The Woo-Hoo Bird

"There was a bird outside the window in our bedroom this morning," Brody said.

All seven of us were in the dining room trying to swallow the clumps of oatmeal swimming in   milk that Mama Candace gives for breakfast every morning. I tried to kick Brody under the table to get him to shut up but my foot couldn't quite reach him. In my opinion, Brody has no sense of survival whatsoever which is why he kept right on talking.

"It was bigger than a raven and it went 'Woo-hoo, woo-hoo," Brody continued.

Alexander smirked and Brendan sank down into his seat in anticipation. Jennifer winced and I guess I did, too. Sure enough.  Papa Branch reached across the table with his big old Kodiak bear paw and smacked Brody hard on the side of his head. Wham!

"God damn it, Branch. Now he'll have to stay out of school for the rest of the week," Mama Candace complained. She meant because of the lump and the bruise which she didn't want to have to explain.  It used to be Alexander who got hit all the time til he turned thirteen and grew almost as tall as Papa Branch. These days Brody was the main target because Brody could never remember the house rules, one of which was that us foster kids couldn't talk at meals unless a grownup asked us a question.

Brody was the youngest of us, only eight years old. His mom was a schizophrenic who used to make Brody wear tinfoil on his head so the government spies wouldn't listen to his thoughts. Papa Branch said Brody'd probably turn  schizophrenic, too, soon as he hit adolescence.

 Whenever the subject comes up, Brody always defends his mom. He once said she was practically a saint cause she worked so hard to keep herself and Brody safe.  "Wait til she takes a potato peeler and tries to peel off your skin," Alexander told him. Alexander's mother was shot to death by his father who's in jail for the rest of his life, so you can't really blame him for being cynical.

After Papa Branch smacked him, Brody just sat there without moving like he'd been turned to stone. With his skinny neck and arms, he looked kind of like a sculpture made out of pipe cleaners. The side of his face where he'd been hit had turned bright pink and pieces of his straw-colored hair were sticking straight up like someone in a cartoon who's just been electrocuted. He was staring into space with those foggy grey-green eyes of his. I got up from the table and went over to hug him. I couldn't help it cause he looked so pathetic.

"Sit down, Sabrina," Papa Branch yelled but I ignored him. I knew he wasn't going to hit me cause that'd be two of us not going to school which would make Mama Candance mad as a wet hen. Truth is, I'd planned to skip school anyhow and maybe I'd sneak back home later and check up on Brody,

Brody leaned into me when I put my arms around him but he still didn't make a sound. "It's okay," I told him, "It'll be okay," which was a stupid thing to say because nothing was ever going to be okay in this sorry-assed foster home.

I was probably the luckiest one here. Until I was fourteen I was raised by my two great aunts who lived together in a big old three-story house with maple trees all around it. Aunt Terrie was an accomplished shop lifter and con artist who made sure I got what I needed in the way of  material goods while Aunt May put herself in charge of my education, focusing mainly on etiquette, fine arts, and elocution. It was after Aunt Terrie got busted at Macy's sneaking a cashmere sweater into her purse and Aunt May got judged incompetent that I was placed in foster care with the infamous O'Donnells.  By then my survival skills were pretty well honed and there was nothing the two of them -- Branch and Candace, I mean -- could do to ruin me.

By the time I left for school, Brody still hadn't said a single word. Mama Candace was making him clean the kitchen floor on his hands and knees, scraping away with a big old scrub brush. Papa Branch had already taken off for work. He was the maintenance man at the Presbyterian church and would probably get fired eventually like he always did for being lazy and drinking on the job. Most of the O'Donnell's money came from fostering us kids which, of course, was the whole reason they took us in.

I arrived at school about fifteen minutes or so after the bell rang for classes to begin. I crept quietly into the staff room and stole a half-eaten loaf of banana bread and a bag of fritos. Then I snuck back to the O'Donnells where I found Brody sitting on the steps of the back porch. Mama Candace was locked away in her bedroom having it on with her latest lover, a construction foreman named Kurtz,  so I knew she wouldn't be around to bug us.

I handed Brody the bag of fritos but he wouldn't eat any until I tore open the bag and placed one between his lips. After that he kind of woke up out of his trance and ate like he was half-starved which he probably was since half of what Mama Candace gives us to eat is only a step or two up from pig swill.  After he'd polished off the fritos and banana bread, the two of us just sat there for awhile. Then Brody started to talk.

