Homer

I seldom imagine anything as grand as the silent Aires of the wings of swans in flight: especially in the peace of dawn as they travel low above the willows and bound for the sanctuary of the nearby bay. It’s like the kingfishers skimming tight over the harbour; or silken rain on bare feet; a pause in a rose garden of July. It seems that these are the moments that feed us, the unseen music the unheard colours that relive in our lives to soothe when the passages are tedious.

One backdrop that prevails in my life these days, at least for a limited number of hours a week is the opposite of the above. It’s the asphalt arena of the parking lot. Nothing more soulless I think; brutal in the landscape/cityscape everywhere. We can do better with effort; models around the world show us how. Can you imagine adding trees and greenery? When it comes to parking needs it’s a contest of pragmatic versus aesthetic— with the scales generally tipped by silver coin in favour of the former. So in the intervals while covering shifts of greeting and watching over safety at a supermarket from beneath a mask during pandemic days, I try to mine some amiable bits from two acres of paved-over plain; engage with what is before us right? I watch the coming and going of vehicles and take notice how the gulls that perch atop light standards seem to survey the world below: The heat rising from the asphalt under the noonday sun shimmers; the glower of light reflecting off of metal and glass; car alarms, passing ambulance sirens, the boisterous cooling unit of the ice delivery truck amidst grocery cart rumble and clatter; all of it leaves the gulls nonplussed. More accurately, they appear to be somewhere else, as if holding down a watch shift in the crow’s nest forty feet above deck on a threemasted sailing vessel, standing alert for sightings of land or uncharted reefs. While we are not likely to gather firsthand testimony from the gulls to really understand, don’t forget we live in the age of the mini-cam and drones so be prepared.

In this crowd of ‘shopper gulls’ I have a favourite; I call him/her Homer. Not as in Homer Simpson, but the mythical Homer of the epic Greek poems, the Odyssey and Iliad —the Homer who remains an enigma in legend. The author’s person has never been identified— age, gender, race or culture? Was Homer multiple authors; were the works fiction, questions that still keep historians awake at night? All we know is that the works rank high in collective literature—wrath of the gods; respect and apology all part of the morals from 762 BC, give or take 50 years. So maybe the analogy came to me because of Trojan wars or legends of wooden sailing ships, and parrots and adventure; or maybe it was simply an oasis-like illusion in the heat of day while watching organized chaos play out on pavement.

Actually the impulse is now coming back to me. It’s because Homer has the markings of a Bonaparte Gull, yes that’s it, and also Homer has one leg only which makes the gull easier to identify. I mean it’s likely that there are more around identical to Homer because I often see a similarly challenged gull down at North Beach in summer and in winter: Maybe multiple Homer-Bonapartes lookalikes?

The Bonaparte gull’s official title—chroicocephalus Philadelphia in the Audubon book—a mouthful of a name which motivated calling it Homer which keeps the word count down and the whole identity thing simple. The gull was first identified by the Emperor Napoleon’s brother Joseph, who in 1815 through nepotism was appointed King of Spain. But Joseph took a pass on the mess Napoleon ended up with, having met his Waterloo and exiled to Saint Helena Island and all of that. Joseph was considered the good brother of the clan, a literary man and smart, too, when he decided that a one- way trip to America was a good thing. It was actually at ‘Point Breeze’, his purchased estate in Upper New York State that he identified the Homer species which is a very long and tedious explanation and introduction to a small black-beaked gull that perches on a light pole in a parking lot. Not sure if the gulls are under cross border quarantine order but whatever, let’s just leave it at that. So it appears that Homer is the taster of the food samples that are destined to fall out of grocery carts as they rabbit on without car suspension and over a toughened surface that slopes ten degrees toward the water runoff drains. From above, the gulls watch rolling turnips, potatoes and melon; they spot the spilled raspberries, blueberries, strawberries and oranges. Homer is generally sent down to do a food taste and most generally returns with a nada response. I’m starting to think that gulls imagine French fries to grow on trees cuz if there happens to be a spill from a customer’s take-out purchase the gulls don’t even wait for Homer, I mean who needs a taster when they can just charge to the ground like a Trojan army on their last days of starvation.

So I’ve come to imagine Homer and company take in their maritime dining experience as the action in the parking lot winds down around closing time. It seems that his clan often follows me as I take in replenishing moments by the water come evening. And what I notice is that Homer, despite being the smallest of the bunch and having adjusted to life after losing a leg still maintains the majesty of wings in flight in a cooling breeze, the seagull call in the face of the setting sun; Homer’s ability to dive into the lake to fish, to also saddle on the surface of the abruptness of waves and then gracefully set down on the softness of sand beach or the hardest of stone. I remember Homer because he once quoted to me a saying of one of his ancestors now decade’s gone: “Fortune is always on the side of those who are bold, adventurous and free in spirit…” Jonathan Livingston Seagull.