canada, and worthy of the hype.  It breaks the general rule that restaurants atop tall city buildings cannot have food that is as immensely pleasing as the view.  From the 54th floor of one of the downtown bank buildings, we look down on the harbor and its islands and the small planes that land at the airport.  As one of my dinner companions says, it’s a rare event when you have dinner in a place where you are looking down on airplanes in flight.   And the food was creative, beautifully plated, and delicious.  An appetizer plate of smoked salmons, caviar, a bit of lobster salad, a quail egg, and little bits of this and that – it looked like the vibrant palette of a painter in love with pinks and reds.  An entrée of squab was spectacular.  Two small, luscious pieces cut from the side of the breast were unadorned and perfect. A gorgeous whole breast, poached in Nova Scotia “screech” (rum) infused with maple syrup, then roasted perfectly.  The two small legs prepared confit.  The best duck you ever had was not half as good as this.

The low cuisine?  The famous poutin, which I got twice, from street vendors on the harbor and on City Hall Square across the street from our hotel.  A “small” poutin costs three-fifty or four bucks Canadian and comprises about a half-pound of good French fries, topped with a cup or so of cheese curds, and then drenched in hot brown gravy.  The first bite or two it seems like an odd combination.  By the third bite you can’t stop forking the hot, hearty mess into your mouth.  It’s got regular fries beat all sorts of ways, not least the fact that the gravy, ladled out of the steaming kettle, keeps your snack hot all the way through.  Reason enough to smile when I think of Toronto.  (2009)

Finding Cardinals

   There are often cardinals in the neighborhood, singing from the tops of trees, just where my father said they often would be.  It was the kind of thing he would notice.  And now I tell my daughters.

   Once, when they were very young, and I was home alone, a cardinal crashed into the big window of our family room.  I went out the sliding door to the backyard and looked at the beautiful, small, red bird lying in the green grass.  Dead, or merely stunned?  I hesitate.  Wanting to touch it.  Afraid to touch it.  
   I wait long enough to think the cardinal is really dead, and slowly, slowly, bend down and reach out my hand.  I move it ever so gently to just barely nudge the wing and BAM!  The cardinal explodes into flight and is gone. 

   A couple of years later, another cardinal crashes into the window.  This time Rachel is home.  We go out together into the back yard to look at the beautiful red bird, lying in the grass.  There is something about the way this one is lying there:  this one is really dead.  I pick it up.  We each stroke it gently with the tips of our fingers.

   Having a small child with me, it is required that I go to the garage and get a shovel to dig a small grave by the back fence.  We bury the cardinal and observe a moment of silence.

   The truth is, I would have buried it even if I was alone.  

Things were simple

   Things were simple.  Like work.  And money.  You had an old, simple bicycle with no gears, which looked like what it was – a bike that no one else wanted anymore.  The bike you wanted was the silver, 10-speed with the racing handlebars and dual handbrakes that sparkled in the pages at the back end of the Sears Roebuck catalog.  That bike was fantastic, and it cost a fantastic $110.  But you had saved the $5 bills that your grandmother had tucked into birthday cards, and you could make $2 each time you mowed old Mrs. DeGroff’s yard across the street.  Even the math was easy.  You mowed Mrs. DeGroff’s yard five times in a month and that was another ten dollars toward the bike. 

   You had a savings account at the Vermont National Bank uptown, and every now and then, when you had some cash or maybe a check that you wanted to deposit, you got your little passbook from the drawer where you kept it in your bedroom and you got on your bike and you rode it to the bank, where you left your bike outside, unlocked, and walked in to see one of the tellers, who would take your money and your passbook, write in the amount of your deposit by hand, then calculate the amount of interest you had earned on your account since the last time you were in, and then write that down in your passbook, too, and hand it back to you.  And you rode home feeling very good about the extra dollars that you had in the bank that you didn’t have there before.  

   And so it went for a while, and then your parents pitched in what they could contribute toward the bike, and then you ordered it from Sears and after another little while the bike came delivered in a big cardboard box, and then that was the bike – the fantastically better bike – that you rode to play tennis at the town courts, which were free and never crowded, or to the town pool which cost ten cents and was always crowded, or to go fishing or just for a bike ride.  “I’m going for a bike ride,” you would say, and you just went.  And when the summertime was over, and fall was over, too, you hung your silver bike up in the barn for the winter. 

   And now?

   No one in these suburbs seems able to ride a bike without donning a full uniform of high performance bike racing gear, including a “camelback” to hold the water that is now required to remain hydrated at all times.  Your finances are complicated beyond understanding.  You find yourself a partner in a law firm that has offices – and thus you have taxable income – in nine different states plus London and Hong Kong.  You sign forms allowing someone you have never met to file composite, non-resident tax returns on your behalf.  You get memos from someone else you have never met, providing information for participants in the firm’s pension plan, which you could swear you had decided not to participate in.  You get memos from someone else you haven’t met about your 401(k) selections, which don’t look right either.  But you can’t stand the thought of trying to figure it out.

