A tiny sparrow on an ordinary day

On Thursday, I made a brief stop at a local grocery store, on the way from and to other errands.

Parked the car, and on the way to dumping the plastics in the recycling bin, saw a sparrow, crushed, but not gruesomely, in the parking lot. (Why do birds insist on running when they can fly? I've seen robins do this a lot. Anyway, I don't know what caused this bird's demise.) Another sparrow kept hopping around his-or-her fallen companion. Clearly, to me anyway, hoping for the late sparrow to pop up and start hopping around again.

The little tableau was still in play on my way out. Another shopper commiserated.

"That's so sad!" (...Pause...) "I don't need to see that!"

But she said it in a nice way. By way of someone noticing something sad.

I did not actually cry, but when I got back to my car, the tears began to flow.

Sometimes I think it is small tragedies like this that release the tears we hold back from larger ones.

My Mom died last year.

Russia invaded Ukraine this year

Then a tiny sparrow died this week.

Of course, I have shed tears over my mother's death, and still do and will until the end of my days. I never know when they are going to come. But in general, my life has gone on. As I'm sure many of us do, I mostly carry my grief in a private space. 

I can't bring back my Mom.

I can't help the victims of war.

I can't help a tiny sparrow.

What is it about that little dead bird, on an otherwise ordinary day, that brings me to tears? 

Maybe it speaks to the real powerlessness that we have. We go blithely about our days, doing ordinary things, like grocery shopping, that we take for granted and thinking that life will just roll on and on.

Only in the face of dumb tragedy do we see how ... precarious? ... our existences are.

The tiny surviving sparrow only knew something was wrong. It was spared the experience of grief.

This witness, not so much.

 

The end of a story

Dad & Mom on their wedding day, St. Louis, 1954.

 

 

 

I had trouble choosing a headline for this post. It was going to be "Tears, Miles and Lowered Expectations," to go with grief, driving home and the shit of expecting one year of a pandemic to be over, done with and la-la life goes back to normal. Fuck.

But it's about me and my Mom. Our story together is over, so the chosen title seems more appropriate.

Mom died in June after a mercifully (and she would agree with that categorization) brief illness. The week or so before she passed away she had been in Maine, with sister Suzy and her two boys, Mom's favorite grandkids. My sister Mary was along as well.

The trip had been postponed from 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

I hadn't seen Mom since late 2019. Husband and I drove up from Pittsburgh in April 2021 for his mother's funeral. We had not seen her either, in about that amount of time. She died alone, tired, I think, in her locked down assisted living facility (which was a really nice place), on Good Friday. She was 91.

For mother-in-law's funeral, as the pandemic seemed to be easing, we stayed with Mom in her new condo. It was so good to see her face and feel her hug and hear her say "It's S-O-O good to see you!"

We didn't stay long. Got the tour of the new digs, ordered takeout, sat in the evenings and afternoons talking, talking, talking. About Dad. My brothers. Mom's family. Just figured there would be time for more visits.

Mom was in relatively good shape, as far as I knew, for a 90-year-old. Still driving (unlike the stereotype, she drove too fast! Not too slow). Still sharp mentally. But she had her aches and pains. Rheumatoid arthritis for one. And the still-simmering grief of losing, most recently, her youngest son in 2018 to gliablastoma. That was hard.

I kept thinking, every time we came home: I have to get Mom on tape, record her stories.

Never did, but the bonus/burden is that I now have decades worth of home movies and audio tapes to go through that Mom & Dad saved over the years.

The hardest, or maybe one of the hardest, things about this is that I can't talk to her anymore. I miss that so much. I keep thinking "Oh, I should ask Mom about ...." and then realize that I can't. No more Sunday phone calls. No more .... birthday cards, impromptu gifts, visits to art fairs, weekend breakfasts ... just, oh gosh. I have a drawer full of birthday cards. And a birding guide she gave me only a couple of years ago.

Mom's story was so interesting, and I was a big part of it, but not the whole part.

She was a beloved only daughter. A nurse (briefly). A wife to a husband who loved her deeply, as she did him. My parents weren't without their travails, and, in fact, Mom did say that at about the 12-13-year point in their marriage, she was ready to bail (my words, not hers). And, of course, this is only my take on their story. I honestly loved my Dad, but really did not know him well. They were married for 41 years and she lived another 26 after he died.

I guess, really, you never know what you sign up for. You think you do, but you don't.

The thing is, I am so grateful my parents met, married and stuck it out through the rough times. And those rough times never, in my memory, were inflicted on any of us seven kids. Sure, there were short tempers. But in a household of nine people, that's hardly surprising.

All of the family stories handed down from Mom, Grammio and to a lesser extent, quiet Dad, were all about fun, goof-ups and making the best of bad (for Dad and Grammio, pretty bad) or ridiculous situations.

