You could call this one ‘For the birds’, just like my street

                        
The neighborhood that my wife and I have called home since the turn of the century is known colloquially as Birdland. This is because all the streets are named after, well, birds. No hidden agenda there; I mean, we live on Cardinal and when we take walks, we’re likely to perambulate along the pine tree-lined lengths of Crane, Ibis, Caracara, Falcon, Kea, Cassowary, Gull, Bluebird and Albatross. It’s a simple concept. But you know me, always looking for deeper meanings, plumbing the depths of the obvious for significant totems, going on sociological scavenger hunts seeking symbolism. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that when we landed here, back in the fall of 2000, I was immediately struck by the name of street where our new home was situated. “Cardinal,” I said as my wife signed a thousand sheets of paper giving us free run of the place. “It’s the state bird of Ohio. Interesting that we’d end up here in Carolina with that kind of connection to home.” She pretty much ignored me, focusing on more important matters, like leases and landlords and licenses and liability. “Of course,” I said, “the cardinal is actually the most common of all state birds; in fact, I believe that eight or nine others claim it …” She stared at me, stopping me in my tracks. “Don’t be a bird nerd,” she said. “Not now.” I took her comment in the spirit in which it was intended, which is a fairly common thing in my family. Anytime’s a good time to make fun of me. I’m used to it by now. Still, I’d like to return, if briefly, to the name Birdland. To me, it’ll always be the third track on the first side of Patti Smith’s debut LP. Released in the winter of 1975, “Horses” has remained solidly in my Top 10 albums of all time and “Birdland” is an enigmatic masterpiece and has stubbornly resisted terrestrial interpretation for going on 40 years. But what I remember is the way my friend reacted when I placed it gently on the turntable after returning with the record from Christmas break. “Just say nothing,” I said to him, serious as a high priest at a Stonehenge dawn. “Then we’ll talk.” It was about three-fourths of the way through “Birdland” that I could see him getting it, changing the way he stood, awestruck, amazed, wanting to see where it was all heading: up, up, up, up. It’s a Patti thing, and that winter, she ruled that South Bend off-campus ghetto house. Then, there’s another layer. Birdland was a legendary jazz cauldron, a cornerstone of a revolution that got its genesis in post-war New York City, a place that the word “legendary” hardly fits. Charlie Parker, saxophonist extraordinaire, was nicknamed “Yardbird,” which was shortened to “Bird,” which became the name of the club where it was all happening: bebop, rebop, fusion. The roster of players who created the myth and might of a club that held maybe 500 people is staggering: John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, Count Basie, Miles Davis, and that’s just the tip of the berg. I’m not what you’d call a jazz guy, but I know just enough about the American art form to have a backlog of memories, most of which revolve around listening to Stanley Clarke or Chick Corea records in my dorm room at Notre Dame, entertaining young ladies with a penchant for quiet evenings as another gentle snowstorm blanketed the South Quad. So, living in Birdland, while just another enclave in a community filled with them, fits us. The Carolina coast got hit with a glancing winter blow the other night and, as you’d expect, black ice caused a number of fender-benders, pushed back starting times for classes and created lots of chatter concerning how bad it was … and how much worse it was going to get. I’ve written about this several times, but it bears repeating. Until you’ve weathered a hurricane, it’s not fair to make fun of folks who freak out with a little ice storm. They have no real frame of reference. Give them a Category Four blow and they’re perfectly at ease with the possible nastiness. They’ve lived through dozens. When it’s below freezing and the roads turn into skating rinks, they do their best, but it’s not pretty. It’s sort of like unleashing that same Cat Four storm on Northeast Ohio, my old stomping grounds. It would scare even the most tornado-hardened country dude, someone who had no problem hanging out in his front yard as a tornado hop-scotched its way from field to field, bearing down on his home. See, the same guy who knew that the twister was going to be long gone in a matter of minutes would absolutely soil himself if he was told a front four times that size, with circular winds hitting 120 mph and an eye the size of Cleveland would be hanging around his place just howling for, say, three days and nights with no letup, no reprieve. So it’s all relative. One man’s nuisance is another’s nemesis. We learn from our experiences. Speaking of knowledge, do you know where birds sleep at night? Here in Birdland, we’re surrounded by them from dawn until dusk. They and their songs are omnipresent, so much so that for the first couple of years we lived here, I imagined that the development’s planners had installed high-tech speakers that were perched, hidden, in the depths of the trees. Seriously. It’s that melodious here, like a pretty soundtrack accompanying even the banal chore, such as cleaning out the gutters or hauling out the tub of recyclables once a week. Ducks, geese, wrens, swallows, robins, tits, gulls, cardinals, orioles and scores of others add their voices to the ambient vibe and it’s quite soothing. Well, the blue jays get kind of raucous and territorial sometimes, dive-bombing anything they don’t like and disturbing the peace. It’s just the way they are. I spend a lot of time wandering around at night (like left-wingers, I suppose) and I got thinking that, aside from the hoot owls and screech owls—plus the ubiquitous nightingales—that I never saw or heard another kind of bird until what Homer called “rosy-fingered dawn” arrived. Again, I wondered, where do the birds sleep? Turns out, almost anywhere; well, not in nests which is where I naively thought they returned. “Nests?” the old-timer spat. “You crazy? You know what a nest’s like? Filled with all kinds of nasty stuff: broken eggshells, blood, feathers, sometimes dead things. Who want to sleep there?” “Well,” I said, “if not there, then where?” I had just blundered into the conversation—another thing I do all the time—and was keen to learn from this bearded woodsy gentleman, whom I’d stumbled upon heading for the water. “Mostly in trees and shrubs, though you’d never see ‘em,” he said, stroking his chin. “Birds have this thing in their knees, folds down when they rest. They can close off one side of their brains, too, while the other one stays alert.” Holes in trees, too, he told me, and in open fields, where they line up in a circle, facing out, wary. On the water, as well, paddling the whole time. Who knew? Well, now we both do. Mike Dewey can be emailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join the fun on his Facebook page.


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