This was UD‘s toast, at Ireland’s Four Fields, to James Joyce on Bloomsday. She raised her pomegranate martini; Courtney and Mary Anne raised their Guinnesses.

The bar was pretty quiet; UD wanted a quiet Bloomsday this year. Her tattered and taped up copy of the book sat on the table by the shepherd pie and the apple pie. While waiting for her friends (both were once students of hers at GW), UD read the opening pages of the book, puzzling as ever over why the words

the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak

have such surpassing beauty. They’re like these lines from a James Merrill poem:

I hear the ferrous, feather-light diluvian / Lava clink at a knife-tap from our guide.

What is it? The delicate combination of hard Ks and gentle Ls?

My students – my friends – were
brimming with life. We laughed.
At the Cleveland Park metro we

embraced and said goodnight.

La Kid qua Batwoman sings with The Sirens, a George Washington a cappella group.

She’s the blond with the mask and the black cape, standing directly to the left of Wonder Woman (Wonder Woman is Sara Fellman, one of UD‘s students).

… was, you recall, Sympathy for the Devil, Rolling Stones.

The wood thrush’s ee-oh-lay — which, now that the babies are here, I hear all day long — is the theme to Mission Impossible.

The ee-oh-lay notes start at fifteen seconds into the Mission Impossible You Tube. It’s those three strong notes that work through the piece, a leit-motif.

Here’s the wood thrush. Hear it?

Foggy. Weeks now of darkness and heavy rain and heavy thunder, and inside Garrett Park’s arboretum the world is a deeply dreaming green wall.

A wall, or a well — dark, deep, shaking with thunder and white at times with lightning.

Mourning doves coo inside invisible dogwoods. Thrushes sing misty.

So many foggy poems to choose among. This one, by David Mason, will do.

***************

Fog Horns

Nothing was done then.
Nothing was ever
done. Then it was done.

******************

These faint puffs of lines, these little brushstrokes, do the deed, make the mood. The haze so subdues the world that we can isolate, and hear, painfully, the wound of existence itself, bruises being born. When we’re out there, we’re vulnerable. We have to make our dim way through the world.

They’re too much for us, those hurts of sound that come blaring into the shut-in world in which we’ve made ourselves comfortable with a pot of tea.

We’re protected inside these small sunless days, inside the steamy fog of tea-time over and over again, where nothing ever happens. Nothing was ever done, says the poet. Comfortably numb.

But that’s its own hurt, because it will be done some day — Then it was done. — and we won’t have lived our lives.

The babies are out – ugly and gray,
with loose pink gullets and random
feathers. They’re surprisingly big.

The parents seem involved in a
perpetual feeding cycle. One
stands motionless on an edge
of the deep, papery, twiggy
nest — really, at this point,
after two weeks of rain, the
thing looks like rubbish, but it’s
held through all the storms — while
the other flies away. It returns in
minutes to deposit worms and flies
into the small mouths that make a
low buzzy sound — like crickets —
in excitement.

When I stand nearby, everyone
freezes. The mother’s huge liquid
black eye is unseeing. I’ve hung
a new bird feeder on a low branch
of the dogwood in the front yard,
in case the thrushes want a treat.

Sunflower chips
and dried
mealworms.

*************************************

The collages are the work of Randel Plowman.

… UD had finished her Asian salad and was digging in again to Google News when a very old lady maneuvered her walker to the table next to UD‘s. There are lots of assisted living joints around Panera, so the place is full of oldies.

This one was lovely — a full head of white hair, lively brown eyes, clear skin. She had dressed up for lunch in an off-white pantsuity sort of thing. Her attractive look put downscale UD — black shorts she grabbed off a street rack in Key West, a stained black shirt, a green scarf, stupid teeny white socks, scuffed sneakers — to shame. Under her shirt UD wore a bra so old she expected it to explode off of her body at any moment. (This actually did happen once to UD, who has a tendency to hold on to clothes longer than she should. Her bra exploded. She handled it with aplomb.) (Bras explode under a variety of conditions.)

Anyway, UD‘s bra is not the point. The point is that this woman looked good.

UD exchanged a few words with the woman, who worried that her walker might be in UD’s way. Not at all, UD assured her; and, now that she had a really good look at this woman’s eyes, she felt like talking to her at greater length. Especially once she determined that the woman was alone.

