cardinal

What of the winter lives of birds? We’ve become neighborly with a pair who have selected our feeder as their regular morning hangout. We take pains to make certain the feeder is filled and accessible each day.

Rich red male and smoke tan cardinals. They arrive together or separately and perch on aluminum wires attached to the store-bought feeder on our deck railing. The bird feeder was a purchase we made; the choice arrived at after research and discussion of the hazards of putting food out for birds only to have it eaten by squirrels and other small rodents.

We made an attempt with another device, watching frustrated as bushy tailed thieves gorged themselves and made a mess of the deck planking with remains of food they’d discarded in a rush to devour everything. Later, large birds left droppings along the flooring as they fed on squirrel castoffs. Preparing meals outdoors became a walk in an excrement minefield—meals seated at our deck furniture unthinkable. But the current device is a success and the unwanted have sought other decks and easier prey.

Beauty survives the coldest that New Hampshire delivers. Often, as one visitor perches to feed, the other waits in small trees nearby—spindly winter limbs naked of leaves—the male spells the female and she flies off, assuming her partner’s place among the saplings.

We sit and watch as Cardinals feed, before the sun rises and the horizon glow washes the white landscape with sufficient light to distinguish color and shape. Like shadows the birds slowly reveal unspeakable brilliance and the morning sky moves on.

I suspect the pair see that we’re here, sipping coffee, separated, on my blue chair and your sofa space, alien if familiar forms, part of their survival ritual. The quiet feels intimate.

Snows arrived in late December, layering lawns, roofs, and meadows, then stayed through January and into February such that frozen white has become a set style of the neighborhood.

Some mornings the skies take on a strong pearl pink luminescence that I believe is a byproduct of this permanent snow cover.

I stare at the female cardinal, her beak an unblemished, orange, the color of a not quite ripe pumpkin. Her head bobs as she pecks at seed. Her partner’s solid red feathers and streaks of black paint across his head and along his wings give him the look of a tribal witch doctor or a warrior-dancer gearing for battle.

Then I think of the punishment the cold and the winds mete from late December until those days in mid April when the threat of Canadian highs meeting lows out of the south abate and the earth becomes friendlier. Does the winter always kill or will the predators of spring and summer have at this pair rather than the cold? And as they now find safety beneath eaves or under decks and at the crooks of barn beams, what happens when shelter isn’t enough? And in all of this, which is likely to die first and what of the other?

In the mornings—for years—I’ve prepared coffee for us. I don’t know when the practice began. I think it settled as an easy way to please and surprised me that I could do it without complaint or expectation of reward. You remind me often that you enjoy it and in truth it isn’t a bother. More than that, it’s a task that I enjoy for the rare selfless sense it leaves me with.

Oh, I get annoyed at times when my pudgy fingers struggle to separate the filters from one another. There are times when a bend or seam clogs the hot water egress and the reservoir fills with soaked grounds, overflowing onto the kitchen counter and dripping onto our hardwood floors. I feel the heat at the back of my neck and curse the machine, forgetting each time that I secured the filter to the holder and smoothed it against the walls. But frustrations pass like mini storms and don’t diminish the lovely confidence I feel in the chore; they don’t take away from the pleasure you seem to get so many mornings, having your coffee ready as you wake and wander groggy-eyed into our kitchen.

The Kennedy Inaugural Snowstorm

 

The recent 50^th anniversary of John Kennedy’s inauguration and the sunny aftermath of the huge snowstorms that pummeled the northeast states over the past few weeks have me thinking of a winter day years ago.

It was January 1961. JFK was to take the oath of office in Washington DC on Friday the 20^th.

I lived in Northern New Jersey, having moved with my large family from Manhattan the prior summer and having already suffered the first semester of junior year of High School among people I knew little of and cared little for—then.

We left New York because my father had taken a job at a small manufacturing plant in Englewood and was forced, because he did not have a car, to subway it from northern Manhattan to 179^th Street and Broadway and then bus to a lonely spot on NJ Highway Route 4. My Dad walked the final two miles to work. His shift began at eleven at night, finishing at seven the following morning. He cleaned offices and mopped plant lavatories.

He had been a shipping clerk for fourteen years at Stern Brothers Department store, working at a warehouse in Astoria Queens. He lost his job because union managers became enraged by his dissident activities. I had imagined that he would remain at Stern’s forever but that wasn’t to be and he was let go at age fifty, an incredibly old man for that time.

For a summer he worked at a hot dog stand in an amusement park and in the autumn found nighttime work at the manufacturing plant in Jersey.

My father was unhappy cooking hot dogs and cleaning toilets but felt fortunate to be working any job and able to support his six children. My mother’s sister lived in a small town on the Jersey side of the Hudson River; she and my mother were locked-at-the-hip close. They alternately fought and leaned on one another. Fiercely loyal when challenged by opinions of others, they were not above spill over molten sibling rivalry.

