Two Birds and a Crow

 

It was the strangest thing.  I was on a walk with Anya and our dog yesterday when I heard a kind of aggressive grunt-bark coming from somewhere above our heads in the trees.  Anya just kept talking away but I was swiveling my head all about trying to find the source of the disconcerting sound.  

My eye finally caught some movement at the top of a large tree where it appeared some birds were darting in and out of the leaves.  And then I saw the crow.  It was at least twice the size of the two smaller birds and sitting on a branch.  The two birds kept diving at the crow and then swerving away to circle back and then repeat the process.  I was captivated and suddenly remembered something that had happened at our old house.  

Every year robins would make a nest under the eaves of our gazebo to lay their blue eggs.  We’d sneak out at times to see the mother sitting there but if we were too loud or too close she would swoop down to the railing and make loud chirps until we retreated (see photo).  When they hatched I would lift Anya up to see their little beaks just over the rim of the nest and if we made a noise they would think the mother was back and start loudly chirping for food.  

One particular year after the eggs were laid we came home to find pieces of those beautiful eggs littered in the gutter.  Elias and I tried unsuccessfully to hide them before little Anya could see it but curiosity got the best of her.  She was quite upset and thought the squirrel was the culprit.  We somehow figured out that a crow had destroyed and devoured those eggs.

It made sense, then, what I was seeing.  It was highly likely that the crow had discovered the birds’ nest and they were desperately trying to force it to leave the eggs alone.  The crow was standing its ground letting out these strange guttural noises and I thought of that line from a Tennyson poem which speaks of Nature as “red in tooth and claw”.  

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Capturing the Sun

 

I saw the sun return to me

in the flickers of the fire pit well

staving off the chill of the night.

By day its rays assist the tree

in separating carbon from oxygen

building a majestic lattice-work.

But when the day is done

and the tree has dropped its pieces

I gather them up and apply the work

of reconnecting oxygen to carbon

and the sun returns to me to warm 

my old bones and frozen toes.

***

Grover at the Indiana Roof Ballroom

I was young once, and loved jazz.  I didn’t really know anyone growing up who shared this love of mine, so I reserved it as a personal corner of musical taste that I felt set me apart.  It could be considered an elitist attitude I guess, except I was a preacher’s son living on the edge of a tiny Midwestern town and aren’t most teens simply self-centered in their desire to differentiate themselves and learn what makes them unique?  Jazz was that thing for me and a bulwark against insecurities which were plentiful.

When compact disk players entered the market in the mid-eighties I pooled my meager resources to buy one.  It was the promise of a more pure and unadulterated sound using a laser beam straight out of Science Fiction.  Jazz, like Classical, had the potential to be a great benefactor of this new technology with its perceived complexities and instrumentation.  

I went to Kmart which was in a larger town north of us and the closest place to find these new compact disks or “CD’s”.  At that time there were literally only a handful of offerings and they were packaged in thin rectangular boxes that I would cut up and use to decorate my walls.  The CD that caught my eye on that first foray into the world of digital sound was one by Grover Washington, Jr.

And this briefly brings me forward in time to my current location which is a hotel in downtown Indianapolis.  Just a block away is the Indiana Roof Ballroom.  It was there in 1986 that a high school friend and I met up with two girls we’d befriended in the summer at a Chemistry Honors Seminar at Indiana State University.  They lived in the Indianapolis area but my friend and I had to drive up from our small town 2 hours away.

We all “dressed up” which for me was gray khaki’s and a t-shirt with suspenders covered by a tweed blazer.  It was supposed to be “cool” but please, no.  When we entered the Indiana Roof Ballroom it was like we’d stepped into a completely different world with its own rules and reality that we had not hither-to been privy to.  It was a Grover Washington, Jr. concert and we looked to be the only non-African Americans in attendance.  And not only that, we were the only teenagers as well.  Everyone was dressed in jaw-dropping attire with flashes of gold and silver winking in the darkness.  I suddenly felt silly in my sneakers as nearby eyes fell on my peculiar appearance.

The experience was unforgettable and possibly even unfathomable.  The ballroom had a high smooth curved ceiling on which were projected the moon and stars along with moving clouds.  Grover was on stage with his band exuding coolness at amplitudes that I could hardly comprehend.  I was entranced by his quiet swaying motion as he patiently waited to enter the flow with his saxophone.  The tone of his instrument is rich and warm on a CD, but hearing it as it was being exhaled from his very lungs in that relatively intimate setting was a whole other thing.  It was a time outside of time and I wasn’t sure that I was “supposed” to be there but there I was nonetheless: a wonder-filled oddity caught up in his love of jazz.      

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