“I’m ninety-two years old,” she said in a very strong New York accent. “I lived in Far Rockaway for years. Worked for Social Security. But my son-in-law moved here, so I live in Ring House across the street. They provide breakfast and dinner. I like to go out for lunch.”

“Is there a traffic light at the crossing?”

“Yes. There’s a light. It’s safe. I like to go to the Italian place sometimes. Sometimes this place. But this place can get very crowded, and it’s not easy for me to make my way.”

“Do you miss New York?”

“No. I like it here. And I get away a lot. I’ve been on thirteen cruises. I’m ninety-two. [She repeated herself a lot.] I like the food on the cruises, and the entertainment’s great. I pay for my son-in-law and his family and we all get rooms with balconies.”

“I hope it’s okay if I tell you that you look absolutely wonderful for ninety-two.”

She smiled.  “People tell me that a lot.”

“Do you know how to use a computer?”  UD glanced at her laptop.

“No, no.  I’m too old for that sort of work.”

An anxious young woman with a French accent — UD thought she might be Haitian — suddenly appeared.

“Mommy,” she said, “I’m thinking I’ll walk you back.  I’m thinking I’ll wait for you to finish your lunch.  I’m thinking you shouldn’t walk back by yourself.”

“This is Janine,” the lady told me.  “She takes care of me for a few hours every morning.  But she’s so devoted that she hangs around after that too.  Thank you, Janine.”

“You’ve been looking after Mommy,” Janine said to me.  “Thank you.”

… the Garrett Park Town Office.  She’s using one of their computers in a beautiful room overlooking the railroad tracks and some enormous trees and the parking lot for Black Market restaurant.  

On her way home from her swim, UD stopped to pick up her mail at the post office (no home delivery in Garrett Park, by popular demand — as you already know if you’re a regular UD reader) and then went up to the third floor of Penn Place to ask Ted Pratt, the town manager, if there’s a Garrett Park hotspot.  He said no, and then escorted UD to this office and said Use one of our computers, Margaret.

So…  Various thoughts in UD‘s mind right now about the glory of living in a town where people know and like you…  UD‘s family moved to Garrett Park when she was eight, and she stayed here until college and graduate school.  Back in DC, married to Mr UD, she lived on Capitol Hill for thirteen years, and then moved back to Garrett Park when Ania, her daughter, was small.  

It’s strange being a ‘thesdan with a long memory, a Garrett Parker who knows almost everyone in town, plus their kids and parents.  I’m not complaining.

Anyway, off to Google News with me.  See how the Princeton thing’s going.

… but strongly optimistic, on a beautiful summer day at the Garrett Park pool, where UD has just finished her swim, and where she now (they’ve got wifi this year) blogs. The little square of orange light on her computer panel shivers and shakes, and it takes an awfully long time to go from one window to another, but UD will take what she can get by way of internet access (on Thursday her home computer problems should be solved). Hotel lobbies, Starbucks, and now the local pool — when computers disconnect, UD reconnects with her little ‘thesdan world.

Five people have emailed UD about the clout list at the University of Illinois (she’s afraid if she tries to link to an article, it’ll take forever), and she’s grateful to them. She’d already read an article or two about it, and had decided not to post on the subject. But since so many of her kind readers think of UD and University Diaries when they read coverage in the Chicago Trib and elsewhere about the well-established use of clout on the part of politicians and trustees to get unqualified students admitted to the flagship public campus, she’ll happily share her thoughts.

Used to be UD was real radical on the subject. When she first started going with Mr UD, he told her about various Harvard friends of his who’d been admitted with middling grades and scores because their parents were well-connected. She was scandalized, and did quite a bit of populist railing against it, which irritated Mr UD no end.

He tried to explain to her that no university merely looks at grades and scores — there are all sorts of special admits, like athletes and musicians and the geographically well-distributed (UD recalled her father saying that he wasn’t that impressive a candidate for Johns Hopkins, but “No one had ever applied to Hopkins from Ocean City High.”) and, yes, children of alumni. “The main question,” said he, “is Can they do well at the university? All of my friends did very well. Most graduated with honors. And you know all of them and how well they’ve done in life.”

