The Dead Bird

When my children were younger, I read to them, a lot. Since I was doing the reading as well as most of the book purchasing, I tried to find books that I liked. It's nice of course if the children liked them, too, but if I had to sit there and read it out loud, it might as well be something that appealed to me. So when I found a children's author that I liked, I bought all of their books that I could find. I might have said it was for my children, but that wasn't completely true; it was mostly for me.

One author that I liked a lot was Margaret Wise Brown, who wrote many wonderful books for children before her death in 1952 at age 42. I hadn't realized - until I read the Wikipedia article to find out when she died - that in addition to writing children's books she led a pretty interesting life. She is probably best known for Goodnight Moon, but she wrote many others, and at her death left behind a large number of manuscripts, at least some of which were published posthumously. One of her books - originally published in 1938 - tells the story of a group of children who find a dead bird.

The children were very sorry the bird was dead and could never fly again. But they were glad they had found it, because now they could dig a grave in the woods and bury it. They could have a funeral and sing to it the way grown-up people did when someone died.

So they take the bird into the woods and bury it, and sing a song to it, and they cry. They mark the bird's grave with a stone.

And every day, until they forgot, they went and sang to their little dead bird and put fresh flowers on his grave.




Recently, walking down the hallway to my office, I have often thought of this story. My office building has outer walls that are mostly windows. At the bottom of the windows on my floor is a narrow metal ledge, only 5 inches or so wide. One day a month or two ago I noticed on the ledge outside my office door the body of a small yellow-green bird, lying on its side; it was clearly dead. It was sad, seeing the body of this little female goldfinch right outside our window. I tried not to look, as I went in and out of my office.

Someone propped a book up against the window, so we wouldn't see it, every time we walked by.

Sometime after that, the dead bird was gone. I don't know what happened to it, but it was gone.

And now the book is now back on the shelf.

The Morning After

On Friday morning, the dishwasher - the one we bought the day after Thanksgiving two years ago - was open and full of clean glassware; I had washed the first load of dishes soon after we had finished eating, but there were still people at the table, and we had left the glasses in place. So sometime during the evening Tom did a second load. There were still some dishes left to wash, and of course there were leftovers. Empty bottles to put in recycling, and lots of wine left; it was only Tom and Mark who lingered at the dining room table into the night, this year, and we had been prepared for more, just in case.

It was a couple of weeks ago I asked Tom how many people we were expecting for Thanksgiving, and he said he didn't know. This was a little alarming, but when I asked if he remembered who all he had invited, he said he did. Sunday night we were at Little Szechuan for dinner and it seemed like a good time to ask him for the guest list; I wrote down the names on a receipt in my wallet and then counted them up. It was eleven, if Angela came, and ten, if she didn't. Ten or eleven is a good number; we can seat ten people at the dining room table pretty comfortably, which meant we could squeeze another in if we needed to. Iain really doesn't like being relegated to the kids' table so I was glad we all would fit.

An unexpectedly anxiety-inducing road trip last Saturday to pick up the turkey. I had forgotten that we'd ordered a heritage turkey again this year, until I got the email from the farm that pick-up day for turkeys was November 19, from noon to 3 p.m. So we could pick up Caroline on the same trip, since Athens is on the way. Let's hope there's not a football game.

But there was a football game. Tom talked to both the Athens police and the university police, and they told him we should be able to drive around Athens during the game, there just wouldn't be anywhere to park. The game was, roughly, noon to 3 p.m. But it should work if we picked up Caroline at noon and then went to Elberton to get the turkey, or got the turkey at noon and then went to pick up Caroline.

Elberton was farther from Athens than we remembered, and the GPS plowed us into game traffic, and of course we didn't have a map to figure out an alternative route. But it all worked out. At the farm, there were very cute piglets in a pen and a flock of guinea fowl wandering around. Tom measured the turkey with a tape measure to make sure it would fit in the smoker (it would), and then our turkey went into the cooler and we headed for Athens.