"You know that bird I saw this morning, the one that goes 'Woo-hoo, woo-hoo'?"  I nodded. "Well, I figured out what kind it was. It's what my mom used to call a chuckle bird." Brody paused to lick some crumbs off his lips. "See, a chuckle bird is sent by God because God wants us to be happy -- that's what my mom says."

"If God wants you to be happy, why did he let your mom be schizophrenic?" I started to say but I stopped myself in time and pretended to clear my throat instead. Brody's fragile little glass world was bound get kicked to pieces sooner or later but I wasn't about to sign on as part of the demolition crew.

What I Am Longing For

It's simple. What I am longing for is spring. I mean real  spring which is not what we have here in the mountains of north central New Mexico.

What we have here is wind -- a sort of atmospheric temper tantrum on the part of an enraged earth spirit. We have brown -- lots of that --interspersed with the dull green of a desicated Christmas tree. Oh come, come, you will say, there are flowers if you look carefully, and, yes, there are but not the ones that belong here. The flowers that belong here will arrive after the monsoon season in mid-July.

In addition to wind, we have out here what I call tease clouds. These are brooding cumulus masses that are supposed to deliver rain or snow but, after raising every one's hopes, simply move on. Sometimes there are a few flakes, half a dozen plump drops of rain staining the sidewalks. I worry aloud about future forest fires and am told, "Well, really, when you think about it, what's left to burn?" Still, I leave my car windows open as an invitation to the rain gods, hoping they will take the bait. In the meantime...



I saunter nostalgically down memory lane summoning the image of  acacias bursting with fluffy, bright yellow bloom which (admittedly) leave half the population of Marin County, California watery-eyed and sneezing. These are followed, in February, by flowering fruit trees -- a veritable pastel explosion. But the latter, though impressive, isn't what I miss the most. What I miss the most are dazzling green fields smeared with mustard flower, brazen orange poppies interspersed with purple meadow lupine, mission bells, shooting stars, wild radish, blue-eyed grass, baby blue eyes, ceanothus, buttercups, trillium, Douglas Iris...


You see, spring, to my way of thinking, should not tiptoe in with a tulip here, a daffodil there, a scrawny spray of forsythia. No, spring should erupt with color, explode with beauty and variety. Spring
 should astonish, dazzle, overwhelm.

This verdant  and kaleidoscopic  panorama is, of course, the product of coastal California's rainy season -- soft, persistent drizzles that last for days and sometimes continue into May and early June. I can't believe I used to grumble in soggy-spirited annoyance while navigating around puddles and scraping mud from my shoes.

 " Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you've got til it's gone."

  In April, if you stand on a high cliff by the Pacific Ocean, you will see the hills below you covered with magenta ice plant. You will breathe in the rich sea-level air, heavy with moisture, and hear the hiss of churning waves raking pebbles and collapsing against white sand.  If you listen carefully,you can hear the bark of seals from a distant rock harshly punctuated by the nearby scream of gulls.



Shortly after I wrote this, a quantity of precipitation arrived, here in remotest New Mexico, in the form of rain, hail and then snow,enough to weigh down whatever is struggling to bloom in this meteorologically eccentric part of the world.

Reflections on the Telephone (including but not limited to Caller ID)

I have never been fond of telephones. In fact, talking on the phone is generally a near-traumatic experience. Why?  I couldn't say. Why does anyone develop a particular phobia? My former mother-in-law was terrified of heights and she passed this on to her son who passed it on to his daughter. Thus, one could argue in favor of a genetic predisposition or, on the other hand, one could argue that it is an environmentally-instilled fear.

I suspect I inherited my phone-o-phobia from my mother. Since she was all about self-discipline and pulling oneself up by one's boot straps, she refused to succumb to fears. She did tell me though, in a rare confessional moment, that as a young woman, she used to sit by the phone and cry before summoning the courage to make a call. Her own vulnerability did not prevent her, however, from dragging me out from under my bed for an obligatory over-the-phone chat with Great Aunt Ruthie.

When I was a child, telephones were hard black objects that squatted on a table or clung like bulky alien lifeforms to a wall.  Each one had a receiver and a dial that whirred and clicked. Their ring tones were generally ominous and loud. Who, in their right mind, would wish to respond to such a thing? I certainly didn't.

Later, the invention of answering machines made the prospect of talking over a wire somewhat less traumatic. If the caller was someone with whom you actually wanted to communicate, you could pick up the phone the minute you heard their voice. If it was someone you wished to avoid, you could elude them indefinitely.