Although her position has moderated a bit, UD remains scandalized by purely money admits — Duke and Brown seem particularly fond of them — where if your father is Ralph Lauren or Rudy Giuliani (how else to explain Andrew Giuliani?) you have a much better chance of getting in than someone more impressive and less wealthy. And sure, many of the University of Illinois admits she’s reading about sound unable to do well at the school — Mr UD’s minimal criterion. One in particular — a law school candidate — sounds terrible, and it’s sad to read the admissions dean begging the administration clout-slaves not to make him write an acceptance email to this person. He worries that the candidate’s wretched test scores will damage the law school’s competitive statistics; he’s sure the candidate will be unable to pass any bar exam.

UD takes both a case by case and a larger, political-atmosphere approach to the clout admissions phenomenon. Illinois is of course one of our most corrupt states. And bad clout admits certainly increase when you’ve got players like Blago at the bat.

Similarly, many of our corrupt, provincial southern states have long regarded colleges and universities as patronage machines, charitable arms of the legislature designed to give jobs to governors’ wives and advanced degrees to children of the prominent. So when there’s a background of deep-rooted cultural corruption, you want to pay particular attention to clout practices.

***********************************

Update: Wrote this yesterday. Apologies for light posting — continued connectivity difficulties. They’re on their way to being solved.

Driven out of her house by connectivity problems (a virus?), UD’s in the lobby of a Marriott Hotel on the Rockville Pike, her teeny Aspire balanced on her knees. Outside, yet another stormy evening.

A line of Barwood cabs waits along the circular hotel driveway; beyond them and up eighteen floors, there’s my aunt’s condominium with its views of the Montgomery County Aquatic Center, and, on clear days, Sugarloaf Mountain.

Like my mother when she was alive, my aunt refuses to learn how to use a computer. She refuses to touch a computer.

I remember how hard my niece — University Diaries’ blog mistress — tried to get my mother on board. She installed a computer in an office across from my mother’s bedroom and taped a big piece of paper saying PUSH THIS BUTTON TO TURN ON YOUR COMPUTER – I think I even recall an arrow pointing directly to the spot – next to the start button. She showed her how easily she could access gardening sites and English Cocker Spaniel sites. But nothing worked. She wasn’t having any. Neither is her sister, my aunt.

So even if I’d wanted to go to my aunt’s luxury condo and sit in one of its big rooms and gaze at the Aquatic Center and use one of her computers, I can’t. No computers. And it’s a pity, because, like me, my aunt writes poetry — she’s been at for it decades, and has an impressive body of work — and I’d love to exchange poems and comments with her online. I’ve mentioned it to her more than once. Nothing doing.

Here in the lobby it’s all about muted tans and whites – a calming color scheme, and UD can use some calming after hours of struggle to connect various computers in her house.

UD is not emotionally complicated. She has two gears: Happy and Angry. She’s mainly happy, and when happy moves through existence looking and acting roughly like everyone else. (Not quite, but pretty much.)

When angry, UD, who never inherited the Repression Gene, storms. She storms like one possessed. Her storms are rarely directed at others; they’re private rages.

When truly cyclonic conditions pertain, as they eventually did tonight after hours of frustration with computers, she turns on the kitchen radio to 1003 FM, the oldies station, and dances and sings with great violence to whatever shake it baby thing is on. Her dog, stationed near the kitchen table in case someone comes in for a snack, gazes at her. Her husband peeks in, laughs, calls her a fool, and goes off to read a good book.

On the drive over here, UD was eloquent: “I come from a land where the sun always shines. In that land, my house had a hot spot and the hot spot was always hot. My heart yearns to go back to Key West. But I must live in this land, where it rains every day and is so dark that we leave our outside light on all afternoon. For two weeks, I’ve been back in this land, where the computers don’t connect, and where I must take to the roads during dark storms in search of a hot spot. Where I must blog among strangers and flat screen tvs.”

First, go to Inside Higher Ed for a post with UD’s thoughts about the possibility of doing a series of Teaching Company lectures.

And now —

It was fun. The day was dreary, one of a spell of dreary days we’ve had in DC. But there’s nothing like a chauffeur at your door to cheer you up and remind you life’s worth living.

This was the same deal UD had when she went to the studios of ITN to talk about Kurt Vonnegut — swept through the city in a quiet ride featuring tinted windows and fine upholstery.

Only this wasn’t the city. It was the dull Dulles Corridor, miles of corporate headquarters along suburban Virginia highways.