Most of the campus had sort of a neutron-bomb-had-hit-it feel - tents and folding chairs but no people, and many of the students already gone for Thanksgiving break - but there were a few groups that had stayed in place and were watching the game on television. (I wondered later if they also had generators there, to run their televisions.) We got out of town before the game ended, although on the way back to Atlanta it feel a little like we were trying to outrun a tsunami that we thought might be behind us. But it all worked.

When the job is complex, timing is critical, and the consequences are high, one can minimize the chance of failure by establishing standardized procedures and making checklists. And that's how I do Thanksgiving dinner. We have roughly the same menu every year, and I have in my Thanksgiving binder a master ingredient-and-shopping list, and I make notes on things that need to be done differently next year. But the bread machine's broken (it makes noise but no longer moves the bread around - I think we probably wore it out) and since we weren't expecting Fred after all, I really needed to make bread. I had tried to get the things ahead of time that my neighborhood Kroger stores had sold out of in Thanksgivings past, and shopped for the rest of it on my way home from work on Wednesday. We had yeast and whole-wheat flour, but I forgot that we needed powdered milk for the bread so Tom stopped for it on the way back from the gym Wednesday night.

Wednesday night, I made the cranberry sauce and cooked the squash. Thursday morning, I started the bread as soon as I was up, but it wasn't in time to avoid conflict with the pies for cooking temperatures. Kroger had changed the recipe on the back of the pumpkin can - it now called for heavy whipping cream instead of one of the cans of sweetened condensed milk - and we didn't have whipping cream, but we did have another recipe in the notebook with my lists. After Sarah had the pumpkin pies in the oven, Caroline made a blueberry pie using a new recipe. I tried to bake the bread with the blueberry pie but the oven was too hot and I thought I'd ruined it. So Tom went to the store for bread and I called him while he was there and asked him to get aluminum foil. Maybe the bread would be okay if I covered it with foil while it finished baking. It was sometime after my near-meltdown over the failed bread that Sarah said, "I love Thanksgiving. We all get mad at each other in the morning but then when we sit down to eat it's all okay."

Fred came by after all, before we ate, and he and Keith traded notes about serving on aircraft carriers during the Vietnam war. The food was great. Mark came and Angela did not. Keith and the girls left after dessert but Mark stayed into the evening and he and Tom talked about music and played guitars.

The dishwasher worked just fine. Fred brought us a loaf of sourdough bread, and after baking a while longer with aluminum foil on top, my whole-wheat bread was fine, too.

It was a good Thanksgiving.

The Last Chapter

Years ago - before Caroline was born - I was an officer in a local organization for women physicians. I don't quite remember how I got involved in this, but both the president and vice-president were spouses of people I knew from work, so that probably had something to do with it. I remember there were some meetings at people's houses, and that we sponsored a reception for a distinguished Emory faculty member who had just gotten a lifetime achievement award from a national organization. I spent an enormous amount of time putting together several issues of a newsletter for the group. I used WordPerfect, which at least at the time wasn't optimal software for newsletter publishing, and it was a lot of trouble, just to get it to look right. And I spent a lot of time working on content. This was before Google, so I was on the lookout in the newspaper for news about women physicians in the community that might be of interest. Once it was all done, I'd take it to Kinko's and get it copied on ledger-sized paper and folded for mailing, then print out mailing labels on my 9-pin printer and put it in the mail. I think the three of us did a pretty good job, but then I had my first child and I had no more time to spend on putting together a newsletter or for that matter much of anything else. I don't remember what happened after that, and I had forgotten about it.

