Flocking gulls

My colleague Susan and I have been watching the gulls these past few days, circling above and settling and roosting, I guess, on the ice frosting the Allegheny and the Ohio.

Susan sits far from me in our workplace, but we watch the gulls together because I get up every hour or half-hour or so to move away from my desk. Just to get the blood flowing and give my brain some think time. So I walk to the west wing of the office, where Susan has a desk. From the window behind her, we can see the birds and share our amazement at their numbers and behavior. They nest on the ice or float on it. Circling, drifting. Always fairly late in the afternoon, although that may just be when we notice them as the busy work of the day winds down.

My brother Tim is a self-taught bird watcher and often visits a power plant on Lake Erie, in Lorain, I think, because the plant's discharges warm the lake water. And the birds are opportunists and take advantage of that.

Not sure if the gulls are enjoying any sort of warmth at the confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny. Perhaps there is just a nice amount of food there. Whatever the reason, it is mesmerizing to gaze at these birds, floating on thermals, flitting over water, a colony of shifting white on deep gray-green water under January skies.

January in Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh is a generally polite town, select Steelers fanatics aside, perhaps.

People often give way on the sidewalk. Men and women frequently open doors to buildings for other pedestrians and are often polite about giving way to others when climbing aboard public transportation.

Pedestrians tend to be helpful about giving out-of-towners help navigating our labyrinthine grid of streets and alleys. (Not that the out-of-towners always understand our tendency to give directions by landmarks that only locals know.)

In lines, mostly, there are not cuts.

You really can go out on the streets and expect to be acknowledged.

I like that and I like that, in public greetings, so many of us seem to have the same perspective (in that I'm sure we are not unique).

Two nodding acquaintances paused to chat today while I was out on an errand. It was a gloomy, gray, slushy afternoon. Our common wish in our short conversations was for sunshine and warmth. We laughed, acknowledging the heaviness of January weather, shrugged and went on our ways.

Of course these days weather is big broadcast and cable bucks. What the hell? It's winter. It's cold. Can we move on?

The better acknowledgment would be that it is part of the warp and weft of our lives and if we can share and help each other through it, that's a good thing.

Meantime, dreaming of warmer days, the picture is of the swimming pool at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington D.C.'s Georgetown neighborhood. I visited it this past summer with my friend Kim Narisetti and her daughters.

It's a lovely place.