The very successful Teaching Company, having outgrown its earlier digs, just moved to the brand-new — not even really finished — building where UD gave her lecture. Their two floors of studios and offices really shine, though the views of highways and tree clumps are uninspiring.

Escorted to a big dark room in which a podium, a cup of green Earl Grey tea, and a digital studio clock awaited her, UD made herself ready.  She scanned each of her talk’s jacketed pages (so the mike wouldn’t pick up any paper-rattling) and chatted with her wonderful hosts.  They were anxious she be comfortable.  Would she prefer an audience?  They’d be happy to rustle up some bodies.  Is everything in the format okay?

Everything’s fine.  There’s nothing UD likes better than the sound of her own voice, and she’s perfectly able to conjure a roomful of admirers — the same imaginary friends who ooh and ah as she plays the piano and sings That Ole Devil Called Love like Billie Holiday if she’d been a ‘thesdan.

From out the digital clock come the voices of her producers, telling her stop now and go now and sounds great.  She times the thing just right, coming in at 29 minutes.  They like it, and tell her she doesn’t need to do a second take.

… for the length of our drive to our house in Upstate New York, Mr UD played a set of Teaching Company lectures he’d ordered on How to Listen to and Understand Good Music. There were many, many disks, but I didn’t mind listening along.  The professor was engaging — a regular guy who cracked bad jokes and all.

“I could do this sort of thing,” UD thought, as she listened to the guy.  “I’m just like him.  Salt of the earth.  Do anything to make people laugh.  Know a thing or two about a thing or two.”

She didn’t share this thought with Mr UD, because it seemed a touch grandiose.  A touch pathetic.

A few months later, while UD was in Key West, she got an email from the Teaching Company asking if she’d audition for a series of lectures on how to write well.   She was thrilled.

She’s become phone pals with Lyndon Johnson’s granddaughter, Lucinda Robb, who works for TC and has helped UD through the stages of preparation for the audition lecture.

Tomorrow a car comes to Rokeby Avenue to take UD to Chantilly, Virginia — TC headquarters.   The lecture UD records there will be sent to sample audiences around the country.  Good reviews – she gets the gig.  Bad – back to non-corporate life.

She tells you all of this because she won’t be posting as heavily as usual today and tomorrow.  She’s putting finishing touches on her talk even as we blog, and pretty much all day tomorrow she’ll be recording the lecture.

As she’s written the lecture, UD has come to realize that she harbors a certain, er, fervency about the subject of what writing is, why it’s so wonderful, and why you should do it well.  It’s one thing to leap from scathe to scathe, as she does in a daily way; it’s another to pause and think in Big Terms about why a person might make herself into something called Scathing Online Schoolmarm in the first place…

Whatever the outcome of the TC process, UD‘s grateful to the place for prompting her to think in this way.

… is a beautiful farmhouse on a snowy night in Upstate New York. Les UDs were getting started in their academic careers, both teaching at the University of Rochester, and they’d been invited to take part in a faculty discussion group that met at various homes. I don’t remember the subject of the reading group; neither does Mr UD.

Perez Zagorin, a history professor, was the genial host that night. Christopher Lasch sat to my left, smoking. He was emotionally intense. He was always intense.

Mr UD thinks we might have been discussing Jacques Derrida, which would explain why I recall Lasch not only as intense, but as angry.

I do remember thinking that if we ended up staying in Rochester (we didn’t want to) the thing to do would be exactly what Zagorin had done: Get a farmhouse and some acres in the hills outside the city.

**************************

That was almost thirty years ago.

Today UD reads two obituaries, first that of Zagorin’s wife, a noted artist. She died April 17.

He died nine days later. Both were 88.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview Zagorin gave about his wife at the time of a 2007 exhibit of her work at the Smithsonian (“Anatomy of a Painting: Honoré Sharrer’s Tribute to the American Working People,” Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery of the Archives of American Art.).

When Kathy Calderwood – when we first knew her, she came over to our house one day… We had a big fireplace there. It was very pleasant, we were having a conversation. … I said to her, what’s so great about self-expression? I said, the self isn’t that important. She was stunned by it.