   And so you don’t.

   Even the simple things aren’t simple.  I go up to the cafeteria for a cup of tea in the morning when I get to work, and realize that I have left in my office the big ceramic mug that I am supposed to use because paper cups kill trees and take energy to produce and occupy landfills, and worse than that, the hot water is so hot that you need to double-cup in order not to burn your hands, although you can re-use the outside cup that didn’t get dirty and that seems like a small virtue.  But I have left my ceramic mug in my office, and anyways if I use the mug, then after a day or so I need to wash it, which requires hot water that takes energy to produce, and detergent that gets sent into the water cycle, and paper towels to dry the mug, which – like paper cups – kill trees and take energy to produce and occupy landfills. 

    I’m still not sure what the right choice is in general.  I am able, barely, to decide that this particular time, I am not taking the elevator back downstairs to get my ceramic mug and wash it.  I’m using the paper cups this time and just go ahead and say whatever you want to say about it.  Okay?  Okay with you?

   Okay then.

My last bat mitzvah

   So I have sat through another bar/bat mitzvah. Sullen, critical, uncomfortable, bored, torpid, angry. Utterly, deeply miserable.  Wondering whether my reaction to it all is just ridiculous or just right.  But not wondering too much. 

The rabbi, a short, plain, sturdy woman with big glasses, begins by welcoming us to the celebration today for Emma and Jacob.  “Jacob’s” family in the front rows makes it known that in fact the young man’s name is “Daniel.”  It’s never a good feeling when the first pitch sails to the backstop.
   The rabbi apologizes sweetly and moves on.
   “God commands us,” she says. “God commands us” to do this and that. The audience stares at her. Impassive. No one nods in agreement. No one disagrees. It’s just words.
   The words roll on.  The Jews are special.  Their traditions are special.  The Torah is special.  Let us go to the cupboard and get out the Torah.  Look at the fancy covering, the fancy silver caps.  See how heavy it is.  This is how special it is.  We will carry it around the room so that you can press your prayer shawl to your lips and use your shawl to kiss the Torah.  

The artifacts, the rituals, the chanting.  The tribalness of it all.
   The singing and chanting, by the way, is grating and awful. If there’s going to be singing, at least sing well. The Mennonites, who get plenty of other things wrong, at least have got that right.
   Worst of all is the determined, overt, even strident, insularity.  At the end of the ceremony, the rabbi gives the two children – and children they are – membership certificates to the local JCC, where, she says with a smile, “you can go and swim and play basketball with other Jewish children.”  Because, God forbid you should have a life outside our special Jewish community.  God forbid you should meet a pretty girl or handsome boy who will take you away from us.
   The ceremony goes on forever and is awful enough in its own right.  But is made more awful still by the calls for audience participation.  The cantor strums her guitar and invites us all to sing.  “It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the words,” she says, just feel the joy and sing “Lai, lai, lai.”  And then she breaks into a complicated melody that you couldn’t follow if you wanted to.  Ask me if I wanted to. 

Also -- note to cantors -- if the joy is real and the music is a real expression of it, people don’t need to be told to join in.  Go to any popular music event.  Or Fenway Park at the end of the seventh (Take Me Out to the Ballgame) or eighth (Sweet Caroline).  Or your local black congregation.
  

And worst of all, there is this.  How am I supposed to sit respectfully through two hours of drudgery when the Jews themselves won’t do it?  Adults talk during the prayers, get up and wander in and out, and do nothing to police their misbehaving children. Two older boys sitting behind us spend the entire service talking loudly, laughing, goofing on the songs and, incredibly, slapping each other with their prayer shawls.  Loudly, and a lot. They draw nothing more than a few casual looks from the adults who are near them. But no one tells them what they plainly ought to hear if any of this is to be taken seriously. “This prayer shawl means you have had your own bar mitzvah?  Yes?  You have ‘come of age’ in this congregation?  Yes?  You are supposed to ‘be a man’?  This is the house of your God?  You can sit still and pay attention – or at least pretend to pay attention – for an hour or two."

Or I was right all along. This is just a waste of a fine spring morning.

Skating on Wight's Pond

   Skating on Wight’s Pond on a bright winter day, wheeling and pushing and gliding aimlessly about until someone shouts, “Look!  Look!”  And then we all come and stand still and look down through the spot of thick, clear ice, into the tea-colored water below, until we see them, too.  Moving through this window at our feet.  Fat, graceful carp, in the colors of oranges and olives.

