The whim of genealogy

Slate heavy skies, the centre white line, an even greyer Scoharie Road rises before me. It’s late morning. Sunday. The car radio and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Volume cranked.

There’s a silhouette ahead and I veer to avoid shaggy-headed turkey buzzards, two of them actually, unbothered, standing firm against threat of traffic. The vultures will not interrupt their banquet serving of raccoon, raccoon sacrificed in the headlight ritual of highways before dawn.

Overhead, a gathering of vulture kin graceful in the navigating sky; their grounded comrades now standing awkward at the feast of roadkill; the airborne fleet circle and then circle again, gliding in the air currents, the up-rise of Lake Consecon. Like a busy airport, each of the birds will hover above waiting until each below has had its feed; Getting clearance to land, a polite pecking order, I guess you could say, amidst what seems to be a randomness without ceremony.

Yet in some cultures the vultures are recognized for their important role as functionaries tasked by nature to cleanse the ground of rotting flesh, while at the same time the birds are revered, sacred winged entities, intermediaries transporting the earthly perished to the ethers and beyond.

It’s probably at the next bend in the road as I watch the collection of starlings light from the telephone wires then chase the horizon like a galaxy of stars shifting here then there in fast-forward motion that I begin to think that we as humans are similar as a tribal culture. Collectively the starlings swirl as a unit, organized chaos at once the form of a flying dragon, then next a Trojan horse. The formation I imagine to be daunting, as large as the sky itself to any potential predator or newcomer. This to me is part of the miracle, part of the form, part of the omnipresent magic that exists moment by moment, night and day, rain and shine. I feel too that this affects all of us.

Prompted in thought and music as I head westbound into the day, ideas of family and roots and why tracking a family tree can be a curiosity, a hobby to some while to others it is an obsession. Forebears. Pedigree. Where do I fit in? I think it’s about our innate desire of story, a link however tenuous, a narrative to help define ourselves within the bigger picture: Why we tend to gather together in places on the planet and want to share experiences, our interests, perhaps how we want to invest our stories in the pot of collective experience in an effort to help better the places we inhabit?

My questioning mind is calmed. The organized chaos of emotion soothed. Everything is answered for me when I reach my destination: An afternoon of friends, family, vagabonds, strangers; immigrants all of us, nurtured by kittens and dogs, food, drink, thunderstorms and laughter. It’s a time of thanksgiving for well-being, days of celebration, an unspoken ritual within the unspoken bonds that hold all of us.