A Teaser from my new book, “The Murder of Figaro.” Publication date 6/1/19

“Listen, Da Ponte, I have an idea! Schikaneder gave me a play yesterday. I think it could make a wonderful opera, but it’s been banned from the stage.”

“What’s it called?”

“But it came out in book form, everybody has read it, and it’s the talk of the town. We’ll have trouble with the Imperial censor, he’s such a prude; but we could go over his head to Baron van Swieten – or perhaps we could go straight to the Emperor!”

“What sort of a crazy idea is that, to set a banned play to music?”

“It’s a good crazy idea. It’s Les Noces de Figaro!

“You’re kidding! Beaumarchais? George Washington’s gun-runner? It’s practically a revolution in five acts! Come to think of it, that clever Figaro is a lot like me; he says the most fabulously disrespectful things!”

“Oh, so you’ve read it, then! Come on, Da Ponte! Say yes! We’ll take the town by storm!”

“You think I’ve had trouble at court, Amadeo? You, a free-lance composer, coming into the court theater with ‘Figaro, The Musical,’ ‘Figaro, the Career-killer,’ ‘Figaro, the Scourge of the Nobility’…”

“Listen a minute, Abbate; the Emperor is struggling to forward his agenda for modernizing the Empire; and who obstructs him?

“The nobil – ooh, Mozart, you wily little bunny you! Yes! Caesar might want our help lampooning them in public!”

” Oh, Renzo, let’s go pitch the idea to him!”

“Better idea, Amadeo, let’s write some of it first and then play it to him as a fait accompli! Wetzlar will back us!”

“If he does, we’ll put some guitars into it, he’d love that!”

“Carissimo, permit me to ask – where did a composer get all these racy political ideas?”

Mozart strokes his dog’s ears and grins.

“Well, you see. I joined the Masons.”

 

 

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via The Path of Memory

The Path of Memory

 

Seventy years ago, when I was five (and a half), my family moved to the leafy village where I would do most of my growing up. Around my milestone birthday this year, I was visited by intense visions of that place. My places. Certain trees. Certain rocks. Certain brooks. The visions were so strong that I almost felt I was there, in that particular there where kids live their secret kid lives. To exorcise these hallucinations I am going to write about them. If that doesn’t make them go away, at least the writing will keep my fingers limber.

Our Village, as the denizens loved to call it, was just a short train ride up the Hudson from New York City. The place has had many names. First it was called ‘Ossininck’, then Philipse Manor, also Scarborough, Sleepy Hollow, and Whitson’s Corner; until it was incorporated in 1903 by its Founding Father and officially named “Briarcliff Manor.”

Our founder was one Walter Law, an up-from-poverty British immigrant who, having become fabulously rich in business, threw it all over to become a gentleman farmer. At the turn of the twentieth century Law bought up most of the land that comprised Our Village, and created a model farming operation (named Briarcliff Farms), featuring a model dairy producing model milk and hothouse flowers for New York City.

He built himself and his family a fancy mansion called “The Manor.” In 1902 he opened a monster Tudor Revival luxury resort hotel called Briarcliff Lodge (the biggest, best, and only hotel in Westchester County; and the only one equipped with in-room telephones and a mooring mast for dirigibles, should one ever fly to the Lodge. None ever did). The rich and famous came flocking to the Lodge to escape the heat of the city and stroll on its manicured grounds and golf links.

Being an old-school philanthropist, Law created his own personal model village. He built a gorgeous Tudor Revival railway station, so that when the Vanderbilts and Roosevelts and the royalty and other important people embarked from the train, they knew they were in for a fabulous Tudor Revival time.

Law also donated our Windsor Castle look-alike school, the town parks, and the nation’s first-ever public swimming pool. He also endowed the Congregational church and put a genuine Tiffany window in the transept. Of course he named his creation “Briarcliff Manor.” Walter William Law was our Benevolent overlord, and no complaints were uttered about it. Our Village was faerieland.

