Tag Archives: outdoors

My Search for the Red Phantom

Posted in Aging, Humor, Mothers and Fathers, Nature and the Outdoors by
Photo Credit: budandjackie via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: budandjackie via Compfight cc

Sixty years ago I saw my first scarlet tanager. I was ten.

I was sitting outside “in the country,” and I don’t know what made me look up, but there was the most beautiful bird I had ever seen.  I called it a “real bird” because it was different than the plain brown birds I was accustomed to seeing. A “real bird” was the kind of bird I only saw in the Golden Guides my parents bought for me.

The scarlet tanager was in a tulip tree. The tulip tree was a “real tree” which I had also recently identified from my tree books. The days of pouring over those books were finally paying off.

I don’t know how long the gorgeous red bird graced me with his presence, but I do know that at the age of ten, it was one of the most joyous experiences of my life.  It was the day my hobby was born. After that day, and for the next sixty years I searched for another scarlet tanager and another tulip tree. The tulip trees were easy. I saw many of them.

But the scarlet tanager quest was unfulfilled.

The sad part of the story is I admit, “I am the worst birder in the entire world.” On Audubon outings when I am on my best game, and I can see color, I can identify birds that are close up. On outings when I am on my regular game, I can confuse pigeons with bald eagles.  I have learned to laugh at myself and have tried to educate myself. Even though I am “the worst birder,” I love being outdoors, being silent, and absorbing the sights and sounds of nature into my soul.

No scarlet tanager. How can that be? The bird books says he (the bright red male with black wings) is up there, but hard to find. Hard to find! I wonder how many other scarlet tanager searchers have been seeking the red phantom for sixty years? I am supposed to listen for him. Well, I mix up all my bird vocalizations, much as I try to work on improving my sightings.

I’m sure if I asked for help, from the many wonderful birding guides I’ve known over the years, I might have seen my tanager decades ago. But I didn’t. Mine was a private desire, lingering in my psyche for so many years—my tanager was becoming my holy grail.

(Of course, between my cataracts, retina surgery, touch of macular degeneration, hearing problems, perhaps I should be given a bird watching handicap…I don’t know what that is, but I know golfers get one) Oh well, I digress.

So the other morning I’m just sitting at my kitchen table and looking out to my deck where I have a bird bath (a plant saucer with two rocks in it for balance) and guess what! There, sitting on the edge of the plant saucer and leaning in to sip the water, is my scarlet tanager—the bird I have not seen in sixty years!

The last time I saw him, I was wearing plaid Bermuda shorts, a sleeveless shirt, and red or blue Keds sneaks. I probably went into the house and ate a tuna fish sandwich on white Wonder Bread, cut in squares by my mother. Maybe I cooed to my brother sleeping in his crib. If it was a Sunday, maybe my father was there reading the travel section of the paper and eating bread and butter, or maybe borscht.

That’s why, the other day, when I saw the scarlet tanager, I cried, hard.

It took me a long time to recover, and I was glad I was alone. I thought “No one will understand.”

But I do hope you will.

And, my scarlet tanager? I don’t know where he is now. But I am hoping he will drop in again.

Do You Live With The Invisible Man?

Posted in Annoyances, Humor, Life, Nature and the Outdoors by

href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/13775090@N07/2181356718/">Roberto F. via Compfight cc

I think, my dear husband, Jerome the Great and Good, missed a couple of physics lessons in school. He must have cut the classes on Light and Sound.

Jerome, usually a very smart man, misunderstands the physics of light.

For example, when he comes into the kitchen for his early morning coffee, even though it is dark outside, he opens the vertical blinds and puts on the overhead light.  This makes me crazy because I am a private person.  He justifies his behavior by saying, “It’s dark outside, and no one can see in.”  See what I mean about the physics?

Wearing my flimsy negligee (Yeah, sure.) I enter the brightly lighted kitchen, and run to close the blinds.

“No one can see you,” he says, and then he adds, “and who would be looking anyway?”

You know the movie, Gaslight, where the husband tries to make the wife think she’s going nuts?  I just thought I would mention it.

Jerome is not too swift with the physics of sound transmission either.

“You are too loud,” I often say to him when we are sitting outside.  As I said, I am a private person.

He tells me I am obsessed with what the neighbors think.

Here’s an example.