Then along came cell phones: compact, colorful, with an infinite variety of ring tones and games to play when you weren't busy chatting. You could even use the camera function to prove that the peace officer apprehending the boy in the hoodie really was using unnecessary force.

 One's cell phone is almost a part of one's anatomy though, on occasion, it disengages itself and you have to use your land line (or someone else's cell) to discover its hiding place.

In addition to voice mail, cell phones have caller ID which is an anxiety-reducing function similar to the answering machine.


Is the cell phone a true antidote to phone-o-phobia?  Not quite.  You still have to call people back and what if you don't know them at all, or  at least not very well? Then you are certain to stammer and blunder and blab and generally present yourself as a linguistically-challenged nincompoop.

 The only way to seem eloquent is to text. Texting gives you time to think before blurting things out you immediately want to take back. Perhaps this is why teenagers like it so much. The recipient of the text can't hear the pernicious squeak of your changing adolescent voice, the intermittent lovesick gulp, the unintended hiccup or the persistent stammer of embarrassment. I am not afraid of texting at all and I wish everyone would do it. The thing is most people my age don't like it. In fact, most people who are elderly or in late middle age are downright scornful of the process. Clearly these are people who do not suffer from phone-o-phobia.

Back to caller ID.  I read recently that it is possible to fake it -- i.e., pretend that you are someone you're not. This gives me pause for thought. What if the announced caller is not my good friend but rather someone lurking behind my friend's name who wishes me ill? Am I vulnerable now to verbal assassination by an impostor?

Although the occasions when I have misplaced my cell phone have been cause for panic, there is a part of me that wishes I could be phone-free forever.  For the rest of my life. That I could venture out into the wide world and nobody would be able to contact me. Being permanently attached to my cell phone makes me feel a little bit like a marionette. On the other hand, I've gotten used to having my strings pulled, and I suppose, in a sense, we are all each other's puppets.

not quite a self-portrait

A Poem in Iambic Trimeter

This winter-colored scene:
 Stale brown and brittle green

And the relentless sun,
Bauble of cloud, finespun
Against merciless blue:
Frivolous curlicue
of dry fluff, cluttering;
No rainstorm, stuttering
Sleet, or hard-tapping hail...

How can our lives prevail
Clinging to spartan stone?
The high winds moan, they moan
Rising in the parched throat,
The strangled, broken throat

Of the dying land....

The Terrible Importance of Nearly Nothing

I could say right now that I feel small.  Very, very small. I  have gone back, far back in time to where I am a witless waif of a child with a bad taste in my mouth that won't go away no matter how hard I swallow or how many times I try to spit it out.  The fact is I could coat my tongue with honey, rinse with  Listerine, chew on cinnamon sticks all day, stuff my cheeks with Altoids and the bad taste would override them all.



The taste?  Well, I know it all too well.  It is the taste  of failure. A shame taste in my mouth that burns worse than chilis and fills my nostrils with the reek of proven incompetence.

I am chewing on failure and growing smaller and smaller as I chew.

The cause?  Well, really, it's nothing more serious than this:  I thought I could do a bit of acting and it seemed I was succeeding for awhile.  Then some adjudicators at a competition told me I sucked. Not really a big deal. I wasn't aiming for a late-start acting career.

And yet...

...it is a taste so familiar that I'm unable to dismiss it as merely a gustatory hallucination. I'm aware that from some far-off philosophical distance, it is not important, not "The Truth," and in the Grand Scheme of Things so small as to be virtually sub-atomic.

I remember a Sixty Minutes interview with basketball star, LeBron James. "Are you ever nervous?" the interviewer asked. " Aw," said James dismissively, "you can't be afraid of failure."

He is right, of course. And he is tall, very tall, in more ways than one.

What makes some of us stride boldly forth while others of us creep fearfully in the sidelines? One's upbringing, no doubt, plays a part, as does one's genetic programming.  It is in my nature to be both timid and tightly wound. In addition, I was  bombarded with verbal abuse virtually from the time I could crawl. Occasionally, very occasionally, I have reached high and briefly held in my hand a small ripe fruit of success. Inevitably, though, the next attempt replaces sweetness with acidity and I give up, shrinking back into the shadows of anonymity.

Since human beings have been granted freedom of choice, it follows that any self-defeating pattern can be altered. The weak can become strong, the last become first and this does happen on occasion. Exactly how this transformation occurs seems to me though to have more correspondence with magic than behavioral science.

I know there are alchemists in this world who can turn failure into gold...