The pretty railroad station, the pool, the parks and the Congregational Church and its hypnotic window, figured powerfully in my life as a child in Briarcliff when I arrived forty-three years after its naming. Built to last, they still exist today. The majestic Briarcliff Lodge, which I saw exactly once, burned to the ground fifteen years ago.

I didn’t know any of this fascinating Briarcliff history at first because I was five (and a half) at the time. What I knew was, there were briars. There was also a cliff, a monstrous massif running north to south the whole length of the town. This hill once separated the rich from the middle and lower classes. The wealthy claimed the highlands–  rusticating and playin golf at the Lodge, and building their extravagant summer homes.

The Law employees and other ordinary folk lived at the eastern base of the hill, in the moist bottomlands of the Pocantico River. We kidfolk knew we had the best of it down there: the school and the ballfields and the pool and the skating pond and the trains and the Fire Station that blew its whistle every day at noon; and Pete’s Soda Fountain and the Rec Hall and Library. That was where ordinary Village Life took place. And did it ever.

Youngsters in Briarcliff led a feral life most of the time. We roamed any and everywhere, or as far as a twenty-pound Schwinn bike would take a sixty-pound kid. We courted death by climbing into the swaying tops of trees, or fishing off the very dangerous railroad trestle that spanned the Pocantico, or forming secret clubs (The Stargazing Club. The Indian Club. The short-lived but thrilling Lurkers Club, whose sworn mission it was to peep through people’s windows after dark. Punishment was swift and harsh), or pressing our little ears onto the railroad tracks to listen for approaching trains.

We also drank deep from the well of  the organized Village Life that our elders cooked up in hopes of giving us the rudiments of civilization. Our good parents, secure in the knowledge that we were safe somewhere or other, and would probably not die in spite of our best efforts to do so, volunteered for any and everything from the fire department to the Scouts; they sat on steering committees and planning boards devoted to elevating community life to near-unbearable levels of bliss.

Among the civic activities that our parents planned for us: swim lessons and tennis lessons at the Park, the town variety show, concerts, field days, visiting attractions (Rex Trailer and his Wonder Horse!) fairs, firemen’s bazaars, flower shows, pet shows, junior church choir, fire engine rides, community sings and outdoor movies (Follow the Bouncing Ball! Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn!! all projected on the school wall!) ballroom dance classes at the Rec Hall, parades (Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day), Brownies, Scouts, and Junior Audubons. Everybody in every class did all these things together. You had to be there, and we were. Village Life was a happy happy hive of humans humming in unison.

I thought everyone in America lived like this. It was a long time before I found out how wrong I was.

By the time I had settled into this mad calendar of delights, Village Life was undergoing changes. Law’s model farms had moved to Duchess County. Mythical Briarcliff Lodge had become a private school campus. The uber-wealthy, diminished by the Great Depression, had sold their country estates to developers. Subdivisions began to sprout up on top of the big hill. The playgrounds of the rich and royal and the pasturelands of Mr. Law’s model Jersey cows began to disappear.

During Briarcliff’s housing boom, the forsaken meadows and woodlots I considered to be mine were dozed under to make way for split-levels and ranch houses.  New Kids came down the hill to our pretty school (kindergarten through twelfth grade).  I hated them. They ruined my places for these jerks? My grief was bitter. I can still taste it today.

A new school was built. Then another. More wild kid habitat had to be sacrificed. Certain trees fell. Certain brooks hid under culverts. I could not be consoled.

Somehow a few holy spots were left untouched, and are untouched still. The marshier sections of the Pocantico, where it oozed under the railroad trestle, became a Nature Park. A  strip of forest on a steep  flank of the hill, known to all kids as The Little Woods, remains. I can see it on Google Earth.

Other kid-numinous landmarks survive as well. There was the mysterious brick Wall on Scarborough Road, sporting signs in raised brick letters that read “WALDHEIM.” I always yelled the name aloud (‘Walled Heem!!’) on the days I drove with Mom to pick up Dad at Scarborough Station. She put up with this, why I don’t know.