I mean, when you’re a worker, such as Honoré is, you don’t think about self-expression at all. … [S]he was not an artist. I don’t ever recall her ever thinking – just wasn’t, and for myself as a historian and a writer – of course, I have the experience of intellectual creativity, which is very satisfying and sometimes exciting, but it’s the work that counts; it’s not the self. It’s so tiresome, you see. And I think this profoundly important in dealing with [university] students.

When I have students … I feel great concern about – I would never humiliate a student or anything like that, and I have had quite close relations with some of my students. What I want to teach them is to be competent, to be really good at something, and when you’re good at something, you’re confident of yourself and you’ll be wanted. And it’s hard work.

… [S]elf-expression should be – it’s like happiness.

The greatest work of moral philosophy in the Western tradition and quite possibly of the literature the whole world is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and it begins with the theme that all men aim at happiness. But how do you – you don’t aim at happiness. Happiness is not a goal. Happiness is the byproduct of the things you do. And I could say, truly, I’ve had a happy life and I know Honoré’s had a happy life, and that was because we were all the time doing just what we wanted to be doing. Happiness emerged, it effervesced.

So you don’t aim – I mean, to your husband, your self is very important, and it should be, and the other way … the other way around. But for other people, why should they give a damn about your self? There’s a famous remark that T.S. Eliot made with regard to self-expression… One of his critical essays has a remark to the effect that – he posits a disjunction between the artist’s personal emotions and sufferings, and the work, which is a very anti-romantic attitude, and he always said he was in favor of classicism. I mean, not that there aren’t romantic elements in his work, there are, but this is a distinct critique of romanticism.

And so – and many people have hunted out the personal things in his work which seem to run contrary to the doctrine of impersonality, but in speaking about self-expression, he says somewhere – he says, self-expression – but of course, you have to have something to express, and that’s the heart of the thing, you see. These selves that are being expressed in those [purely personal] cases, we must respect individuals, but they are very ordinary selves. They haven’t anything much to say. So that’s why Kathy was stunned by this remark of mine. The work is everything…

Home again in Garrett Park after spells in Key West and Rehoboth Beach, UD finds in her garden among overgrown holly bushes a low-lying wood thrush nest with an anxious egg-sitting mother and an aggressively patrolling father.

The nest is ugly but clever, composed
of semi-circular twigs that form a deep,

well-rounded bottom, and, for connective
tissue, bits of white paper from human trash.

Having been dive-bombed, UD cedes this part of her backyard to the thrushes, and contents herself with watching through binoculars the big mother bird, the trembling nest, the tyrannical father. And although she misses the raucous chants of the Key West macaws, she knows she’s fortunate to have orchestra seats at the famous sound of the wood thrush.

… [T]he rich, liquid song of a Wood Thrush resonates through the morning air.

… [In the] moist and shady deciduous forests throughout the eastern United States, …the sensory experience of a walk in the woods is enriched by the flute-like sounds of the Wood Thrush. These sounds have inspired many lofty descriptions, such as this excerpt from the writings of a naturalist in the 1930’s:

“As we listen we lose the sense of time—it links us with eternity…Its tones…seem like the vocal expression of the mystery of the universe, clothed in a melody so pure and ethereal that the soul still bound to its earthly tenement can neither imitate nor describe it.”

Perhaps the most famous reference to the Wood Thrush’s song is this quotation from the writings of Henry David Thoreau,

“The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. Here is a bird in whose strain the story is told…Whenever a man hears it he is young, and Nature is in her spring; whenever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him.”

The legendary “ee-o-lay” song of the Wood Thrush is actually a one-bird duet. Because the Wood Thrush has the equivalent of two sets of “vocal cords,” it is able to sing two overlapping songs at once. In other words, the Wood Thrush sings with two voices simultaneously. The syrinx, or voice-box, of the majority of bird species contains two membranes which when vibrated produce sound. The ability to control each membrane independently makes birds such as the Wood Thrush capable of impressive vocal gymnastics.

Immortal bird.

Sweet bird of youth.

Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman, and, more recently, Amy Clampitt have all had what to say about the thrush.