Although it was given as the sole reason that our move to New Jersey was to improve my father’s commute, the closeness of these sisters was also clear incentive for us to leave the only home my brothers and sisters (and I) had known.

I hated New Jersey and the obsession of young people there with cars; people went nowhere without them and the few guys I met talked endlessly about them. Some worked on them, fixing up or adding touches like muffler pipes, chopped windshields and leather covers for steering wheels or removing rusted panels on classics, reshaping and applying mountains of Bondo plastic

Talk was always of last year’s car models and prospects for next year’s. What you drove was who you were. Were Chevys badder than Fords? Would a girl even look at a Plymouth? No one thought of dating without considering what kind of car would be involved. I knew little of the nuance of any of it and it angered me that this knowledge was necessary to enter anything like friendship among peers. Mostly I was jealous of skills I never thought I’d acquire and didn’t feel I wanted to have.

There was little about NJ that appealed to me. I left friends in New York I’d known since I was a child. I loved our neighborhood in Manhattan, had been comfortable with the expanse of public parks near our apartment house. There were athletic courts and baseball/football fields galore. The Hudson River formed the West bank of the neighborhood. The park, from the river to the apartment houses, covered more than a square mile of natural forest and was longer than a mile in length, filled with winding walking paths up and down modest to steep hills. The buildings and paths were constructed by WPA workers during the Depression of the “30’s.

There were animals in the woods, Native American, Indian, caves that invited exploration; the confluence of the Hudson River Barge Canal and the Hudson River that bordered the park invited my friends and I to swim from Spring through Summer. The river and the canal were polluted for most of my youth, polio being a real threat, but we were oblivious to the danger and without sharing our whereabouts with parents or any authority we went routinely to the river to swim.

The remainder of the northern tip of Manhattan was occupied by bridges and apartment buildings, athletic facilities and a football stadium for Columbia University students and fans; there were a half dozen public and parochial schools in an area about one Mile Square. Very little manufacturing took place here but there was a large NY City Transit system train storage yard and a bus garage and still larger Sanitation Department garage.

Some apartment buildings were connected to one another and often a builder would ring a center courtyard with five or six identical buildings the center of which contained a small plaza with plantings and a fountain and a look of formality meant to make apartment renters feel they were every bit as sophisticated as their downtown betters. But truth was Inwood wasn’t an elegant neighborhood.

Neither was it a poor neighborhood. Families who made up the bulk of Inwood’s residents were middle-class, working class people. There was an ethnic centric feel to the place. Jews from Germany had moved to Inwood upon arrival in the 1930’s. Irish from the lower West Side of Manhattan (Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea, and Vinegar Hill) had moved in as well when the neighborhood first began taking shape. There were to be sure other ethnic groups in Inwood—a few Puerto Rican families and fewer African Americans, some Italians, Greeks, and other eastern European peoples—however it was largely an Irish-Catholic and Jewish enclave.

In Jersey, the presence of single family and two family homes that predominated put me off. My parents were never to have finances enough to afford such circumstances and I was sure we would live in an one of the five story apartment houses that each Jersey town at the time seemed to have one or two of.

We settled in a two-bedroom apartment in the same building as my Aunt and Uncle and their five children.

When snow fell on January 19^th I thought of getting hold of a shovel from the apartment building superintendant and using it to clear driveways and walks for the homeowners in the single and double units homes nearby. I loved the idea of making cash and I considered snowfalls of any significance goldmines.

I’d agree a price and then work as quickly as I could and behave as friendly as I could to ingratiate myself to the homeowner/customer and try to work my way to a large tip. I succeeded fairly often. People loved the idea of not having to lift all that heavy white stuff from walkways and being able to drive cars out of garages easily or seeing the results of street plows that had dumped mountains of packed ice and snow at the end of their driveways simply disappear.

One of my cousins was married to a guy whose father was a superintendant at the New York City Sanitation Department facility in Inwood. My aunt received a phone call from him on the afternoon of the Jan 19^th snowfall to ask if her son or cousins wished to work on a Sanitation snow removal project in the Bronx.

When word of the offer got to me I leapt from my socks. I pleaded with my mother to allow me to take the bus to the city and she agreed if my cousin, who was 20 months older than I was planned to go. I was sixteen years old and my cousin was eighteen. I was sure he wanted in since he was legal drinking age in New York. His sister was our key to getting the work, since it was her husband with the connection, and without my cousin being present it wasn’t likely that I would be invited.

A friend of my aunt’s offered to put her son up for the nights on the weekend that we’d be working on the snow crews. The friend did not have room for me and so I was left to find somewhere to stay.

Fortunately, my sister remained friends with a girlhood friend of hers who was married and had two small children. There was room on her couch, she said, and I was happy to take her up on the offer.