But what was Waldheim? What was happening on the other side of that wall? It took me decades to find out, but finding out was great. Here is the story.

James Speyer was a  German-born Jewish New York banker and philanthropist who built the Wall and a monster Tudor (of course) Revival villa and model farm called (of course) Waldheim. Every inch was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead for “Our Crowd” to visit, refresh themselves and admire the sweeping view of the Hudson River. “Our Crowd” were wealthy German-Jewish people from the City. Perhaps, or indeed certainly, they were not welcomed at Briarcliff Lodge.

Mrs. Speyer was a New York socialite, and an animal rights advocate who provided her own personal ChowChow dog with a chauffeur and a maid. The whole gorgeous domain was demolished and subdivided in the thirties, but the Wall still stands.  I know how to pronounce the name on it now. I like to think that the high-life of pampered pets, maids, manicured landscapes, financiers and their silken trophy wives continues at Waldheim, when the ghosts of Our Crowd cavort behind their wall on moonlit nights.

There were lots of ordinary middle-class Jewish people in Briarcliff. I did not know who was Jewish and who was not, until much later. I knew who the Catholic kids were, because they were excused from school for religious education on Wednesday afternoons. Everybody envied them. Sometimes I would go with a Catholic friend to confession. Not that I confessed, I just cooled my apostate heels on the church steps while my pal cleansed his/her soul.

Our Model Village was white. We all looked the same, except for the Ghiazza kids in the summer, all of whom served as lifeguards at the town pool, and all of whom bronzed up in five minutes with enviable Catholic Italian suntans.

There were no visible “colored” people lived in Our Village. In the halcyon days at Briarcliff Lodge, the black caddies and housekeeping help who worked up there were forbidden to come down the hill to shop, or, God forbid, to hang out in the park or in the pool.

The only black people I saw were the garbage men, who swore ferociously and bared their terrible white teeth at our dog, who was swearing ferociously and baring his terrible white teeth at them.

They were big tough looking guys, and my mother and I were afraid of them, and the dog knew it and took action; and that’s as far as we got with race relations in Briarcliff. My mother’s anti-black-people feelings ran deep. Even Scouts did not help. A troop of all-white Brownies did nothing to inspire her to love her fellow man regardless of their color.

Where did these black guys live? Ossining, maybe, or White Plains or Mamaronek, or other places without parks and pools and Rec Halls. Did they have black children my age? I didn’t know, nor did I care.

There were so many things and people in the wider world I didn’t care about, they being far outside my charmed circle of privileged, exciting jam-packed Mayberry whitegirl Model Village Life. I lived as I pleased, sledded and skated, biked, camped out, learned the waltz and the hokey-pokey, played ball with the neighborhood gang (me and seven boys) and decorated my bike for yet another parade.

I wanted to be a kid forever and ever, but in the sixth grade the inevitable happened. The cool kids seceded from the uncool kids. The girls stopped playing baseball and football and turned their attention to their clothes, hair, breast development and of course, boys. The boys withdrew in alarm and joined organized all-male ball leagues. Dance classes gave way to Junior Rec dances, where the reluctant boys had to ask the same girls they had viciously tackled in football games only last year– yes those selfsame girls– if they could please gently clasp them on the dance floor.

These excruciatingly embarrassing events were written up afterwards in the cool kids’ slambook news-sheet: who had danced with whom, who was noticeably absent from spin-the-bottle, who wore the wrong kind of clothes or had flat chests. Ancient friendships dissolved, malicious cliques  formed. Suddenly Briarcliff’s sweet tendency to do everything together morphed into the misrule of the cool, and their commandment to join the rush to puberty, grow some breasts, or be forever damned.

I was damned. I was a loser. I was shunned and mocked. I nursed my melancholia with solitary rambles in the remaining scraps of Mr. Law’s forsaken pasturelands. Yes, I had the consolations of horseback riding lessons, books, music, and a few loyal loser friends. But I felt the sting of being outside of things after having been so deeply inside. Here was the dark underbelly of our Model Village Life: the strict lockstep of conformity. I was eleven (and a half), and my perfect kidhood was over. I moved to New Jersey.

