For the birds

By chance or prompted by inner need, during a reshuffle of furniture around my house, the desk ended up in the kitchen: Right beside the fridge. That actually happened back in December and the desk was a recent arrival at the time.

It is my late dad’s walnut desk with three drawers on each side and a hinged, pulldown door in the middle: The desk I remember him sitting at in the family home going back far enough that I think it’s my very own teething marks on the right hand corner. I’m guessing I imagined myself a beaver in a former life and a mouthful of desk complete with a top-coat of varnish would just be the thing to recall the atmosphere of the swamp, or something along those lines.

Now living in a house the size of a Chiclet, it is a challenge whenever a newfound, or in this case an inherited, object lands on my doorstep. They appeal to the soul like a lost puppy wanting in and how do you respond to that?

Sorting and launching a new future for the contents of your parent’s or any loved one’s home holds a menu of lessons. Oh my gawd! Those are grandma’s knitting needles and the red hat with the veil she wore to church when she wasn’t knitting. Looka this! Uncle Art’s vinyl record collection including the Best of Marty Robbins, the one Art would put on and replay over and over with the volume cranked wide open down in his basement so he could rehearse the singer’s voice for the Legion’s Thursday Karaoke night. With that, I became scarred for life. As a musician, I would break out in hives whenever our band was asked to play Robbins’s El Paso.

Stuff can become magnetic icons, the sock drawer of memories of your walk on the planet thus far. Want to banish certain unwanted icons? Really? The emotional reflex is like stale gum stuck in a vault of recalls and then scraping the thing off like an old scab. “Hey how about that?” guilt will say when you donate the red hat with the veil and the knitting needles to the Thrift Store. You’re giving away grandma! Guilt does a fine job of making you search for whatever it is you are actually doing.

But new/old stuff arriving in my house is like re-ordering the contents of a knapsack. Nothing ever seems to find its place. Or so it feels. Take this new setting for dad’s desk and the pros and cons of it.

One pro of course is having the fridge door within easy reach. Like sitting shoulder to shoulder with a friend on a long bus ride who has packed a grocery store-sized picnic hamper. So, a bonus? Maybe not come to think: Me, sedentary as I work on a writing project; next to me, with a flash of the hand the fridge door opens and voila! Enough protein and carbs to feed the Wellington Dukes all season long? So we know where this conversation is headed, right?

On the other hand there are the birds. Yes, forgot to mention them. Also next to the fridge which means now in front of the desk is a north facing window where over time I have installed my favourite bird feeders. And on a grey day with a blast of snow like today, I could not have more of a distraction than to be mesmerized by the hordes of chickadees and juncos and nuthatches and tree sparrows and purple finches and woodpeckers and a pair of cardinals and … now see where I’m headed here? Like fish in an aquarium, I am offered a whole new range of entertainment that soars —pun intended—beyond my limited vocabulary when it comes to describing endless and simple ways I can be distracted: And how a normal few hours of work can easily stretch through a winter when distracted. But I write it off like Eckhart Tolle says in his book, The Power of Now: Being in the moment. Ya right, but which moment? The writing moment or bird observing moment? Which Eckhart? You see this is what can happen when a new anything arrives at my place. My universe goes into convulsions— sorta like global warming of the brain.

But hey, thanks to a friend who thought that a pair of binoculars and the Sibley Field Guide to Birds would be a good way to launch the New Year, it could be in my next lifetime that my stage-play-in-theworks gets done! And it just may have something to do with fridges and ornithology studies.

But alas, the saving grace here is finding another small object of inheritance. From the middle left hand drawer I just pulled out the tiny sign that stood forever at the edge of Dad’s desk. I carefully return it to its familiar spot and I feel immediate calming. The sign simply reads: ‘The secrecy of my job prevents me from knowing what I am doing.’