Pater Familias

WATCHING BIRDS. In BLINK, Malcolm Gladwell writes of how David Sibley says that most bird identification is based on how a bird moves, on angles it takes, on how it flies and turns its head. I had thought that identification turned on the markings illustrated in the bird books. Yesterday and today were the first warm spring days and we went for walks. We saw just above our heads two chickadees taking turns disappearing into a chickadee-sized hole in a tree. THE SIBLEY GUIDE TO BIRD LIFE & BEHAVIOR says that chickadees will excavate a hole in a tree, perhaps left by a woodpecker, to make a nest, sometimes taking up to two weeks on the excavating. Farther on, we saw two herons high up in an old nest, raising their wings and displaying their plumage in what appeared to be flirtation. THE SIBLEY GUIDE says that herons do come back to old nests and they do engage in courtship rituals which show off their plumage. My Uncle Walter–my mother’s brother–kept notebooks on birds as a boy and worked in the birdhouse of the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago before World War II. He was going to be a zookeeper. He fought in most of the battles in the Pacific. He was in the amphibious engineers. If you watch the landings in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the amphibious engineers had the task of getting the soldiers to the shore. He died soon after the war, I think in 1949. He was about 40.

BAD MOTHERS. In the story of the girl who lived in the storage shed in today’s post, the article seems to suggest that it was the girl’s mother who was responsible for much of the deprivation and cruelty, I was at a dinner party of six people in New York City a couple years ago, and one of the men pointed out that of the six of us, three had wonderful mothers and three had mothers who were monstrously cruel. We have several friends who have liked the musical of GRAY GARDENS, so Mary Jane finally watched the original documentary, which she found very good. I saw a little bit of the mother celebrating how her daughter, whose life she was blighting, was much less successful than the mother, and I couldn’t watch any more. I know six is a small sample, but I think the mother who destroys her child is more common than we like to think.

DEPRIVATION AS WELL AS POVERTY. On his new blog , Lee Bryant posted this story about a woman who lived in a self storage shed with her parents for ten years while she was growing up. What is striking is that her parents actively sought to isolate her from society and to deprive her of education and playmates. She taught herself to read at fifteen and as an adult became a literary agent.

MY FATHER’S CAMPAIGN PLATFORM. Americans don’t have time to listen to great music on the way to work because their work day has already begun. Dick Weisfelder commented on this post that Swedes can’t understand how little vacation time Americans take. I am reminded that my father announced at the dinner table one night that he was going to run for President in 1960. (It must have been in the early fifties that he made the announcement because it seemed a long time in the future). He would campaign on one issue, he said. He would double or triple the number of national holidays. He pointed out that in medieval times the saints’ days had made for many holidays and that that was the direction he would take the country.

NOT STOPPING TO SMELL THE ROSES. Dick and Chris Weisfelder sent me this article which describes an experiment to determine whether Washingtonians, presumably on their way from the subway to work in the morning, would stop to listen to beautiful music played by one of the best violinists in the world. This may be a spoiler: for the most part they didn’t. I have to wonder whether they would have stopped if the experiment had been at another time of the day. I don’t think there are a lot of people who leave extra time to get to work.