Google Earth shows me that the golf links on the storied heights of Briarcliff Manor are now the Trump National Golf Course, and heaven knows what sort of plutocrats and gangsters and high-rollers hang out up there, and heaven knows how Village Life below has adjusted to the looming Trump presence. Everything may be different now.

I still dream about going back home to repeat fourth grade, walk in the woods, sleep in a puptent in my back yard, climb a tree or take another absolutely forbidden dip in the Pocantico. My house on South State Road is still there. I could just ask to move back in.

I never dream about the home I have made and lived in happily for over half my life. I suppose it’s because still I’m in it, no yearning required, I just wash the dishes, tend the garden and run the Roomba.

I have been many places and met all manner of folks in my life and I know that I really don’t want to return to the bubble of Model Village Life in Briarcliff Manor, if it even still exists. But the intensity of memory, and the enchantment, remain.

P.S. Stace, Tersh, Gary, Gary, Noel, John, Eddie, David and Ricky; Ragg, Shoe, Tommy, Fi and Dickie; Jeannie, Beth, Susie, Sarah, Fay, Annie, Holly, Karen, Sue, Jackie, Bonnie and Liz! Miss you all. Get in touch.

God Bless America, as Sung by My Mother

My mother was a singer, keyboardist and a racist. I believe she got the racist part from her father, who was born in Tennessee and moved to Texas. Her father, Albert, would not speak to, or walk on the same side of the street as, a black person. He hated Jews and Catholics and said so.

Mom, who was brought up in Ohio, where everybody was the same as everybody else. She was an inherently nice lady, but during my early childhood I heard her curse the Jews every Saturday for shutting their businesses on Shabbat. It always came as a surprise to her that the Jews observed the Sabbath every week, just like we did, only on the wrong day; and that this shocking inconvenience needed to be responded to with weekly damns and even goddamns. I heard the word “Jew” sometimes utilized as a verb.

Mom tried to break up my first-grade friendship with a little girl named Elisabeth Brightler, with whom I walked home hand in hand, every day after school.

“She’s Jewish,” Mom said. “They don’t believe in God or Jesus.”

I went to the source. I asked Elizabeth Brightler if she believed in God.

“Yes,” she said.

I asked her if she believed in Jesus.

“Yes,” she said.

I’m sorry, Elizabeth.

When I was a toddler we had a black cleaning lady named Beatrice. My mother was not nice to her. Neither was I. When Beatrice cleaned the floors with our dachshund-shaped tank vacuum cleaner, I would ride on the tank and yell giddy-up horsie at her. She put up with being my horsie until one day she snapped, and yanked the cleaner out from under me. I fell off backwards onto the carpet, hitting my head. I screamed with rage and pain and segue’d into a self-willed tantrum. I sensed that Beatrice hated me, or the likes of me, and maybe I sensed why. That is the reason, more than three-score and ten years afterwards, I remember her name.

I’m sorry, Beatrice.

But people can change. We moved from Yonkers, New York, to “the country,” alias the village of Briarcliff Manor, New York; and my Mom joined the Girl Scouts as a Brownie troop leader. Her co-leaders were two lovely ladies named Marge Malsin and Carol Goldwater, of blessed memory. They were the world’s nicest people, and Mom fell in love with the first real actual Jewish women she had ever known. The three were total besties, and their intense friendship, both with and outside of scouting, helped her and me stop harboring our shadowy racist thoughts.

Thank you, Marge and Carol. I love you. I miss you.

It was in the Brownie troop, ironically, that I missed having my first brown friend. Her name was Goya Perez, she was a Filipina and she was pretty. I stared at her as if she were a museum or zoo exhibit, all the white kids did. I could never get over my unease and embarrassment, because I felt sorry for her for being colored. So when the staring finally stopped, we never buddied up. It was too much of a leap for me.