...and I know that, so far in my life, I am not one of them.

Not Much Gusto

   

I have been thinking about this word, this prompt of the week:  gusto.

It sounds as if it ought to be part of a magician's spell:

     Abracadabra, presto gusto
     Eye of newt and mote of dust(o),
     May you always pine and lust(o)

     After one you cannot trust(o)

It could also be a spell to raise the wind:

     Presto gusto
     push and thrust(o)
     Scatter and shatter
     Rattle and clatter
     Ram the rooftops,
     Raise the dust(o).


Gusto could  also be the name of a friendly golden retriever.

Or the nickname of a boy named Gustav.





Really, though, it is gusto that I lack during these long winter months.  I have of late but -  wherefore I know not -  lost all my mirth; forgone all custom of exercise...

If a warm cave, lit by gentle firelight, were to present itself, I would gladly crawl into it and sleep until spring. Except that, out here in the Southwest mountains, spring generally means high winds smacking you in the face every time you go out and only a few imported flowers and fruit trees blooming courageously under the weight of a late snowfall. Summers, though, are pleasant especially after the monsoon season brings moisture, in the form of thunderstorms, to the brown and shriveled land. Then the native flowers burst into bloom. Subterranean streams rise out of the earth. The leaves of the cottonwood and the aspen shimmer greenly, gladly in the long light.

















The word, gusto, derives from the Latin word meaning "a tasting." And from thence into Spanish -- e.g., con mucho gusto, or with great pleasure.

Par ejemplo:  Quieres dormir hasta el verano?  (Do you want to sleep until summer?)

Si, con mucho gusto.

The Only Good Crowd

The word prompt this week is crowd.

For me this word has mostly negative associations. I am both anti-social and claustrophobic. Finding myself imprisoned in a mass of other human beings is bound to sabotage the restraining influence of my cerebral cortex.  Waiting in a long line of people in front of a counter staffed by a cognitively challenged octogenarian makes me grind my teeth and curse under my breath. If by dint of ill fortune I find myself  jammed into the back of a crowded elevator, I hold both my temper and my breath until the doors slide open and I can elbow my way to freedom.

Naturally I try to avoid these situations.

Take supermarkets for example. If I'm planning wisely, I'll always choose a weekday morning to shop. Sometimes, however, I forget an item and feel compelled to return at a less auspicious time.  Often, in these circumstances, I find myself blocked in the middle of a narrow aisle by shoppers who are taking forever to decide between competing brands. The result is instant outrage. I imagine my shopping cart as a modern-day battering ram. Only the tiniest whisper from my suppressed  superego prevents me from emitting a war whoop and launching my attack on the poor innocent shoppers blocking my egress.

Anticipating my loss of self-control, I have sometimes abandoned a cart full of purchases and left the store. It's a good way to save money, at least.





One of the positive aspects of living in remotest New Mexico is its (relative) lack of crowds and generous portions of open space.  Uninhabited canyons and plateaus, dominated by sage and juniper, comprise the scenery between urban areas which, relative to the East Coast, are sparsely populated.  My eyes feast on this expanse along with the dazzling enormity of blue sky.  Where I lived before, in the San Francisco Bay Area, there was always the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, along with the plentiful county, state and federal preserves, to balance the  burgeoning urban and suburban sprawl.

Sometimes I try to imagine how the North American continent looked before droves of Europeans arrived here to devour and breed.

No, I am not rejecting civilization or romanticizing the existence of hunter-gatherers. It's just the visual image of a swarm that seems aesthetically repelling. Bee swarms, ant swarms, swarms of locusts, mud swallow nests jammed together on the side of a building -- all of these make me shudder and look away. In my (albeit over sensitized) mind,  a dense concentration of almost anything is physically abhorrent.

I have, though, at least one positive association with the word "crowd."  I am thinking back to the year 1970 when the American people rose up and stopped the Vietnam War.  I no longer remember which month it was. All I remember is a freeway in Seattle occupied by so many thousands of people you couldn't see the end of the line or the beginning.  Opposition was no longer solely a radical stand. Liberals, quasi-liberals and even moderates had seen more than enough televised images of young girls catching fire and traumatized elderly villagers hobbling on the edges of rice paddies choked with corpses.

The occupants of the freeway sang, brandished signs, pontificated, speculated, and laughed because for this moment in time, our differences --  political, economic and social -- had been set aside in pursuit of a common goal. We were the force of reason, the implement of peace and we would prevail.

It was a crowded situation well worth tolerating.