My cousin and I woke on the morning of Jan 20^th and took the earliest bus from Jersey to New York and made our way by subway to the Sanitation Department garage on 218^th Street and Broadway.

We’d been told nothing of the work requirements. It was tough imagining how an organization like sanitation might trust a sixteen-year-old kid at work in any capacity. When we arrived at the city garage in the Bronx a small army of workers stood about or climbed aboard large flatbed trucks. Most of the men who worked the trucks wore gray uniforms and canvass-type gray winter coats with large blue NYC insignias. The men who stood about, as though waiting for instructions, were dressed in civilian-like winter clothes, some of them shabbily dressed, as though they had been recruited from a temporary work services agency. Most of the stand-by workers were in fact unemployed.

Immense plow-fitted trucks idled in the parking areas as other construction gear was being readied inside the garage bays. Large bays were packed with gray trucks, smoke pouring from their exhausts, dozens of men in gray uniforms working over them like military flight deck crews on an aircraft carrier preparing for battle.

Our ‘connection’ met us at the garage and assigned each of us to a driver manning a garbage truck equipped with a snowplow. My job was described quickly by the driver I was assigned: ride shotgun and make certain that as he moved along the narrower side streets in the Bronx that the plow did not strike parked cars or other protruding objects. My driver’s name was Gary. There were many cars snowed- virtually everywhere we rode but Gary was expert and I was left to sitting and watching as he navigated within about ten inches, never closer, to the parked cars.

The work proved little work at all. I sat and listened to the radio, which broadcast news mostly of the inauguration ceremonies taking place in Washington.

My family, being very Irish-Catholic and being members of labor unions and being long time Democratic Party members (my great grandfather was a Tammany Hall leader and my relatives were friendly still with the current head of the New York State Democratic Party) we felt invested in Kennedy’s election victory. At home in New Jersey my parents would be watching proceedings on television but I was off to make my fortune; the prospect of cash meant more than any presidential oath or the success of any Irish Catholic icon for that matter.

I recall Gary’s appearance as hulking. He was a friendly man; had a Mediterranean look about him; kept calling me “kid”. We were assigned a section of the Bronx known as Riverdale. He told me straight away that the neighborhood was his regular garbage pickup route and that he knew it well.

The streets of Riverdale are impossibly narrow under the best circumstances and the heavy snowfall made the streets near impassable. Gary seemed unconcerned. “I know this place: back of my hand… back of my hand!” he said several times as the truck wove in and out of streets banked by small Tudor homes and square ranch houses.

“Kid, this is where I do my regular pickups,” he said. “I know the people … know my route; know the people… get lots of gifts at Christmas… every once in a while, like on a hot summer day, these folks come out with beers that I share with my crew. It’s a friendly place.”

We drove what seemed aimlessly into the early afternoon and as we headed up a street so narrow I first believed we’d have to back up, he said, “Hey, kid, would you like a hot chocolate? I got to make a stop. This house up here is one of my regulars… thinking about having a cup a coffee just ahead… real nice folks. I’m sure they’ll have a hot chocolate for you.”

The house was more elegant than I’d expected he’d feel comfortable stopping at: posh. It had trim white wood plank siding and was built on a fieldstone foundation rising about four feet from the ground. There were many leafless spindly trees planted on the ample property and high snow covered bushes that all but hid the windows on one full side of the house. A driveway twisted down, sharply to the right from the street, ending at a garage door that was not visible when we first approached. Two fire hydrants stood at the sides of the driveway making for about forty feet of car free sidewalk and more than enough room for the truck, with its plow, to pull into and not block passing cars.

As we angled into the curb Gary shut the engine down and jumped from his cab. I sat, nervously, waiting for instructions. He walked up the front walk and rang the doorbell. Seconds passed before the door opened slightly and he quickly stepped inside. More seconds passed and he reappeared and motioned for me to join him.

“Should I lock the truck? I shouted as I got out of the cab. He placed his index finger over his mouth—shushing me—and waved me toward the house.

Once inside I saw a woman in a housecoat, her hair loose—tasseled—as though she hadn’t quite finished preparing herself for the day.

She placed her hand on Gary’s arm and ushered him aside as she approached. “Hi there, young fellow. Welcome from the cold. I hope Gary, here, isn’t working you too hard. Can I get you some chocolate?” she asked.

“There’s s television in the kitchen; you can watch whatever you like. I’ve been looking at the Kennedy thing. He’s the new President today so the news has him on. They keep repeating this part where he says “ask not” or something. It’s getting boring for me but maybe if you haven’t seen it… You can watch that or anything else you want. Change the channel if you like, too, though there isn’t much else I’ve seen on.”