A year or two ago I heard from Rachel, who had been president when I was the secretary, with the news that somehow there never was a successful handoff to the next set of officers. This wouldn't have mattered so much, but there was still quite a bit of money in the organization's bank account, and we had to do our due diligence to either try to find some new officers or officially put the group out of business. Carol, the former vice-president, no longer lived in Atlanta, so it was just Rachel and I. Rachel hired someone to send out a letter to our distribution list and there was a meeting at a restaurant, somewhere, to see if anyone was interested in taking the chapter over. No one was. There was one more outreach and then - absent any alternative - the decision was to close the bank account and send the money to the national organization.

So Rachel tried to do that, but it turned out that only Carol and I were signatories on the account. Rachel sent me the paperwork to get her added to the account but I never got it done. I would periodically get an email from her, asking when I could go to the bank with her to close out the account. The times that worked for her were always bad for me. There were a few final checks a couple of months ago, covering the costs of mailing and a deposit Rachel had made just to keep the account active. But the days I took off from work and had time to go to the bank were not days that worked for her.

Then, on Monday I had to go to the Bank of America to deposit some money for the Girl Scout's fall product sale. Girl Scout product sales - including the cookies that will be on sale in a few months - are set up as cash sales. The directions say don't keep more cash than you can afford to replace if it's lost or stolen, but you have to go to the bank in person to deposit it, which suggests to me that they think all their volunteers work for Bank of America (and can easily do this, during the hours the bank is open). But I digress. So I emailed Rachel and told her I would try to close the account while I was there, and if she would tell me what to do with the check, I would mail it.

At the bank that afternoon, I deposited my $57 for the Girl Scouts, and then told the teller I needed to close an account. Personal? A business? An organization, I told him; I showed him the checkbook. It would be a few minutes; have a seat.

Just a couple of minutes later I was invited into an office, and the banker pulled up the account. Carol and I were signatories on it; did I have ID? I gave him my driver's license. I told him I wanted to purchase a cashier's check for the balance of the account; he said they'd give me the cashier's check, that I didn't have to buy it. So I wrote a last check for the account balance - $19,720.24 - to the American Medical Women's Association, and he asked a little apologetically for a second ID ("because of the size of the check.") I gave him my passport. He disappeared with the check, my driver's license, and my passport and came back a few minutes later with my documents and a cashier's check, made out to AMWA. It was done.

That evening Rachel emailed me a cover letter to send with the check, and asked what the final amount was. I told her, and that the banker had told me that the account had been opened sixty years ago. She responded back that it said a lot about how things had changed for women physicians that there apparently was no longer a recognized need for a local organization like this one (although she thought there was still a need at the national level). I thought this was an interesting observation, and she may be right - on the other hand, organizations generally are not fairing so well in modern life. I asked her if she'd read Bowling Alone. No, she replied, should she? Yes, I told her, it's one of my favorite books.

In his book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam makes the case that both formal and informal social ties have massively frayed in the modern United States, and that this actually matters - that social ties contribute in important ways both to our personal well-being and the strength of our nation. Thinking back to all that time I spent putting together that newsletter, years ago, and putting a first class stamp on each one and dropping the bundles in the mail - it was an effort to tie together somehow a group of busy professional women who were too busy in the end to keep the organization going.

Sixty years ago, there were many fewer women in the medical profession, and they were of a generation that were more organizationally-inclined than their daughters and granddaughters. Now, of course, if we did want to network with other women physicians in the community we would do it differently. If we had a newsletter at all, it would go out by email, but we probably wouldn't have a newsletter; we'd have a website or a Facebook group or a blog. (This is one of the reasons that the Postal Service is in trouble.) But we're busy - we have jobs and kids and causes we're passionate about - and maybe this category doesn't resonate any more.

On Tuesday morning on my way to work I dropped the letter into the mailbox.

Autumn Again

I was only gone five and a half days, but when I came back, the lemon tree had been moved to Kathy and Steve's porch, and yesterday morning there was frost on the windshield.  The ginkgoes in the neighborhood are now mostly yellow, but ours - always the last one in the neighborhood to change color - was yellow-green yesterday; today, it's more yellow that yellow-green.  There's a Japanese maple on Cumberland that is red on the top, orange in the middle, and green on the bottom.  It's cold enough that the dog doesn't mind being outside.  An email from the farm in Elberton that we need to come next Saturday to pick up our turkey.  First quarter report cards and midterm exams.  Who's in town who can work the Friday after Thanksgiving?