Sorry Goya.

Sometimes Mom also had a reflexive relapse. She didn’t take kindly to my going out on a few dates with Bobby Kaufmann, the funniest, most talented actor and comedian in my high school. She hid in her boudoir when I brought my only black college girlfriend home to visit. What will the neighbors think, she asked me after the integration of our house was well over. You don’t even like the neighbors, I thought to myself.

Sorry, Bobby, sorry Barbara.

But these were really minor glitches in her career as an increasingly tolerant and caring person. She cultivated all sorts of people through scouting and library work. And then there was the Cantata she helped create with her friend Jane White.

The cantata was for youth choir, and was called “My Garden,” based on a collection of poems about how we love flowers of all colors, and other texts about tolerance and love. This was the first cantata had ever sung in, and I was both a chorister and a soloist. I was about twelve I think. I only remember bits of it, my solos of course: “Are you a gentile, are you a Jew? What’s your belief, your point of view” and the final line, “I look into my garden. There’s much to understand.”

Thanks, Jane and Mom for this sweet little piece.

We tried hard, we thought, to listen to our better angels, and the flower music that ran through our minds’ ears. Mom and I became nicer people, in our way. We had Jewish friends, Black friends.

Mom and I both grew up in a wall-to-wall racist environment. We were swaddled in it, nurtured by it we swam in it as fish do in water, in our benign element, but unconscious that it was supporting us.

When we are very young we feel that the world was created for our benefit and comfort. For white people of all ages, America and its system of pale-person privilege keeps us in that infantile state. We were insulated from the real world by an inherited legacy of wealth and property, which we could pass on to our own kids. We lived in places that were safe and tranquil, where everybody knew the cops by name, and nobody worried about being arrested and going to jail. We could walk into stores and public places and never think we might get thrown out. We went to good public schools and never doubted that we would go on to college. Of course, we were happily, or willfully, unaware of the violence and injustice that the Other People suffered, in Other Towns not very far from where we lived, and across the country.

We prospered as a matter of course, and we prospered at the expense of the Other People. Even when we were warbling our little be-nice hearts-and-flowers cantata, we never thought that we were responsible for the differences between us and Them. But we were, and we are. It’s on us. To fix it.

Sorry, America.

God Bless the America that grew inside my mother’s heart, and mine. God bless the time when, as the man said, “America will be.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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via The Only Word

The Only Word

My grandfather was Swedish. He was born in a country house called Siggeboda in Örebro county and educated as an engineer. After emigrating to the States he spoke very good English, with a strong Swedish accent that he may have cultivated for its exotic appeal.

I never heard him speak in his native tongue, even around his Swedish sisters (my great-aunts) or his equally Swedish mother-and sisters -in-law from his first, tragically short-lived marriage. Except, as I now recall, for one word, the only word.

My grandfather came to New York from Sweden in the first decade of the 20th century. His sisters had already emigrated and found work. He also found employment as engineer/inventor at Otis Elevator, brought his mother Carolina to New York, married a Swedish American girl, had a child.

His young wife died of typhoid soon after and his mother died of cancer. His sisters said he was devastated and never quite the same man after. But he worked on, re-married an American girl, who helped him raise his infant daughter. They produced one child, my father.

My grandfather was pretty taciturn, not given to gushes of affection or outbursts of sentiment, but he was very kind and indulgent to my cousins and me. He taught us to eat sill, the Swedish marinated herring, on hard Rye toast. He showed us how to make little Swedish pancakes, and how to eat a lobster properly. He taught us to fish, I mean really fish– casting with a spinning rod and playing a big bass or pike until we could net it and haul it into the boat.

Our fishing expeditions with grandfather took us to Charleston Lake in Ontario, where the family had a fishing shack; electricity, no running water, stinky outhouse in the back yard. I was about ten when I first went there, and I never had so much fun in my life. We would head out to fish in the morning, clean, grill and eat the fish on a different island every day, then go swimming or hiking around the island, then head for home in the afternoon if we didn’t feel like fishing any more. In the long summer evenings, we ran wild with the local kids.

