Common Birds 42 - Red-Tailed Hawk
Wednesday, August 23
I never spent much time outside when I was young. Well, I did spend time outside, but the fact that I was outside wasn’t the point. I wasn’t outside to be outside, I was outside to do something: marching band, soccer, running. When I had free-time, I filled it with reading or video games. Now, in my sparse free-time I long to be outside birdwatching. Birdwatching is, of course, doing something, but it involves a lot of sitting around while not much is happening. Though, being attentive to the outdoors has a specific, soft joy. I did not have the patience for this joy when I was young, too busy marching and running off to the next bigger and better thing (so I thought). So today when I hear the purring of the cicadas, it does not remind me of the long summer days which I spent roaming through forests and fields. They don’t really exist, or are earlier than my memory. The sound reminds me of the long, summer days I spent playing Animal Crossing, staying up past 10 pm to catch cicadas and rhinoceros beetles.
Now that I’ve discovered this gentle joy, I’m outside on a picnic bench behind the doctor’s office. Not much is happening. Amelia is with our son in Mommy and Me. The parking lot is filled with empty cars and the droning tones of the cicadas. Honey bees and dragonflies drift over the grass. The wind delicately bends tree branches out of its way. Being still, I become invisible. Great blue herons dedicate their lives to this fact. Becoming invisible is like listening well: patient, quiet, and yet intently present. Slowly disappearing from the space, wonders of all sizes begin to appear.
First, a mourning dove wings silently by. A few minutes later, three mallards sweep overhead, quacking like a grunt with each wingbeat. Distantly, I hear the scream of a red-tailed hawk. I hear it twice more before it drifts into view. It wheels and is suddenly joined by two other red-tails. High against the light blue, they’re hard to distinguish from the blood vessels in my eyes which flash black and white. The three hawks scream and circle together before heading off in different directions.
Then, for about fifteen minutes I see only the sun shining magnanimously on the slowly rippling plant life. Glancing down, I’m mystified yet delighted to find myself sharing the picnic table with the littlest frog I’ve ever seen! It’s as small as a honey bee and as green as the finest jade. A black stripe runs from its golden eyes all the way to its hind legs, neatly dividing top from bottom. How long has it been here? How did it get all the way up here? I take a picture, then return to my stillness. Eventually, the frog either forgets that I’m a giant thousands of times its size or somehow it’s just fine with my sun-blotting presence. It sizes up the gap between the top of the picnic table and the attached bench, then braces itself and leaps, landing hard on the wooden bench. Shortly, it recovers itself, turns, and starts heading towards me! Bounding, it closes the distance between its tiny body and mine. Then it plants itself, scopes out my denim covered knee, and leaps onto my leg! It rests briefly, then dives into the grass, disappearing from view.
Walking back to the car, I’m now acutely aware that I could be stepping on any number of tiny frogs, or anything at all in that centi-cosmos where that delicate amphibian resides, the centi-cosmos that I must march through. The tiny frog reminds me of my son, not just because I think about him constantly, and not just because he is also a small, delicate life, but because he’s still a newborn. In his sleepiest and cutest moments, he’ll ‘frog-up’ on our chests and sleep and sleep. If I were a better writer, maybe I could convey how wonderful this is, but as I am, I can only say that it is wonderful. Holding our precious frog, I am struck that my parents used to hold me like this: helpless, fussy, and loved. And I wonder how my son will change between now and the next twenty-eight years, when he is as old as I am now and no longer so like that little frog. And I wondered if I really am so different as I think. Or if any of us are so different from him: hungry, tired, and needy. We cry and lash out, knowing merely that we need, and not what we need or how to get it.
And then I wonder how he’ll remember his summer nights.
There is some truth to me being like my son, but I believe there is more truth to our (mine past, his future) growth and change. I hope he remembers summer nights of singing cicadas, and summer days of seeking and finding their pristine, fragile husks which nevertheless hold on to wood with determined strength. I hope he remembers summer nights of fireflies rising and rising again out of the knee-high corn stalks, and summer days of finding frogs in unexpected places. It took me long, long years, but I pray that he can find that gentle joy, that grace to know and love this world where even nothing much happening is glorious beyond words.
