Brilliance and color
I have cardboard nailed up over the window and a new mattress on the floor. It's raining. The window is open. Room dark, breeze on skin…
— Keith Snyder (@noteon) October 16, 2014
The rain surges, forgets itself, gathers again. The breeze makes me feel wealthy. I don't have a bedframe…
— Keith Snyder (@noteon) October 16, 2014
Even when the rain attacks so hard that I fancy I hear a resonance between glass and cardboard, I can hear myself breathing…
— Keith Snyder (@noteon) October 16, 2014
A bright little rectangle with dark silhouettes of my fingers—that's you. You're a different kind of breeze. You flow in over the airwaves…
— Keith Snyder (@noteon) October 16, 2014
We finished a book tonight at storytime. The hero—an adolescent who lives with his father & uncles—leaves them at the end and they all cry…
— Keith Snyder (@noteon) October 16, 2014
Then the narrative shifts to present-day, and the hero, much older, is told by his love that his father and uncles are still within him…
— Keith Snyder (@noteon) October 16, 2014
So we teared up a little too, and I said it will really work that way when I'm gone. Which maybe they got and maybe they didn't…
— Keith Snyder (@noteon) October 16, 2014
But they're asleep upstairs, and I'm down here feeling the breeze when it remembers to slide back in, and the only water I can hear…
— Keith Snyder (@noteon) October 16, 2014
is gutter trickles and taps on dirt. And isn't it a privilege to be alive at a time when you are there and I am here, and yet…
— Keith Snyder (@noteon) October 16, 2014
I can tell you I hear a train horn now, and now tires on wet street, and now the field crickets have started up again.
— Keith Snyder (@noteon) October 16, 2014
AT 7AM THE NEXT morning, I got up from the mattress that doesn’t have a bed frame yet and went into my kitchen to make my tea. I can see the wet street because there’s nothing covering the kitchen window—which is probably odd, since I moved here ten weeks ago, but general move-in stuff hasn’t been as important as making one single room beautiful and functional. That’s the kitchen. The boys and I live in it together. We cook together, they do their homework there, and if they don’t want to read in their room, they’re doing it down in the kitchen. That’s what I wanted when I put the kitchen together, and that’s what I got. When they’re at their mom’s, I cook in it, sit at the nook with my computer and work, and keep it nice. (Usually.)
One room at a time, as money allows. The living room is next.
I don’t remember the precise moment when I realized we could use the 25-minute drive to their school as podcast time, but it happened in that kitchen or on the way to it, and I got kind of excited. My more sciencey boy loves RadioLab (so do I), and my less sciencey boy tunes out anything he’s uninterested in and listens to the music and TV shows in his head, so I thought it could work well—and RadioLab Shorts are about the right length.
So we would do that. I got them up and we had breakfast and referred to the new checklist on the envelope on the refrigerator and got out the door at very nearly the appointed time.
FALL IN WILLOUGHBY, Connecticut is retina-dazzlingly gorgeous. If you’ve ever had the experience of barely being able to look at someone who was talking to you because they were just too beautiful, it’s a similar sensation, especially along Simpaug Turnpike before it crosses Umpawaug Brook. During this part of October, every morning brings a new shock of rust and gold, and the green and light yellow fade, morning by morning, like drying paint.
The RadioLab Short I already had on my phone was about an endangered bird species. There are spoilers for it two paragraphs from now (like, big spoilers for the entire episode), but the episode’s not very long, so you can listen here first if you care about that. I started it playing when we were underway and glanced to see who had noticed. Science boy was forehead-down over Rick Riordan. Music-in-his-head boy was looking out the window. I can never tell what he hears or doesn’t, but it’s generally a good bet that whatever’s already in there is more entertaining than whatever you’re trying to force through his ears.
So I let it play until it got to a point they had to understand, or the rest wouldn’t make any sense, and I paused it and made sure they did, which I also figured woud get them listening in the first place if they weren’t. They made the right noises to make me go away, which are indistinguishable from paying actual attention, and I let it play again.
This episode is about a group of people who go to a huge amount of trouble and gargantuan expense to try to turn endangered whooping cranes back into a viable wild species. There was a full-length RadioLab about it; the Short is a sort of coda, in which those people realize some of the cranes are going into this lady’s yard and eating from her bird feeders, which is not good for a variety of reasons, one of which is that whooping cranes in this project have already been shot, so allowing them to learn populated areas are good foraging grounds—that’s bad.
So the endangered-crane repopulators go to the lady’s house and ask nicely, and she refuses to take the feeders down.
At this moment in the show, we’re disappointed in our own species. (Except for those of us who are longtime RadioLab listeners and can see how much time is left in the episode.)
The next thing is a phone call they recorded with her. And she is not what we expect. She’s not a crazy bird lady, or some intractable ignoramus. She’s a widow whose husband of fifty years had Alzheimer’s, and the one thing that brought him back to her was when the birds came back to the bird feeders. And then, in more recent times, amazing huge white ones started showing up. It was magical.
The hosts, as they do, performed our own thoughts and emotions for us. On the one hand…but on the other hand…but how does this change…and I won’t spoil the rest of that conversation. But in the car, driving through the painfully splendid Autumn and making the sharp right onto Cain’s Hill Road—which I refuse to stop reminding them I climbed on my folding bike with a trailer because I didn’t know the hill was there until I got to it—first I asked what they thought. And got the expected responses: Why won’t she take her bird feeders down!?
Which we talked about. And then I pointed out that there were no bad guys in this story. There were only good guys, but what they wanted was different. Then I said, What if you were a judge, and you had to decide how this should go?
Science boy, who was the main one I was talking to, since his brother was still just looking out the window, said, I think she should take them down. It’s a whole bird species!
Then, because I have a thing about including them both whenever possible, even when it’s pretty clear (as during the story the night before) that one isn’t paying attention, I said his brother’s name and repeated the question. If you were a judge, what would you decide?
He said, “I’d tell the lady that even though he’s gone, she still contains him within her.”
MAY YOUR DAY be gorgeous and humbling.
Filed under: Divorce, Family, Fatherhood, Favorite, Kids, Parenting