One day my cousins and I were diving off an island rock after lunch (who waits an hour? not us) and I caught my toe in a crevice, fell bellyflop into the water, leaving my toenail behind. I surfaced screaming and thrashing and bleeding. My grandfather fished me out of the lake, put me, still howling, into the boat with my cousins and headed for the dock, full throttle. He carried me to the telephone in the Charleston Hotel, found out the address of the nearest medical office, and drove me there.

The doctor was a kindly old man, who was so deft and gentle as he cleaned and dressed my gory toe that it didn’t hurt a bit. His office was really old fashioned looking, with big glass bottles and antique medical instruments in cabinets and on the walls. My grandfather looked around at them, and began to talk. He said this office reminded him of his childhood in Sweden. There was an old country doctor in his town who knew how to do everything for people. He went to that doctor when he was a boy, and was never afraid, because the doctor was gentle as a woman, but strong enough to set bones, pull teeth or turn around a baby that wanted to be born backward.

My grandfather never talked about the old country, but now the words came tumbling out of him faster and faster, telling me about Sweden as he looked at the bottles and remembered his old life. Those doctors, he said, were called something.

“Shee Rooric,” He said. Or something like that. I knew he was speaking a word in Swedish, and the sound of that word was too strange for my ears to really hear. But I remembered it, because he said it over and over on the drive home, and his face was lit up with love and remembering. He never talked like that to me again.

Shee Rooric. Or something like that. The kindly country doctor.

When I went to Sweden this year to meet my long-separated second and third cousins, I downloaded Google Translate in case they had forgotten their high school English. With this app we could have easy conversations just by pressing the button. They were wonderful to me, their English was excellent, they fed me like a Christmas goose, and we gossiped endlessly about our relatives. We talked about my grandfather. I said I had never heard him speak of his childhood and youth in Örebro. Nor say anything in Swedish.

But when I got home from this blissful family reunion, I remembered the day of the torn-off toenail and the old doctor, and my grandfather’s sudden transportation to another time and country. And the only word. And there was my Translate App still on my phone, just waiting to help me out.

I typed in “doctor.” Translate typed in “Läkare.” No.

Then I typed “general practitioner.” “Allmänläkare.” No.

Then I tried the old-fashioned term “surgeon.”

There it was. “KIRURG.” The beloved word. The word that had swept my grandfather home to Örebro in a flood of memory.

 

The Larssons at Siggeboda. My grandfather is the little boy on the left, in the sailor suit

I had discovered during my adventures in Sweden that my grandfather had had a rocky start in life. He must have been sickly; he was baptized David Karl Larsson, not in the Lindesberg Church by a priest, but at home, by his father Vilhelm. Parish records called this “Nöddöpt,” an emergency baptism. I cannot ever know the true story, but I think perhaps his wondrous KIRURG may have been a frequent visitor to Siggeboda- or that my infant grandfather may have been taken to see the KIRURG in his office with the shining glass bottles and strange metal tools.

The KIRURG’s kind face, the deft and gentle touch and comforting voice may have warmed the child’s heart and healed him as much as any medicine could have in those primitive days, over 130 years ago.

This is the story I have made up about my grandfather, a tale which provides me with a reason for his explosion of passionate feeling, talking to his grandchild in a village in Canada about a long-ago country doctor he had loved.

 

You may have noticed that the word Kirurg derives from the French chirurgien, and perhaps the British term for doctor’s office, a surgery. However, to my ten-year-old as well as my seventy-four-year-old self, it is a Swedish word through and through.

 

Duck and Cover

 

 

So, fellow bird-lovers, I am reading a book about avian evolution, which addresses the force of sexual selection as opposed to natural selection. Sexual selection means the mate choices female birds make, which tend to be aesthetic in nature, as opposed to natural selection, which means random adaptations to changing environmental pressures (the famous beaks of the famous Galapagos finches for example), where the better-adapted survive and reproduce and the less-adapted die off.

