The musician told me he grew up in a city-bound family. He had only one boyhood memory of nature—which involved catching a caterpillar when he was six. He placed the caterpillar in an empty margarine container, laid down some grass for food, and closed the lid. No one had taught him that he needed to create air holes. So he sat, watching and waiting for his future butterfly.
He told me: I started going on bird walks to get out of my studio and out of my head. I used to worry about being loved as an artist. I wanted to be understood. I wanted to be admired. I wanted to be significant! I wallowed in a shitty state of insecurity most of the time. Now I spend hours trying to spot tiny distant creatures that don’t give a shit if I see them or not. I spend most of my time loving something that won’t ever love me back. Talk about a lesson in insignificance.
The moment of us not knowing each other quickly receded. I was used to being around people who were somewhat hobbled by their artistic temperaments. What differentiated the musician was that he had made an unusual change in his life, separating himself from the competitive world and from the imperative to feel tragic about things, but otherwise he was still a familiar duck.
“Let’s walk,” he said.
I followed him on the path.
As we walked, I was thinking about something I had just read in a book by Amy Fusselman: “You would be surprised at how hard it is to be open to new and different good things. Being open to new things that are bad—disasters, say—is pretty easy … But new, good things are a challenge.”
Part of being open, I decided, meant cultivating a better kind of attention. I wanted to achieve the benevolent and capacious attention that the be-scarfed artist and the bird-loving musician showed the world.
My usual (non-maternal) attention had three strains. There was the dogged attention I gave my art, the boxed-in attention I gave to my devices and screens, and the durational attention I (sometimes) gave to challenging books/art/films. All these seemingly dissimilar forms of attention had something in common: they were on their way someplace. They sought a reward, a product purchase, a narrative connection.
Was it possible that my focus on making art, on creating tellable stories, was intercepting my ability to see broadly and tenderly and without gain? What would it be like to give my expansive attention to the world, to the present moment, without expectations or promise of an obvious payoff? Was I capable of practising a “God’s love” kind of attention? An adoring and democratic awe? Could I be more papal?
The musician was oblivious to the questions moving through my head, questions that had developed a weird ecclesiastical cast, as we walked. He was too busy peering into shrubs, grandly and generously giving his attention to the birds—leaning to hear, bending to see, falling silent when he heard a melody, looking for the singer.
My sons were whistling when I returned home. My elder son had taught my younger son how to carry a tune, and I listened to them in their bunk beds whistling into the night.
On the street a few days later I spied a young man moving strangely on the footpath. He was stepping forward, then stepping back. He was leaning to the side, then stepping forward, then stepping back. Sometimes my husband and I do a pretend modern dance, and this reminded me of that. I crossed the street to see why the man was dancing on the footpath.
Lying there, broken and flightless, was a pigeon with a bloody severed tail. I unearthed a gym towel from my bag, and we encircled the bird and carried it gently to a sheltered doorway. Then we crouched down and tried to make eye contact. I don’t know if the bird took us in with its glazed eyes or if it felt absolute indifference, but we took the bird in as it grew increasingly still. I had seen dead birds before but I had never seen a bird die. Rationally speaking, I knew the pigeon wasn’t a message. I am not a sign-seeker who scours the skies for mystical portents, yet over the years I have developed a certain faith in chance and serendipity. I would not be here but for the accident of two ill-suited people meeting under unexpected circumstances. I would not have met my husband had I not walked through an unlikely door on an improbable evening. So after the pigeon, after a few more days of unusual and banal bird encounters, I began to feel that I was being told what to do next. I would learn about birds. I sent the musician a note and asked if I could follow him for a year.
The musician said yes.
Husband: What are you writing about?
Me: Well …
My husband is far too loyal and drowsy to doubt me. If I embark on a fantastically ill-conceived journey I know he will be the guy throwing paper streamers in the air and hooting Farewell! Farewell!
This is what we do. We cheer each other on in our misadventures.
We did this for my father when he escaped from his hospital bed later that winter. He called us from a taxi, recounting his jailbreak as if he had just dug a tunnel to freedom using a spoon, when really he had rolled his walker to the elevator, travelled a few flights to the concourse, and flagged a cab right outside the hospital doors. Breathless with excitement and emphysema, my father jokingly imagined an epic—maybe a nationwide—manhunt. For a moment he was a fugitive, not a patient.
When we cheered my father on and celebrated his getaway, it was not because we were diminishing the medical ramifications of his escape (the doctor would call to reproach us soon) but because we knew that there was something bigger at stake.
There are moments when what we need, what will benefit us most, is the power to style our own stories.
That’s what we were celebrating when we sat in my father’s small kitchen, eating the homecoming lunch my husband and I had brought. We were in a moment of repose. There was nothing to be done or to be put in place. My father felt more alive and durable than he had felt in a long time.
So when my father asked what I was working on, I told him.
“I am thinking of writing a book about birds and art,” I said (though I hadn’t started; the words and will still slowly forming).
I put on an open and trusting face, which was an effort because my father who had been slightly forward-leaning through lunch was now leaning back and looking at me blankly as if I had just described plans to write a book on farming with wooden implements.
We sat there having a silent conversation.
Why?
Why not?
Couldn’t you write something a little more useful? A bigger book?
My father, who likes things distant and serious, thinks I write too close and peculiar. He is drawn to the largeness of things, to epic battles and big History, the clash of civilizations. Birds are too compact and ordinary for him.
It is possible we are destined to be like the father and daughter in Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father,” who misunderstand each other “on purpose.” For example, as we sat in his kitchen that day, I knew my father believed I had chosen birds to deliberately antagonize him, just as I believed his dismissal of nature and art was a dismissal of me. Neither of us was entirely to blame for this dynamic. When I became a writer, I entered the family business and he assumed the mantle of mentor.
A few “useful” books written by my British kin: The Hour of Sorrow, or the Office for the Burial of the Dead: With Prayers and Hymns by George Maclear, Sailing Directions for Bering Sea and Alaska, Including the North-East Coast of Siberia by John Fiot Lee Pearse Maclear, Catalogue of 4,810 Stars for the Epoch 1850 by Thomas Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam 1945–1975 by Michael Maclear.
My husband, who had been staring at the ceiling while my father and I had our first silent conversation, registering his desire to escape, glanced