Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Birds In Blizzard

While the nor'easter rages outside, I'm watching the birds at the feeder under the eaves. Long past the time when they usually retire to their roosts, they're flying in for a few last bits of energy to get them through the night. Titmice, their little crests down from the cold; feisty chickadees; and winter-dull goldfinches swoop in, perch, grab a single sunflower or nyger seed and fly off into the trees to feast in peace. You'd think that they would use way more energy in those flights than a single seed could supply, but the yard is not littered with bird corpses, so they must know what they're doing.

Slate-colored juncos--elegant little birds with deep-gray backs and wings, white bellies and yellow beaks--are ground feeders, gleaning what our obese squirrels have left of the seeds that drop from the seed containers. Just now, as the agile titmice dove at the feeders swaying in the gale, I saw a pathetic sight: a junco fluttered up from the ground towards the trove of sunflower fuel, fell short, fluttered down, then fluttered up again. What was he thinking? That is the last thing he should have been doing, wasting energy pursuing an impossible goal.

After watching five or six of these vain flutterings, I filled a plastic tub with sunflower seeds and flung them into the shrieking wind. "Those seeds will be covered up in no time," said my husband. As it happened, the wind was blowing against the direction in which I had thrown the seeds, and they stuck fast to the surface of the snow. Soon four, five, six juncos appeared, feeding greedily. For a few minutes even a female cardinal came by, her feathers ruffling in the gusts. Cardinals are scarce in these latitudes, so even I, who used to get a dozen at a time at my Maryland feeder, have taken to gasping with wonder when I see one. I hoped she would stay, but she didn't.

It's almost dusk now, and although the titmice, etc. have gone home, the juncos are still out there, in the midst of the weather hoopla, pecking the ground like hens. But one little clever one, wing feathers tending to brown, beak a paler yellow--a female--is hanging out in the one-inch-wide strip of bare ground right against the house. Except that that ground is not really bare, but covered in sunflower husks and seeds fallen days and even weeks ago. She's filling up on these, feeding contentedly next to the wall, away from the males battling the storm. Bon appetit, junquette. I have high hopes for you. May you live to fledge a nestful of babies in the spring.

Monday, March 13, 2017

Paper Protest

Ten nasty, persistent women, one (v. nice) man, and a little red dog spent Sunday afternoon writing messages to the President, in anticipation of #TheIdesofTrump. Bisou wrote a card of her own (the one with the paw print), which I will be forwarding for her on Wednesday, March 15.


It was as much fun as a protest march, and warmer, since we were indoors with the gas fire on while outside the wind chill was well below zero. Two stalwart women showed up on foot, so swaddled in coats, boots, hats and scarves that at first I didn't recognize them.

A couple of days before the card-writing marathon I went to the Shelburne, Vermont post office and asked for sixty stamped postcards. The clerk said, "I don't think we have any left, but I'll check." She was gone a while, and when she came back she said "Nope. Not a single one. People have been buying them for that thing on March 15."

I got nervous. Where, if anywhere, would I find sixty stamped postcards? The clerk advised me to try the Charlotte (pronounced a la francaise, Char-lotte) post office. So I drove over, tempering my irritation with chilly views of Lake Champlain on my right.

When I told the Charlotte postman--four-feet tall and with uneven brown teeth, but beautiful to me--what I wanted, he smiled a cunning smile: "We got wind of what was coming, so we ordered extra." Tiny Charlotte, Vermont, voted to impeach Trump at its recent Town Meeting.

"I want to be prepared. Where will these be going, and when?" the postman asked, counting cards into little piles. I explained about #TheIdesofTrump, handed him my VISA, and drove back with the slate colored Lake Ch. on my left, to saute chicken livers for pate to sustain the card writers.

In the end, thanks to the Char-lotte P.O., all went swimmingly. We wrote and laughed and planned for the next paper protest (Show Us Your Taxes? Save ObamaCare? Hands-Off Planned Parenthood? Climate Change Is Real?). I'll know where to get my stamped cards from now on.

It looks like a promising spring for nasty, persisting women, v. nice men, and little red dogs.

Friday, March 3, 2017

Don't Link, Think!

At breakfast, sipping coffee, I said to my spouse, "Did you hear that thing on NPR about cyborgs?"

"What about them?" he asked, measuring honey into green tea.

If this had been the 1980s, I would have rummaged in my short-term memory and retrieved whatever shreds of the story I had retained. Then, flexing the muscles of my frontal lobes, I would have turned those concepts into coherent speech and voiced the results, thus giving myself a tiny intellectual workout before even starting my day.

"Cyborgs," I might have said, "are created by combining organic and inorganic parts in a single being. For instance, I became a partial cyborg when I got an artificial hip ten years ago. Merging the human brain with computers, which is already beginning to happen, will create the ultimate cyborg, with potentially alarming results."

But, this being 2017, I just said, "I'll send you a link."

(Here, in case you're interested, is the link to the cyborg story: http://www.npr.org/2017/02/21/516484639/are-cyborgs-in-our-future-homo-deus-author-thinks-so)

I'm suspicious of all this linking. Of course, the advent of hypertext has expanded our access to knowledge in ways undreamed-of in the era of shoulder pads. One click and I can read about Hildegard of Bingen's migraine-induced mystical visions, or find out how to make yogurt in a crock-pot. How can we not love this?

But this ease of access risks turning us into spectators of knowledge, passive enjoyers of an endless cornucopia of facts. And it's changing the way we interact with each other, as we increasingly express ourselves by posting links to what third parties have said or written rather going through the admittedly taxing process of putting things into our own words.

Consider Facebook. If you're like me, most of the posts on your news feed consist not of your friends' own ideas and opinions, but of links to videos and articles made by unknown others. I often click on these links, and laugh and cry along with the everyone else, but, unless we increasingly are what we link, they strike me only as indirect communications, at best, from my Facebook friends.

True, even before the hypertext era, few people managed to come up with really original ideas. Most of us just rehashed stuff we'd read, or heard others say. But even at its worst, rehashing is more mentally demanding than clicking.

Of course I know that fighting links is a losing battle. We Googlers and linkers are already cyborgs, letting the machine articulate and express many of our thoughts and feelings for us. But for those who would like to cling to the old ways of being human for a few more years, the strategy is clear: think, write, paint, sculpt, and compose more...and link less.


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