Crazy Stable

The following BBC news item has come to our attention:

Keith Richards 'tree fall' injury

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has been taken to hospital in New Zealand after injuring himself while on holiday in Fiji.

A band spokeswoman said Richards had suffered a "mild concussion" and was taken to hospital as a precaution.

Media reports in Australia and New Zealand said Richards had hurt his head when he fell out of a palm tree.

  Compared to Keith...

  ...wasn't Spouse positively prudent to install the Child's new ceiling 11 years ago with a rented "Sheetrock lift"?

(It probably wasn't nearly as much fun as falling out of a palm tree in Fiji, but we still have a pretty cool ceiling to show for it...and no concussion...)

It's Poem In Your Pocket Day, and Arbor Day, too. Yesterday, the Child and I sprawled in the cool grass of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Cherry Esplanade, celebrating our own private Sakura Matsuri; the official one starts tomorrow (more crowds, but also bento boxes at the cafe and taiko drummers and such). Meanwhile, poem/arborwise, this seemed to cover all the bases:

L OVELIEST of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

                                          A. E. Housman

So I was thinking, If only there were a blog chronicling all the cool nature stuff happening around Brooklyn...every day, including the days (approximately 360 per year) when I am too lazy/preoccupied/distracted to cross the street to Prospect Park with my binoculars and find out for myself.  Well...here he his, my Brooklyn Nature Dude!

He's Rob J, and he both writes and does the jaw-droppingly gorgeous photographs for "The City Birder," now a permanent link to your right. Although he looks here more like a suspicious new cast member on "Lost," he is a true Bird Geek, as witness this list of guys he observed from his Park Slope roof deck  yesterday: "Great blue heron, osprey, northern goshawk, laughing gull, herring gull, rock pigeon, mourning dove, chimney swift, blue jay, American crow, northern mockingbird, European starling, house finch, house sparrow."  This is why it is so wonderful to go bird-watching with a Bird Geek: You actually see birds. It's like somebody already did the "find the hidden birdies" puzzle in your Highlights magazine with a fluourescent Magic Marker. My list from Rob's roof would have been: "Rock pigeon, European starling, house sparrow."  I plan to check City Birder daily to see what I'm missing as I sit screen-sucking in my third-floor study/studio, glancing up at the window where I'm visited by the occasional sparrow/pigeon/starling (couldn't they just breed into one convenient invasive species called the "sparlingeon"?) If Rob were here, he would probably see an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker eating termites out of my backyard telephone pole.

Not that the CrazyStable has any shortage of avian life. I try to keep our two feeders stocked in honor of my late Aunt Louie, who was such a passionate bird feeder that she would buy giblets to leave up the road from her country place for the vultures.  (There was one particular vulture, she insisted, that looked old and weak and in need of nutritional assistance.) I don't go that far, but the supermarket seeds lure an occasional blue jay and cardinal in addition to the brawling mobs of sparrows. (For some blessed reason, the pigeons and starlings leave the feeders alone; they much prefer fast-food leavings, which are never in short supply at curbside.) And we've had a few Audubon Moments: I once looked down as I sat out back to see a dazzling little yellow warbler at my feet, feasting on a periwinkle-blue butterfly. And Spouse once looked out back and said, "Wow, that's a big pigeon." It was a hawk, sitting on the telephone wire, making Yummy Gut-Gobbet Feast out of a sparrow.  For years, I let a few pokeweeds flourish and toss off their deep purple berries, just to thrill the mockingbirds each fall, but the subsequent Pokeweed Madness (billions of babies with foot-long taproots!) was too much, and now I just tell the mockers the hell with it.

You know, my Aunt Louie claimed there was a mockingbird that could imitate the sound of  her friend's cat having a hairball.  That's my kind of bird. 