Lexington, Virginia

   At 4:30 on a Friday afternoon in November, the cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, formed in their companies, emerge from their barracks and march onto the parade ground for the viewing of their superior officers and visiting dignitaries and the handful of families who have driven in for the weekend from one Southern town or another.  The families sit on the small sets of bleachers or stand by the thin rope at the edge of the parade ground, holding their cameras and asking each other, “Do you see him?  Can you see him?  Can you see which one is him?”  They can’t tell which one is him, which is rather the point of this place -- the transformation of the individual into a part of the greater, gray whole.  All you see is the company or the corps, the force that has been assembled before you. 

   Next door to VMI, literally, is the campus of Washington & Lee University, where the young men and women live not in barracks but in grand fraternity and sorority houses and where at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon they are mustering at their BMWs and Volkswagen Jettas and all the other fine cars that will take them up to Washington or down to Charlottesville or wherever else this weekend’s adventure might be.  

   On a Saturday morning in November, a second-year law student at W&L drives me down to the airport in Richmond.  He went to W&L as an undergrad, too, and yet, deep into his sixth year here in Lexington, he has never stopped by to watch the VMI cadets on parade.  Worse, he somehow does not even know that the cadets do this each Friday and Saturday afternoon.  

   “You should do this,” I say.  “At least once.  It is so traditional, so historic, so different from what is going on right next door at your school.” 

   “I don’t know,” he says.  “We don’t go over to VMI.  We wouldn’t feel welcome there.”

   And there you have the South.  Right there.  Two groups of kids, living right next door to each other, not merely not mixing, but not even knowing what each other is doing and sure – nonetheless – that they wouldn’t be welcome to just come see. The South of course is not the only part of the country where you can find this mindset.  But they do seem to have perfected it.  

W&L has no parade ground, and no cadets, but it does have the Lee Chapel, where is buried not only General Lee but also his beloved war-horse, Traveller.   Someone -- who could it be? -- comes to lay apples on his grave.  Perhaps it is the same person who places the small, Confederate flags at the monument to Stonewall Jackson, who is buried in the cemetery just on the other side of downtown Lexington along with other soldiers … both known and not.  

I wonder how many of the W&L students never bother to stroll through this cemetery, never learn that Jackson taught at VMI before, or what he did in the war, or how he died at Chancellorsville in 1863, days after he was shot by his own pickets as he and a group of officers returned to the lines, or his famous last words, which came as he drifted in and out of consciousness, and then as a calm, peaceful expression settled in his face:  "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees."

Christmas Ornaments

   The kids have not yet flown the nest, but nor are they the children who used to wake early on Christmas day.  Full-blown teenagers, they sleep in while they can.  We wake them when it’s time to have brunch with their grandparents, who moved to town when the kids were young and soon will move away to somewhere warm.  Presents for the girls are clothes and music and gift cards. Toys from Christmases past are piled inside the living room cabinets, within easy reach but far from here. 

   After brunch the grandparents go home to nap and KC starts working on our fancy dinner.  I walk down the street to the river and slip along the path in the woods along the bank to the golf course, looking for birds, enjoying the sun and fresh air, contemplating this present slice of life.  Some leaves hang stubbornly on their bushes with a light coating of frost like so many humble ornaments.  But the sun is moving higher in the sky and the frost, like a lot of things, will be gone before you know it.

(2009)

Birds of North America

Yellow-shafted Northern Flickers
Wellesley,  MA

Least Tern
Truro, MA

Cardinal (female)
Wellesley, MA

Great White Egret
Orlando, FL

Common Mergansers (female)
Lake Bomoseen, VT

Wood Ducks
Wellesley, MA

Sandpipers
Ogunquit, ME

Common Merganser (male)
Newton, MA

Red-bellied Woodpecker
Chestnut Hill, MA

Red-Tailed Hawk
Eastham, MA

Hooded Merganser
Weston, MA

Downy Woodpecker
Wellesley, MA

Turkey
Wellesley, MA

Snowy Owl
South Boston, MA

Herring Gull 
South Boston, MA

Red-Winged Blackbird
Chicago, IL

Cormorant
Lake Champlain, VT

House Sparrow (female)
Boston, MA 

Brown Pelican
Fort Myers Beach, FL

Pileated Woodpecker
Wellesley, MA

Burrowing Owl
San Diego Wild Animal Park, CA 

White Pelican
San Diego Zoo Wild Animal Park, CA

Snowy Egret
Fort Myers Beach, FL

Osprey
Cape Cod, MA

Bald Eagle
Lake Bomoseen, VT

Great Blue Heron
Lake Bomoseen, VT

American Robin
Wellesley, MA 

Blue Jay
Weston, MA

African Spoonbill
Orlando, FL

Laughing Gull
Wildwood, NJ