 

This book, titled “The Evolution of Beauty” by Richard Prum, argues that most lady birds are attracted to and mate with gentleman birds because they can sing and dance, or can build whimsical love-shacks,  grow fabulous plumage, and are just all-around charming and cute. I am supplementing my reading with frequent visits to YouTube, where clips of elaborate and totally insane male sexual displays are readily available. They really are awesomely charming and cute.

This female taste for male loveliness has led to a competition in swiftly-evolving, crazily- ramifying forms of wooing antics by those hopeful boybirds, Their sexual displays serve no adaptive purpose at all, and sometimes quite the reverse.

Consider the peacock, the Great Argus pheasant, the birds of paradise, the bower birds and the manakins. These guys aim to ravish the senses, and they do. They do not manfully defend their mates, feed their children or help around the house. The sex lives of these male birds consists of competitive flirting, flaunting, winning and making sweet love to any lady (or ladies) who choses him. A few seconds of intimacy and that’s it. The lady then gets to build a nest, lay the eggs, incubate, feed and guard the babies. But! She got to pick, all by herself, the most gorgeous among all the gorgeous contestants to father her brood. Thus beauty begets more beauty. Ravishing, melodious, iridescent, dancing avian beauty.

 

And then there are ducks. Like the aforementioned birds, male ducks are often gorgeous. They also court their womenfolk by posturing and flashing dazzling colors and making sexy moves and sounds. After mating with her carefully chosen drake, the female duck takes on all the familial duties, and the male goes about his business, whatever that may be.

 

But here’s the difference. Gangs of rejected male ducks are lurking, and they are up to no good. They try to force their repulsive unwanted selves on the female, who really, really does not want them to. She runs, she resists, She fights, and she is often injured or even killed in these gang rapes. I don’t know what else to call them. The male-to-female ratio in ducks is skewed by these violent proceedings, which of  results in an even larger number of  incel males, doing their nasty business with a diminishing number of females, who would rather die than to be inseminated by their attackers and pass on their yucky genes.

 

So what’s up with this sex war among ducks, when it seems so counter-producktive? (chortle here) Why do male ducks carry on in this brutal way? What makes them different from those other pretty, colorful, charming, singing, dancing boybirds?

 

Ducks have penises. Long ones. Longer than their bodies long ones. Most other birds don’t. They evolved away from that penetrative organ millions of years ago. Just sayin.

My Lawn

“Do you want us to dig out those violets and dandelions and…other stuff?” said the landscaper.

“No, I don’t,” I said firmly. “I like them.”

The man took this in while examining my lawn more closely, his inner turmoil showing in his face as he grappled with the sacrilegious concept of letting flowers live in the lawn.

I live in the leafy suburbs, a place where the all-green velvety, pool-table-like lawn is worshipped and served as a god. Where a stray bugleweed or a lamb’s quarter  would be ruthlessly hunted down and murdered, where visions of  dandelion fluff blowing in from elsewhere haunt the dreams of the grass-obsessed home-owner. Where the big bucks are spent for International Harvester-sized sit-upon mowers,  herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilizers, all to groom, feed, water, and maintain the monoculture of grass. Grass. Grass is not a plant. It is an animal. It is a cash cow.

I have no grass. Or little grass. It is true that my spouse re-seeds the lawn with grass when the mood takes him in September;  and grass emerges, tender and lusciously green. By the next summer there is no longer any grass. Or little grass. There is crabgrass and violets and clover and bugleweed and dandelions and God knows what-all else. It is green sprinkled with white and blue and yellow and purple in May.  You can tread on it. You can mow it. It is my lawn.

