Letter from Yvonne: Hope – And a Thing with Feathers
Hello, Everyone.
When R J invited me to guest blog, I teased that he must have read the CNET article in which the CEO of I Can Has Cheezburger (…yes, that blog has a CEO; let’s all contemplate that for a moment…) reports that his site “is approaching 100 million page views a month.”  Surely this is why I’ve been brought on board:  clever R J is expecting moi to contribute plenty of the kind of cute animal stuff which would not otherwise tread upon the green expanses of The Daily Blague.  Win/win:  perhaps a few thousand of my fellow giggle-buckets will be lured over to the DB, away from those trivial LOL sites – and once reeled in, R J will get them reading The Decameron and Moby Dick, or at least something about the Mitfords.
If that is your secret agenda, R J, I’ll do my part!  But, oh, the Critter beat has seen some dark days lately.
I’m trying as hard as the next savvy Democrat to ignore Sarah Palin (while not for a second underestimating the danger inherent in her nomination).  But I was astonished by the national glee over this woman’s reputation as a killer of large beautiful animals. Apparently, 54% of Americans find this charming.
The 2006 Alaska gubernatorial debate is online; I took a break from ignoring Sarah Palin and watched a chunk of it.  Alaska’s many social problems – the nation’s highest rate of rape/sexual assault; domestic violence (“epidemic”, Palin admits); a near 40% high school drop-out rate, etc. – are ponderous, yet Palin seemed most engaged and sincere when she was advocating for trophy hunting.  The heck, Sarah?  (She didn’t use that phrase, of course; she spoke of “managing wildlife resources for abundance” and “all of us” having “more access to our wildlife resources.”  That is, in order to shoot them.  For fun.)
I couldn’t not watch the anti-Palin aerial-hunting videos of magnificent Alaskan wolves being tortured to death by goons in small aircraft.  Obscene.  And Governor Palin has kept it nice and legal for “sport” hunters to walk right up and blast the wild bears in the protected areas of Katmai National Preserve – where the bear population has long been habituated to the humans who come to admire and photograph them.  Ha! – in your face, animal lovers!
Moose and wolves and bears, oh dear.
You’re probably wondering what I’m doing with all the time I save by ignoring Sarah Palin?  I’m obsessing about critters closer to home – that is, right outside my window.  A baby Northern Cardinal became a regular visitor to our deck, where food is sometimes put out for the neighborhood songbirds. I fell in love with her!…and nearly had my heart broken.
The first time I saw the baby Cardinal was obviously her very first day out of the nest, which means she had hatched into this world only eleven days earlier.  She was accompanied by her beautiful scarlet father, and she was so adorably clueless – she sat right in the middle of a buffet of seeds and nuts we’d put out and made baby-bird begging sounds, beak open to heaven, wings quivering.  Feed me feed me feed me.  The male Cardinal would put a single sunflower seed onto her tongue and then flit to another part of the deck, trying to teach her to follow him. He was as patient as she was demanding and stubborn: he’d call to her intermittently with his sharp “chip” sound, and eventually she would make her way to him, hopping awkwardly, to be rewarded with a tasty seed…ah, I loved watching them!
At the end of the show, the father flew to the roof of the building’s gabled side wing, immediately adjacent to our deck.  Hysterical peeping from the baby…but he waited and chipped.  She finally gave in and hauled herself over to his perch:  fluttered her wings hard enough to catch some air and then flapped wildly, rotating and zigzaging – upside down for half a second there! – and landed more or less upright beside him.  (And all this messy drama – it could hardly be termed a ‘flight’ – over a mere four-foot span!)  Her daddy fed her a seed when she stopped trembling.
They returned a few times that day, and again the next day, to repeat the lessons.  But worry began to abrade the edges of my delight:  geez, why wasn’t this fledgling getting this?  She had yet to eat even one seed on her own!  Winter is coming, sweetie…
Alas. Â On the third day, she was perched on the side roof alone, her insistent baby-bird cries loud, then softer, then the equivalent of self-comforting murmurs. Â I took photos, and between my camera’s zoom and iPhoto was at last able to see it: Â her beak was either deformed or had sustained a severe injury.
My worst fear for her was, I thought, confirmed – she can’t eat on her own, can’t pick up the food.  Her father had abandoned her.  Nature’s way.
In those photos, she was the very image of misery: Â her drab-brown baby feathers were wet and matted because it was raining…that hot, awful, summer-weary rain that refreshes nothing, and during which the whole world seems ugly, and smells of rot.
This damaged and doomed baby bird became the symbol of all the misery I’d been feeling, which began with that terrifying Republican National Convention.  Then, Wall Street.  Reading the daily news is making me soul-sick; not reading the news is irresponsible.  I am afraid that Obama might lose this election. I miss David Foster Wallace.
An attitude adjustment became necessary, because I’m not kidding about the soul-sickness.  I was beginning to enjoy ignoring Sarah Palin so much that I considered extending that strategy:  how soothing it might be to ignore all of it – this painful political morass, the economic crisis, the suffering of little birds on my deck, the suffering of humans everywhere…
But then (devil!) it occurred to me that ignoring might be in some way related to ignorance. You think?
So there may be no real alternative, but it felt like a momentous decision:  I will accept the discomfort of uncertainty, and do what I can to remain hopeful.  For the country, for Obama, for myself.  No use denying my fear – but leaning hopeward, I’ve caught my breath again.  Cynicism is understandable and, at this point, thoroughly justifiable…I simply don’t wish to live that way myself.
Because the truth is, one never knows.
After two low days of not seeing the baby Cardinal at all and assuming the worst, I was thrilled when she suddenly popped up on our deck – with her father.  She’s not only begun picking up the food herself, she’s decided she prefers the big honking peanuts to the Cardinal-bite-sized sunflower seeds!  So that misshapen beak of hers is perfectly capable after all.  Because of the distinctive beak, we will be able to recognize her when she’s sporting her adult plummage…dare we even hope that she’ll make it to adulthood and find a mate – a good father who will bring her babies to our deck next year?
And now, as a treat for everyone who’s read this far, and to assure R J (if he’s still reading!) that I can bring The Cute:
A few weeks ago Father Tony posed a gentle question for the ages – “What do dogs think?”  I wondered if he’d ever seen this painting by Pierre Bonnard.  We can venture a pretty good guess about this dog’s thoughts, but Bonnard refuses to put too fine a point on it:  the title of the painting is La nappe à carreaux rouges. The Red-Checkered Tablecloth.
Good week to you all! Â
Yvonne