I didn't know this until after Mom died, but she had a love of poetry, and the book she had thumbed well somehow went missing the clearing of her estate. Pretty sure she inherited that love from her own Dad, who wrote daily in a diary and loved musical theater.

Kind of got off on a tangent here. Still ... there's so much about my Mom that I didn't know and now, never will.

I'm glad I was a part of your life Mom. Thanks for being in mine.

About a dog

This story starts way back in the mid 1970s, but my reason for writing is right here in 2021. 

A few nights ago, in the waning days of the year's first month, I watched on our office TV a film released in 2019, "A Dog's Way Home." Kind of a latter-day "The Incredible Journey," which I loved as a child. The stories are similar. Beloved but somehow lost domestic pets find their ways back to their people.

It's been many years since I've seen "Incredible Journey," so I don't recall many details. Just that the trio was comprised of a Siamese cat, a Staffordshire terrier and a Golden Retriever.

"A Dog's Way Home" follows a single dog, Bella, a pit bull mix, on her way home to her beloved Lucas, his girlfriend, Olivia and his mom. Her travels take her from New Mexico to Colorado over the course of two winters.

Bella makes friends with a pack, becomes a mother-dog to an orphaned cougar (Big Kitten) is hunted by wolves, adopted several times on her journey and finally, finally completes the game Lucas taught her: Go Home.

But not without a final road to cross. And it nearly proves fatal.

She is hit by a car.

Now this movie pushes all the right buttons for a tear-jerker, but it brought tears to my eyes because of where this story began in the '70s.

It was spring, I remember because I was wearing just a jean skirt and a light top.

I left my apartment by the Ohio State campus headed for a morning class (which one, I don't remember).

As I approached Lane Avenue, a dog on the opposite side started to cross, trotting right into traffic.

A car hit him, then ran over him.

Amazingly, the dog got up, trotted back to the side of the street it had started from and laid down under a young tree. It sat with its head up for a moment, then the head went down.

I was in a panic. I ran back to my apartment, a matter of moments, and phoned campus police.

I don't know what I thought they could do, and I can't recall what their response was, I think the dispatcher promised to send a car.

It didn't matter. The dog had died.

I wish, rather, that I had gone to the dog and comforted it. Stroked its head.

Where it came from or where it was going, I'll never know. But it was just a simple ordinary day for that dog that ended in what I can only imagine was great pain. And tears for me. Then and now.

It would be many years from then until I had dogs of my own and learned all they had to teach me.

I don't know if I can really think of that pup as my first dog. If it was, I failed it by not comforting it.

But if there is a rainbow bridge, little dog, I'm sure you made it to the other side.

Forgive me.

Desks and work

 

The desk!

A messy desk is a sign of a creative person.

So the narrative goes.

During my working days, I kept a fairly neat desk. Oh, I had my postcards and buttons. At one point, I even had storage space above my computer to keep copies of the print products that I designed.

But, mostly, I did not like a lot of crap cluttering up my work space. It was always extraordinary to me that coworkers could, in a building that OSHA would have summarily condemned, pile up papers, news releases, clippings and all other sorts of flotsam and jetsam. Once, many years ago, an editor pulled out a sheaf from a notorious hoarder's pile and she (the hoarder) immediately knew that her territory had been disturbed. Tears followed.

(And seriously, my newsroom was definitely a tinderbox waiting to be lit. There were the aforementioned  hoarders and then there was the morgue. Full of ancient clippings of long-ago events that would set you sneezing [the clippings, not the events] the moment you pulled out a file from an overstuffed shelf. Unfortunately, too, it was unguarded, so many valuable prints were stolen over the years.)

So the narrative of now is this.

 My desk at home is messy, but in an orderly way. My morgue is two paces away, containing a boxes of ancient and fascinating clippings about my life: diaries, photos, letters. I don't think OSHA would condemn it, but it definitely needs some Marie Kondo-type attention.

Collage No. 9

I'm making stuff from the flotsam and jetsam that sits on it. 

(Favorite quote from a former colleague, who got tired of some copy desk questions: "Is anal-retentive hyphenated?) :)

 

 

All Hallows Eve

Allegheny Cemetery (Photo by Katy Buchanan)

Halloween, for a long time, hasn't been a big deal for me. (Best Halloween ever? My mom made me a Morticia Addams costume when I was in seventh grade!)

So some years ago, when the number of trick-or-treaters at our house diminished to a trickle, leaving us with too much candy to take to the office the next day, my husband and I decided that the evening would be dinner out.

Close the drapes, turn out the lights and head to a restaurant. It was a nice tradition for a while. While I missed carving the pumpkin and roasting the seeds, it was kind of a relief not to rush around with one more decoration in the busy Labor Day-to-Christmas season.

I do feel kind of curmudgeonly about it, like I'm no fun, especially with friends and family who wholeheartedly embrace it. But so it goes.

This Oct. 31, 2020, I really had forgotten about it until I had to dress in black for a protest at the home of the publisher of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. My former employer, where the union employees have not had a raise in 14 years, no contract in three, to name two of many injustices. I added an orange scarf and purple gloves to complete, so to speak, the outfit.