The house on Cumberland that was empty and unfinished for so long has been finished up, modern (from looking at it from the outside) and ecofriendly (according the the sign in the front yard).  It's not stylistically a match for the 1920s bungalows on the street, but there are no Design Police in our neighborhood, telling you what's acceptable and what's not as far as the appearance of your house is concerned.  (If there were, probably someone would have words with me, as we are still flying the flag of the Kingdom of Libya at our house.)  It looks like they did a wonderful job of transforming the empty white box into a beautiful home.  Last night, as we drove to the symphony, we saw people in the dining room, a bottle of wine on the table.  There never was a "For Sale" sign in front of the house, after the work started; whoever was responsible for the completed renovation apparently planned to live there, and now I think they do.

Up the street, Millie and Jon are putting a second story on their house.  Although there is still a construction dumpster in the front yard, the exterior work seems mostly to be done.  Friends have been coming to help them with interior painting.  They have a compelling deadline for completing the work, with a baby on the way.  Their architect did a good job, with a design that fits the street.  The only "For Sale" signs on the street are at the apartments at Wessyngton and Highland, which still are on the market as a site for Three Luxury Homes.  They have been on the market for a long time.

The analysis of the ten sickest housing markets in the United States in August listed Atlanta as number 4; I suspect our friends in the apartments are not going to have to move just yet.  Yesterday I mentioned to Tom that it's been a long time since I've seen shattered car parts on the sidewalk on North Highland; we've assumed that this is an economic indicator, of sort, that the Drinking and Driving Set are spending less at bars south of us before driving home.  So I knew what he was talking about when he said, "We should have known it wasn't real."  A fake affluence, driving by an artificial rise in the price of housing, ultimately did in the U.S. economy in 2008, and even though the numbers say that things are getting better, it doesn't feel that way.

A chickadee grabs a sunflower seed from the feeder on my dining room window.  Leaves on the ground in the back yard.  I need to do something with those lemons, and clear out a space in the freezer for the turkey.  It's that time of year.

Mass Transit

I was in Geneva this week attending a meeting. In the baggage claim area at the Geneva airport, there is a machine that - when you press the button - will give you a free ticket for public transportation into the city. You can use it on the train - the train station is next door - or the bus. There are many trains an hour. They all stop at the Geneva station so you just get on one with your free ticket and go. Usually no one asks to see your ticket during the ten minute ride into the city.

When you check into your hotel, the hotel will give you a transit pass good for the duration of your stay. There are buses and trolleys that go throughout the Geneva area. There may be somewhere you can't get via the public transit system but there's never been anywhere I needed to go that I could figure out how to get to. The buses run frequently and although a valid ticket is required to ride the bus, I've never seen tickets checked. You just get on, your ticket in your pocket. Not having to check tickets makes boarding the bus much faster; you can board through any door, rather than having to file past the driver and present your ticket. But you are required to have a valid ticket, and if asked you have to produce it; if you don't have it, there is a stiff fine. I've never seen anyone be asked to show their ticket on a bus, but people buy tickets at the automated ticket machine at the stop, and I assume that the ones who don't have weekly or monthly transit passes. (I assume also that this is why they make such an effort to provide transit passes to visitors, who could just assume they don't need tickets and get themselves in trouble.) And I've never seen any kind of of disorderly conduct or bad behavior on public transit there. Everyone is quiet and polite.