The Darkling Thrush, by Hardy, starts with the speaker entirely depressed at the thought of his exhausted civilization, a condition for which he finds a visual equivalent in his lifeless wintry scene:

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

Only a poet would stand outside in such a deathly scene; everyone sensible is inside at a household fire. Those strings of broken lyres — a world once musical with beauty and life and meaning now violently broken off into silence — will recompose themselves in the throat of the thrush. But not yet. Next stanza will deepen and clarify the poet’s problem:

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

The poet’s time is a dead time – war, social upheaval, spiritual confusion, the usual suspects, have made earth and the poet spiritless. But ahoy.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

A messy old thrush, his feathers mussed by the wind, nonetheless pours forth. If he can do it, goddammit, so can I!

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

In Whitman’s gorgeous When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d, a threnody for Abraham Lincoln, the thrush sings a death carol that captures both the poet’s grief and his conviction of the country’s immortal soul: ‘The voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.’

Sing on! sing on, you gray-brown bird!
Sing from the swamps, the recesses—pour your chant from the bushes;
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

… (Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying, ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth, and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses)…

Poetically, the Clampitt piece, A Hermit Thrush, is the least impressive. It’s a garrulous shapeless thing in which the poet worries here and there and everywhere about impermanence. But she’s got a way of talking about the thrush that pleasantly domesticates the high exotic note of the earlier poets. Here are some excerpts:

no point is fixed, … there’s no foothold
but roams untethered

Every summer she returns to a tree at the beach; every summer she worries it’ll be damaged or even washed away, but so far it’s still there.

aloof seraphic mentors urge us
to look down on all attachment,
on any bonding, as
in the end untenable.

This is your Buddhist buddy lecturing you on non-attachment as a solution to your worries. The poet finds it unpersuasive.

Base as it is, from
year to year the earth’s sore surface
mends and rebinds itself, however
and as best it can, with
thread of cinquefoil, tendril of the magenta
beach pea, trammel of bramble; with easings,
mulchings, fragrances, the gray-green
bayberry’s cool poultice–
and what can’t finally be mended, the salt air
proceeds to buff and rarefy: the lopped carnage
of the seaward spruce clump weathers
lustrous, to wood-silver.

So actually even though everything’s always changing (and what doesn’t get said here but what underlies the poem is our misery at our recognition that our changes, once youth passes, are all toward the grave), the earth every year rejuvenates itself, or if it doesn’t find youth again, it finds ways of mending and sustaining its life. And even those earthly objects that do die… you know…

Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell…

Clampitt concludes:

we drop everything to listen as a
hermit thrush distills its fragmentary,
hesitant, in the end
unbroken music. From what source (beyond us, or
the wells within?) such links perceived arrive–
diminished sequences so uninsistingly
not even human–there’s
hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain
as we are of so much in this existence, this
botched, cumbersome, much-mended,
not unsatisfactory thing.

Fragmentary and yet unbroken, the music of the thrush affects us because we intuit a link between its beautiful, inexhaustible — though diminishing — self-expression, and our own human assertion of ourselves in the world. We barely understand this world, but as we move through it we find ourselves — at first hesitatingly, later smoothly — in possession of an ever-renewed voice.

Tell me about it. I just walked out on my deck because I thought I saw a bird floating in the birdbath. In short, my motives were compassionate.

The male wood thrush guarding the nest in my backyard came bombing out of a tree right at me. He made threatening noises.

The story of my inability to set foot on my own property because of a slew of threatening animals continues.

… because while cleaning up the fenced-in part of the yard a few moments ago – the area right outside our bedroom – I encountered a bird’s nest with an anxious bird in it, and I’m trying to identify the bird.  Brown head, big black eyes, black spots on its belly…

The bird has built its nest quite low among the azaleas and hollies, and I can’t blame it for thinking that was a clever move.  While I was away all those months in Rehoboth and Key West, the place was neglected, and things grew massively wild.  The bird must have figured it had plenty of cover.   And because of the, er, untidiness of our gutters, it had a vast and convenient supply of nest junk.

But this afternoon, under pressure of guests for dinner tonight (someone might – gulp – want a garden tour), UD went out there, gloved, hatted, and insect-repellented.  Hacking at honeysuckle, she suddenly uncovered the nest and thought Again.  Again the animals make it impossible for me to maneuver in my own backyard. Yes because now the back area has to be treated like a hospital so the babies aren’t disturbed, blahblah.  I stopped hacking midhack.  God forbid the whatevers — cowbirds? — should be disturbed in their egg-maintenance…

No – now I’m almost certain it’s a wood thrush.

Same big melting black eyes and speckled belly.