The Morning After

The Morning After

Sitting outside, starring at our front door, are seven little critters, birds to be precise, who are wondering what’s next for me and Kim. They are a roadrunner that looks like Snoopy’s Woodstock. There is an owl who looks like Owl Jolson from Looney Tunes who likes to “Singa…..Like a moon and a June in the Springa”, There is a Hawk that looks regal, but ever so menacing as he sails across the thermals between here and the ocean. And then there is a family of quail with Mama quail and her three baby quails. The only one who can’t be seen at the door because he is flittering from flower to flower, unable to keep his heart rate slow enough to stay still is the humming bird. These are all Kim’s new pals on the hilltop (as cast in metal sculpture as my birthday gift to her today) and they are all here to help her to move on (not forget, just move on) from her lovely life chapter with Cecil for the past eleven years. Kim has fallen for birds in the past six months. It was always a latent love affair, but now it is front and center.

We have all loved road runners since Wile E. Coyote built his first rocket with the help of Acme Electronics (now the name of brother-in-law Jeff’s online electronics boutique). Out here roadrunners are almost as nimble as in the cartoons, hopping up on this rock and that rock for a better view. But here’s the thing, they don’t go “Meep, Meep” like Looney Tunes made them sound. Looney Tunes was working on a strict budget for cartoons (remember, they started as a freebie short before the main movie feature started to play), so they couldn’t afford then very expensive recording equipment nor did they have massive sound effects digitized libraries that can be bought for a few bucks today. They had whatever Mel Blanc had at hand and which his creativity could muster. In the case of the “Meep, Meep” it came about from a thumb in a Coca Cola bottle (listen carefully next time). Out in the real world of Escondido, road runners make a low cooing sound and a bit of cluck, but they do move quickly and I’m guessing few get caught by the many Wile E. Coyote’s out here, who cannot afford to shop at Jeff’s Acme Electronics.

I don’t think Owl Jolson is as ingrained in Kim’s brain as he is in mine. He was born in 1936 at Looney Tunes’ studio and he played to all the stereotypes of the age. The father was a tough Germanic taskmaster who pushed classical music on poor little Owl, when all he really wanted was to play jazz and croon. He was the original Jazz Singer and the tune was played from Laugh Clown Laugh, the silent film starring Lon Chaney and Loretta Young. The Looney Tunes animators’ “Singa” Song lyrics were their own adaptation. There is something about the way he boogies to the music that always worked for me, and who doesn’t like a good underdog makes good story. Well, what Kim does like are owls. And she only had to say that once to have brother Jeff launch into full research, design and construction mode for an owl box for her to attract the nocturnal scavengers. Jeff has used information from the Cornell Ornithology Lab at Sapsucker Woods (I lived my senior year at Cornell a quarter mile from there) as they are arguably the world authority on birds. Today when we happened by his office/warehouse/shop we heard power tools at work in the back. I thought he might be building a rocket for Wile E. Coyote, but in fact he was building Kim’s owl box. I just hope for Kim’s sake that the owls that know about Sapsucker Woods expertise and can appreciate Jeff’s fine workmanship are the sort who stay focused on mice and rats and steer clear of little furry bunnies and other birds, since that is what Kim feels they ought to do. I will be looking for some serious jazz crooning coming from the new owl box.

The Hawk is the most beautiful bird in the sky when it is in flight. It is smooth and elegant in its movements and seems to fear nothing.. We have a five foot sculpture made of an old tree trunk and copper of the mother of all hawks, the American Bald Eagle. It sits out in the bronze gilded cage of our Juliet balcony off our bedroom. He sits scanning the horizon out to sea, looking for his next victim. Nature at its most raw and harsh. Kim can appreciate the grace of the hawk as it wafts across the hills and valley in lazy circles, focusing its beady eyes on what moves below. What she cannot appreciate is the kill or die Darwinian reality of the Hawk’s raison d’etre. So in our household and our little hilltop, Hawks, like the owl box inhabitants will be enjoyed for their beauty and fluidity of movement and decidedly not the end to their soaring.

And then there are the quail family. My nephew Jason, a versatile artist who works, among other medium, in tile mosaic, designed and executed a magnificent Mexican colorful tile mosaic on our kitchen walls that features cacti and roadrunners. This was commissioned by Kim as she designed the renovation with my sister Kathy, the architect, and had her brother Jeff find the perfect live-edge wood for the long countertop. What she didn’t commission, but was added as a pleasant surprise by Jason was in the front hall, where he set into the travertine tile a lovely family of quail with a Mama and three babies. Kim recently found her quail mojo and sighted a Mama and Papa with ten little quail babies and she is feeding them with quail chow the way she fed Cecil with ground turkey and broiled salmon.

Those fleeting now-you-see-em-now-you-don’t devils, the humming birds are also a big part of Kim’s new hilltop life. She has a feeder or two with sugar water and a red art glass humming bird bath. Between that and the cactus and succulent garden that is designed to flower here and then there for months after months, this hilltop is a bird sanctuary in the making for all of these feathered friends.

I have never been a big bird-watcher, but then I wan’t really a dog person until I followed Kim’s lead and gradually came to love Cecil. So, who knows, maybe I will be joining the Audubon Society and planning trips back to Sapsucker Woods Ornithology Laboratory before I know it. What I do know is that these birds are anxious to get a piece of that limitless Kim love that she has in limitless quantities, bounded only by the hours available in the day. With Cecil off to a better place, they are all ready for the morning after to help their pal Kim get back in the air and soar as she is meant to.