Grass lawns are good in Great Britain. It is cooler there, and it rains a lot more. Big British Lawns are populated by sheep, who keep them trimmed down. Grass lawns are not good in New England. It is too hot. Grass lawns want to go dormant and brown in the summer.  Eternal vigilance and loads of toxic chemicals keep grass from being crowded out by plants that love living in New England. Those plants who have displaced the grass in my lawn are real plants; they survive on their own, with sunshine and water and dirt being the only contribution from me.

I do have to mow it. I always wondered why those grass breeders have never come up with a dwarf species that stops growing at three inches, and holds its own against crabgrass. I am sure that will never happen, because the lawn-care and lawnmower industries would quietly assassinate anybody who threatened their cash cow.

Think of all the great things suburbanites could do if they kicked the grass habit. Vegetable and flower gardens, wildflower meadows with mowed pathways, astroturf,  Japanese sand and rock gardens.  But no. We have drunk the Kool-Ade;  the all-grass lawn is a sign of respectability, financial success, and the Puritan Ethic. It is a  a holy grail to be struggled for and worried over day and night. Labor-intensive though it may be, costly though it may be, crazy though it may be, stupid though it may be, we pour cash and labor (our own or the labor of those nice guys from Guatemala) into our grass lawns. We resent and silently curse the neighbors who have violets and dandelions spangling their lawns. That would be my lawn…

How to Charm the Birds out of the Trees

Source: How to Charm the Birds out of the Trees

How to Charm the Birds out of the Trees

Yesterday I got about a dozen hits; the gang showed up all at once, yelling and swearing and threatening each other. Today, they ignore me. I stand for thirty minutes in the backyard, motionless as a post, whistling softly and looking modestly at the ground. Nada.

Then there is a rattle of feathers, and tiny claws grip my thumb. A chickadee swipes a piece of peanut off my palm, squeaks, and takes off. A titmouse takes his place, eats a peanut and nips my hand to see if it might be tasty. She grabs another nut, flips her wings, and heads for the woods to dine on it in private, or stash it for later.

I am totally, helplessly enchanted. The birds have decided I am good people.

“My” backyard birds have always been pretty casual around me, eating at the feeder as I puttered in the garden or read in the Adirondack chair. But of course, like all biophiliacs, I wanted to touch them, or at least I wanted them to touch me. So I decided to make the effort to lure them onto my hand.

There are a number of ways bird-lovers accomplish this trick, but the principles remain the same. Put some birdie treats, something extra good like pecans or peanuts, on your feeder and stand around at a discreet distance.

Wear sunglasses (no wild animal likes to be stared at, it’s very threatening, and if you roll your naked eyes to look at them the scream EEEEEK and fly away). Wear comfy shoes. This takes a while.

Even though they figure out pretty quickly that you and the goodies arrive together, eating in your company is a big step for a little bird. Shorten the distance between you tactfully, retreating if necessary. When they are happily fluttering around your head, take the treats off the feeder, put them in your hand, arrange your hand so it touches the feeder and wait for the bravest bird- a chickadee probably- to take the plunge. Last step, remove the feeder and offer the goodies.

You will hear the birds vocalizing and figure out what they are saying. There is the general alarm-call, “chicka-deedeedeedeedee.” Five ‘dees’ indicate your high dangerousness quotient, and will lesson in number as the bird decides you are harmless, until you rate only a “chick” as the bird weighs and risks and benefits giving itself encouragement to hop onto your palm.

In my imagination, the bird working himself up to do it is saying “shit, shit, shit!”

The little squeak they make when they have actually done it means “Yippee!” And the angry chickadee ‘gargle’ is a curse flung at other birds: “My turn, bitch, back off!”

I just love being fought over…

Nuthatches alight on my hand also, making their nasal mutterings, “meh, meh, meh.” I am hoping that I will get woodpeckers, who make a sound like a sneeze. Perhaps I can entice some other birds too, although the resident cardinals and finches are very shy. My idea of heaven is a Carolina Wren- that tiny russet-colored droplet of pure energy- taking peanuts from my hand. But anybird will do; it’s a thrill to have them sit on me, and an honor to be their pet.