After days of rain and gloom, Saturday dawned as one of those perfect fall canvases: drenchingly blue sky, leaves of red and gold and lawns still in brilliant green.

Since I was in the Shadyside/Friendship/Lawrenceville neighborhood, I did something I've been wanting to do for a long time. Revisit Allegheny Cemetery.

Decades ago, I wrote about it for the Associated Press, when I worked in the Pittsburgh bureau. Somewhat more recently, I wrote about a Japanese woman, living in Pittsburgh, who made it a point to visit the grave there of songwriter/native son Stephen Foster each year on the anniversary of his death (Jan. 13, 1864).

What I've always taken away from visits is how much history is buried there. Not a startling deduction, sure, but it allows so much room for ruminating and daydreaming. Some headstones are so sad because they testify to long-ago lives that often ended just after birth. There are grand mausoleums that have photographs inside of those who rest inside; sometimes flowers, too. 

And the sculptures! The wealth of art is amazing, although I noticed today that some tombs have window openings and door grates essentially bricked over. Whether those features have been lost to the indignities of time, the elements or vandals, I don't know.

Still, it's a beautiful place. You might even say restful.

Flying. And dreams of

It's mid-September and the days grow short. Every day I squeeze in some patio time in the lengthening southwestern Pennsylvania light.

 

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail.

One pleasant surprise this late summer has been the arrival of four Monarch butterfly caterpillars. I noticed them a bit more than a week ago on the swamp milkweed that we had planted last summer as part of a landscape project. I knew it was Monarch food, which is why I insisted on it, but was not quite up to speed on how they consumed it.

 

So naturally, I was disappointed over the summer by the dearth of Monarchs in my back yard. Lots of Swallowtails and skippers, though, as the season waned.
 
Back to last week. Surrounded by unfinished Sunday newspapers and various magazines, I noticed four beautiful yellow-green and black striped caterpillars munching away on the milkweed leaves. It's the caterpillars, not the butterflies, that consume the milkweed. The females find the plant and lay their eggs on it. So the Monarchs had been visiting. I just hadn't seen them.

I feel bad now, because in spraying the milkweeds with a garden hose to dislodge aphids, I may have dislodged Monarch eggs as well. I'll know better next year.

 

Monarch chrysalis.

One day, the caterpillars disappeared, only to show up, hanging upside down in a J shape, on nearby shamrock hollies. Within a day, they had shed their final skin and were covered in jade green with gold necklaces.
 
The chrysalises are like pieces of jewelry. It may be a couple of more days before they actually break out and start feeding on the nectar of nearby plants. Of the four caterpillars, I count three hanging, waiting and dreaming of flight. (Looking closely, you can see the wings through the transparent chrysalis.)
 
They won't soar like the hawk (probably a red-tailed) I watched this afternoon, circling high overhead in big, lazy circles. Over the 15 minutes I followed it, the wings flapped only twice.
 
But they will flutter and feed all the way to Mexico, where they'll spend the winter. I hope fate will be kind enough to get them safely there.
 
Vaya con dios.

 

Pal Is Still Lost

In my rare pandemic peregrinations, I drive the same few routes over and over.

• Local grocery store (Instacart does not work well there).
• Further out grocery store  (where wine is sold).
• Local hardware store (for bath strips and grab bars that husband now needs.) 

Masked up at all of them and in and out without dilly dallying.

Photo by Katy Buchanan

On the runs to the second (farther) store, I pass several versions of this sign.  Either "Pal Is Lost" or "Pal Still Lost."

You can see by the fading and running colors that the notices have been up for a while. It's now mid-May 2020; I think I've been seeing them since mid-April.

I hope Pal's people have found him or her, and have merely forgotten or neglected to take down the signs. That there are so many of them speaks to the love Pal's family has for this little cat.

For some reason, Pal reminds me of a chapter in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," the opening tale in C.S. Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia."

The chapter is titled "The Spell Begins to Break." The White Witch's terrible winter is nearing an end, yet she still maintains her power to turn Narnia's creatures to stone with a flick of her wand.

As the Witch and her dwarf (with captive Edmund in tow) slowly realize that her grip on winter is ending, they sledge along ever more slowly through Narnia's melting snow.

Father Christmas has already been by and the villains come upon a "a merry party" composed of squirrels, satyrs, a fox and a dwarf, all celebrating with meal of plum pudding and other delights.

It ends poorly for the little gathering. The Witch turns them to stone.

An increasingly remorseful Edmund thinks of of those small stone figures, "sitting there all the silent days and all the dark nights" until they just crumble away.
 
Right now, it seems the chances of Pal being found are crumbling, too.

Maybe the signs will come down. If not, they will continue to fade to illegibility, melancholy reminders of a beloved little cat, missing in all the silent days and all the dark nights.