On the second day of the rest of my life, I awoke to another sunny and teal-blue-ocean day in Paradise. Or so it seemed for the first ten minutes.
The cats had followed me into the kitchen in the far front corner of the main living area. I’d filled their bowls and was waiting for my coffee to finish perking when we were distracted by a dull thonk.
The bird had come in for a landing on the tar roof.
"kwawk kwawk kwawk," he said as he wadded to the large center window and peered in like someone expected for brunch. Seeing me at the stove, he dashed like a duckpin on legs to the kitchen window.
“Just ignore him,” I told the cats.
They continued eating but warily.
“kwawk kwawk KWAWK,” called the bird.
Receiving no acknowledgement, he tapped on the window.
MITTS retreated to the back room. cd fluffed up and hissed.
Refusing to make eye contact with the interloper, I poured myself a cup of coffee, then added a bit of milk. As I returned to the bedroom, coffee in hand, the bird raced across the roof alongside me.
“KWWAAAK,” I heard as I slipped under the covers. Then, silence. Just as I relaxed, several more plaintive kwaaawks wafted in through the open window. Unmoved, I let the steam of freshly brewed coffee warm my face.
As the distress call continued, the cats grew agitated.
“We’ll just let the baby cry it out,” I assured them. “He’ll eventually give up,” I assured myself.
Setting my coffee on the bed stand, I opened the book I’d picked up the day before at Rainy Day Books—The Great Blue Heron by Hayward Allen, a beautifully illustrated description of the life and temperament the bird I’d chosen as my spirit guide in this new life . . . jab jab jab . . .
Let him break through the damned glass, I thought. I'm not budging.
“ ‘Look on the one that stands near the margin of the pure stream,’ “Mr. Allen began by quoting John James Audubon. “ ‘See his reflection as it were into the smooth water. How calm, how silent, how grand is the scene. You might imagine what you see to be the statue of a bird, so motionless it is.’ “
Yes, this was exactly what I wanted for myself—the still spirit, the singular purpose, the . . .” jab jab JAB insisted the bird before letting loose with a string of piercing KWAAAAWKs.
At last, the screeching stopped. But relief was short-lived as I heard a strange grating sound . . . ? . . . holy bird shit—the screen!
I stormed into the living room, book in hand, waving my arms and shouting, “Shoo!”
The offender backed away to the edge of the roof, and, after nearly stepping off into then air, retracted his neck between his tiny bird shoulders, and just stood there on those splattily flat pink feet, his sunny yellow beak sunken into his feathery white breast. I started to laugh, then reminded myself that his bird was nothing but a manipulative and irksome little con.
Suddenly, an avian uproar broke out over the bay, birds scattering and screeching in all directions. An eagle flew by, not thirty yards from my window, its head glinting white in the crisp morning light. Even with several gulls and crows dive-bombing the predator, the eagle soared off over the trees, unperturbed.
Hey, I thought, maybe I should go for a raptor as my guide. Those guys can really stir things up with nothing but a simple fly over. But I’d always had issues with authority figures.
“kwawk,” said the bird on my roof.
“Forget it,” I told him.
With that, he flew off to join the ruckus that arose between another gull and three crows over a free lunch of chips that some tourist had tossed out on the motel roof next door. The crow and gull fluttered down to the chips that had scattered on sidewalk below. There, the crows began hippety-hopping around the gull, distracting the poor dope this way then that while scarfing up the crispy snack.
You just couldn’t get any more clever or antiauthoritarian than a crow.
But shiny, flip, and hippety-hop get old after a while.
Besides, I’d come here to get away from all that.
Meanwhile, the con had pecked the motel roof clean then flown over to the motel deck where he was now working his charms on a young woman enjoying coffee and Danish.
Peace at last. And time to subvert the dominant paradigm—time to commit myself to a solitary and mediative life, to surrender myself to matters of the spirit and a precision of movement in pursuit of some new and deeper purpose.
As if giving me a sign, Heron ballooned down into the shallows below.
Full of purpose, I returned to Mr. Allen's book and learned that the image of Heron’s early ancestors appeared across the globe from the wall of an Egyptian tomb to stone along the shore of a lake in Ontario.
Of this mystical bird, Allen wrote, “Every heron has its own dance of seductio—" thonk
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