We enjoy outdoor meals on our deck, with wine. Once a decade, when our neighbors’ lawn mowers, tractors, zappers, hedge trimmers, leaf blowers, and chain saws are not on, our little backyard is gloriously quiet. Ah, stillness. I can hear the fluttering of the birds’ wings. Jerome and I converse. We sip our wine. He shares a story about his day. He uses a bad word. Trust me, the word is not “doodyhead.”

“Shh,” I say gesturing to our backyard. “The neighbors will hear you. There are kids out there, you know.”

Although Jerome was absent for the physics session on sound, he has perfected the physics of motion. He gets an A+ for Eye-Rolling. This silent movement is directed at me. “No one can hear,” he says, and then to prove his point, he shouts, “Doodyhead! Doodyhead! Doodyhead!”

I cringe. My neighbors used to think Jerome and I were upstanding citizens.

I want to throw a plate of something at him. But I don’t, because my neighbors will see, and then, they will all hear me say “doodyhead” back to him, and I will be arrested, and sent away, and my children will have no one to overprotect them, ever again.

He says I worry too much.  I’m worried about that.

 

 

Photo: href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/13775090@N07/2181356718/”>Roberto F. via Compfight cc

 

 

 

 

 

Adirondack Chairs in God’s Country

Posted in Humor, Life, Nature and the Outdoors by

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I see kids today doing their homework while reclining on their beds.

People of my age did not do that. We used desks.  If you are a contemporary of mine, I bet you remember taking great pride in your desk and feeling like a real hot shot when you organized your drawers with your new school supplies and, then, topped it off with your new green blotter.  I even had a special desk lamp!  Yowza!  Sitting at that desk, I felt like I was in the Oval Office.

That feeling lasted for the first week and a half of school. Then, I started hating homework, messing up the drawers, and listening to songs on the radio like Runaway by Del Shannon.

But, anytime my parents came in the room, there I was, at my desk, looking studious.

I think desks were a part of my parents’ American Dream.  Desks were ergonomically designed for work, and hard work meant success.

Speaking of success, as those of you who follow my blog know, I married Jerome, the Great and Good. We bought a home in what our parents called, God’s Country, because it was forty-four minutes from the Bronx. Also, our home was a real house, not an apartment with a screen door on the third floor or the elevated train running outside the living room.

Jerome and I bought two Adirondack chairs for our backyard. OK, so the chairs are plastic, and they are not exquisitely carved by Native American craftsman.  When you pull into our suburban driveway and see those two forest green plastic chairs under the trees on our dried up brown grass, you can almost hear the call of the loon and the howling of the wolf.

Unless you’re an astronaut manning a control panel during takeoff, Adirondack chairs are not designed for work. True, you can set your glass of iced tea down on the wide arms of an Adirondack chair, but if you drink your iced tea in your reclining position, you may choke to death on an ice cube.

The green plastic Adirondack chairs in our backyard are not suitable for reading a book, or writing a personal manifesto, or even a shopping list.

Adirondack chairs are only good for looking up.

Looking up is great, perhaps even greater than doing homework.  There is never a test on “looking up,” and you don’t have to study for it. Often I sit in my Adirondack chair, look up and think about the same stuff I thought about as a child. I count the leaves on a branch of a tree.  Then I try to figure out how many leaves there are on the tree. Then I think about all the other trees on my block, my town, my state, my country and the world.  Then I feel alive, even more alive than I felt when I listened to Runaway by Del Shannon.

 

 

How Really Cool People Go Hiking in the Wilderness

Posted in Humor, Nature and the Outdoors by

On this Earth Day I am contemplating the great outdoors.  Here is how Really Cool People go hiking in the wild.

Really Cool People:

  • Always wear red or khaki bandanas,
  • Never wear pink flowered scarves designed to draw the eye upwards and away from the butt.
  • Always carry matches.
  • Never carry handbags.
  • Always pack a light snack of nuts and raisins and lots of water.
  • Never pack pickled herring with creamed onions in a Tupperware container.
  • Always squint their eyes and say words like “I reckon…”
  • Never screw up their noses and say words like “Oy.”
  • Always have weather-beaten feral faces and look formidable.
  • Never have flushed sweaty faces and look like they are about to drop dead.
  • Always wear weathered khaki short shorts, and baseball caps.
  • Never wear blue plaid Bermuda shorts with a matching baby blue solid shirt, and a white sunhat with chin straps.
  • Always nod and say hello to other hikers who look just like them.
  • Never acknowledge people like me.