WTF were we doing here? I thought. Nice lady but we were supposed to be plowing roads; it’s a long time until dinner or to the 4:30 work cut-off time.

I lay my jacket on the back of a kitchen chair and sat waiting for the chocolate. Gary made no move to make any of this any clearer for met. Actually, he stood fidgeting with the zipper to his canvass jacket, looking down at the floor and away from me as he did and then he was soon out of sight—gone from the kitchen to someplace unknown.

What impressed me, or actually worried me, more was the silent way he disappeared. Later I would learn the word ‘dissolve’ – it applied to Gary’s exit. He’d been a loud presence all afternoon and now not a peep. His large boots that had made loud crunching noises on the walkway and on the snow went silent.

The woman brushed long locks of hair from her eyes and forehead with her fingers wide as she reached into cabinets, removing a large mug, a box of chocolate powder and a bowl of sugar. She heated milk in an open tin pan and stood by as it warmed, humming a tune I couldn’t make sense of. Every few seconds she turned from the gas range and looked at me, her hand on one hip the other at the break in her housecoat at her chest, clutching her lapels, and smiling.

“You working with Gary first time?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’m here for the snowstorm—that’s it. Working for the weekend to help clear the streets. I go to school, otherwise.”

Why am I so nervous? I thought.

I felt a tremor in my voice. If I speak my voice is going to crack. I felt like an ass. I became very aware of pimples at the cleft of my chin and on the left cheek of my face. The woman was someone’s wife or mother or sister. The home was obviously her domain; she was in charge and why was she wearing a bathrobe in the afternoon?

I was used to many more people occupying a smaller home space as this. I had known masses of extended family members in tiny apartments and kept expecting a kid or a husband or someone to burst into the kitchen and make demands that would take her attention from heating milk, talking nicely to a teenager and mostly from giving a shit about me. I was also very aware of Gary’s disappearance.

She pointed me toward a kitchen chair closer to the television and placed the mug of chocolate before me.

“You sit here and the view will be better,” she said.

She lowered a pair of venetian blinds about halfway on both kitchen casement windows. Even so, the brilliant sun poured into the room from the west and I could see that had I sat anywhere other than where she assigned me the screen would have been impossible to view.

What troubled me more though was: the door to the entrance where we had come in as well as to the hallway and whatever lay to my back, i.e. the rest of the home, was not visible. Gary wasn’t making noises and I thought maybe he was in the bathroom; he was gone a long time at this point. The woman leaned forward and placed her mouth near my ear.

“Call, if you need anything but try to stay here until either Gary or me comes to get you,” she whispered.

Her breath smelled sweet and sour—a little like someone’s breath after drinking sherry—and her hair smelled like it had just been washed although it looked like she had recently slept on it. I wasn’t used to older women, not from my family, being so close.

This was mystery; the effect she was having on me, though I couldn’t fathom why either feeling was happening. I felt guilty and excited and my interest in her lifted as my wish that she would move away from me increased. She patted the back of my neck.

“Sweet boy,” she said. And she was gone.

I saw Robert Frost on the TV screen. His hair blew in the cold January wind of Washington and he looked like he was fighting to hold onto pieces of paper he had in his hands. I sipped the chocolate and it wasn’t even warm. I couldn’t hear what Frost was saying but he looked old and I knew he was important and I couldn’t think whether I should be listening to him or finding Gary or going outside to the truck or just sit still and drink my chocolate.

I drank.

I emptied the cup and sat for fifteen more minutes that felt like fifteen hundred. I wanted to look around but some part of me said I shouldn’t. I think I heard a rustling, a cooing sound or a chair leg scraping on wood or a doll’s voice squealing or maybe I heard nothing.

Something was afoot. I screwed my courage and bent down as though to tie my shoe and then looked behind me—upside down—along the hallway that the woman had gone. There was a very white   bolt of cloth protruding from a darker lump of cloth at what appeared to be an entrance to a room against a side of the hallway wall. A pair of pants! A pair of pants and a pair of white men’s underwear lay on the floor at the room entrance.

I neglected to mention that when we moved to New Jersey I was less than six months from having left a Catholic Boy’s Seminary in Baltimore Maryland after nearly two years of prayers and devotions and pursuit of the vocation to be a priest. What I did not know about the world of desire could fill libraries.

I could not take my eyes from the underwear and the pants. I was transfixed by the way the leather belt looped through the holds at the waist. What the hell are they doing there?

Holy shit, she’s killed him, I thought. Why that thought and no other I can’t say except that it was my first thought. And I could not raise my head nor stop looking at the pants in the hallway. It also didn’t occur to me that if she killed him why would she remove his pants. The murderous thought was soon followed by the awareness that cooing or creaking or squealing sound and an understanding that something was happening that my life to that point hadn’t prepared me for.

I turned to the television and watched as someone reached for Robert Frost’s papers.