My little sisters, the birds, much bounden are ye unto God, your Creator, and always in every place ought ye to praise Him, for that He hath given you liberty to fly about everywhere…St. Francis of Assisi, Sermon to the Birds

"If any be a devout lover of God, let him partake with gladness from this fair and radiant feast. If any be a faithful servant, let him enter rejoicing into the joy of his Lord. If any have wearied himself with fasting, let him now enjoy his reward. If any have labored from the first hour, let him receive today his rightful due. If any have come after the third, let him celebrate the feast with thankfulness. If any have arrived after the sixth, let him not be in doubt, for he will suffer no loss. If any have delayed until the ninth, let him not hesitate but draw near. If any have arrived only at the eleventh, let him not be afraid because he comes so late. For the Master is generous and accepts the last even as the first. He gives rest to him who comes at the eleventh hour in the same way as to him who has labored from the first. He accepts the deed, and commends the intention.

Enter then, all of you into the joy of our Lord. First and last, receive alike your reward. Rich and poor, dance together. You who have fasted and you who have not fasted, rejoice today. The table is fully laden: let all enjoy it..."

From the Easter sermon by St. John Chrysostom (traditionally read during the all-night Easter service in Orthodox churches), with thanks to Jim Forest

Photo: The Child at large in Brooklyn Botanic Garden

A strange time is Easter Saturday...a deep breath of quiet after the purgative solemnity of Good Friday, and (for those of us who enjoy the Triduum as a sort of cathartic liturgical mini-series) a time to keep a willfully straight face before the jubilation of Easter Sunday, as if we didn't know how it were all going to turn out.  The Teacher has been laid in a borrowed tomb, and for all they knew that first Triduum, that would be the end of it.

We must embrace the Passion to experience the Resurrection, said a friend of mine yesterday afternoon, and as I served as a church usher during Veneration of the Cross, I had ample time to ponder our wonderfully wacky Catholic expression of this truth: people lining up to kneel in front of a humongous cross and kiss it. (Good Friday is great for prostration opportunities; it starts with our scarlet-clad priests tossing themselves face-down at the foot of the barren altar, a perfect storm of high-style Catholic glory and humility.)  I had time to observe various Veneration techniques--a reverent head-butt, a tender splinter-risking kiss,  a gentle touch of the fingertips.  Kiss the instrument of torture and execution; without it, no redemption, no revelation of fathomless love, no intrepid Brother to show us the way ahead to everlasting life with the Father. 

At such a time, unless epic sorrow and misfortune have recently paid a visit, it is easy to feel ashamed of one's whinings about one's own puny "crosses to bear." In fact, our Lord's sufferings have long been used by nuns and Irish mothers and the like, to put the kibosh on such self-indulgence.  "Offer it up!" (I have sometimes wondered if the Lord really wants such offerings...imagine a metaphysical in-box loaded up with daily mountains of dental pain, car alarms, and delayed lunchtimes...wouldn't he rather we offered up things like carousel rides and massages and vanilla thick shakes?) 

But I am going to "try to try" my friend's advice to embrace the Passion, even if my passion involves such mundane components as perpetual debt, peeling paint, a leaky roof and a brain-soup of acrid neurotransmitters instead of a crown of thorns.  The debt in particular rubs me sore...I tried to imagine it taking shape into our big altar cross, wondered if I could kneel and kiss that impacted pile of credit card balances incurred during years-past dismal emergencies...what has the Passion of the Debt to offer in the way of salvation? Perhaps nothing more than the possibility of compassion--for every other poor soul blown sideways through life who has managed to dig himself in too deep, not do anything "right," not buy low and sell high. As it is, I tend to hoard stories of people more screwed-up than we are, and mull them over as delicacies. (Chapter 11, eh? We're not that bad! And at least we didn't get one of those balloon mortgages, even if we will pay off our fixed-rate re-fi at age 71!)  This raises the distinct possibility that, if I had lived in Jerusalem in 33 AD, I would have looked up and said, "Well, at least I didn't claim to be King of the Jews!", and gone on about my business.

So...having kissed the Cross, we wait and wonder and hope.

Behold the wood of the Cross, on which hung the salvation of the World. -- Good Friday liturgy