With the parking problems at my workplace, there's been a big push for us to consider mass transit, and I have thought about riding the bus to work. But I haven't quite figured out how to do it. And how do you buy a transit card on the bus? There aren't vending machines at every bus stop like there are in Geneva. But I did ride MARTA to the airport on Sunday. Tom dropped me off at Lindburgh and I successfully put $20 on a transit card (so maybe I can ride the bus sometime). I had to carry my suitcase down the stairs - there was no "down" escalator that I saw - and I waited on the platform for the train.

A train came quickly but it was being taken out of service, so they made everyone who was on it get off. MARTA employees walked the length of the train to make sure everyone was off. Then the train left the station, empty of passengers, and we waited.

I don't know if he got off the train that was taken out of service, or if he was there when I arrived, or if he came later, but sometime after the train left, I heard him, talking loudly not clearly to anyone in particular (not that I could tell for sure, and I didn't want to look). It seemed threatening enough, this string of random obscenities, that we moved away from him. No one talked. No one wanted to make eye contact. The unstated fear of a deranged person picking someone at random off the platform and tossing them on the tracks. And the MARTA employees, who had so diligently made sure that no one stayed on the train being taken out of service, were no where to be seen.

It seemed like it took a long time for the next train to come. We breathed easier when the doors closed and the man with the loud voice wasn't in our car. There were several of us with suitcases. At some point a guy with a bicycle got on. Then - I think it was at North Avenue - two young women and a young man with numbers like they give you when you participate in a race pinned to their shirts got on the train. I figured they'd been in a 5K earlier in the day, or had walked to support finding a cure for some terrible disease. One had a clipboard, which is unusual for a 5K, and they didn't seem to be dressed for running. I thought one of them was carrying a GPS. Maybe they were geocaching? But with race numbers on their shirts?

Then one of the young women knelt down next to me and said, "I don't want to scare you, but we're on a scavenger hunt, and we need to find someone with an out-of-state driver's license." (Why she thought I would be so easily frightened I don't know, but then I *had* been frightened at the station; maybe that still showed.) I told her I couldn't help, but other passengers with suitcases spoke up, and a young man volunteered that he was from Virginia. Did he have a driver's license? They needed a photo of themselves with him, and they needed a close up of him with his Virginia driver's license. The woman sitting next to me obligingly took the group photo ("get closer together, okay, that's it"). They also needed someone wearing clothing for for a non-Atlanta professional sports team. The request got passed halfway up our car, but no one could help with that. The three of them got off somewhere downtown, but the idea of teams of people wandering around Atlanta on a scavenger hunt left me with a smile.

Monday afternoon after the long plane ride and the short train ride, I got to my hotel and I found the event on line - they were participating in the Atlanta Challenge, part of a national series of events sponsored by Challenge Nation. I'd never heard of it before, but it sounded like fun.

As the week went on, I rode the bus uneventfully to and from my meeting every day, and back to the airport early yesterday morning. On none of those rides did anything interesting happen. Nothing at all.

Harvest

My father was a wonderful gardener. When we lived in Kansas, we had a large garden and he grew corn, tomatoes, cantaloupes, watermelons, boysenberries, cucumbers, and lettuce. There was rich soil, and full sun, and a well my father dug. When we moved to Woodward, we joked about the small back yard that was almost completely covered with a concrete patio; he said he didn't want a big garden anymore, that it was too much work. But he couldn't stand it; he ended up taking out part of the driveway with a sledge hammer and planting tomatoes.

I, on the other hand, am not much of a gardener, although I keep making these ineffectual attempts. At the beginning of the summer, I bought some lettuce plants at the farmers' market. I set them in the bed in the front yard and forgot about them; by the time I remembered, they were dried up and dead. The strawberries in the front bed - descendants of plants placed there a few years ago - did produce some wonderfully sweet strawberries early in the summer but as soon as the squirrels found them, they disappeared as soon as they started to ripen. The blueberries disappeared and so did the few blackberries on our new blackberry bush. I planted some heirloom tomatoes but got not a single tomato off of them. If we were responsible for producing our own food, we'd have to live on squirrel and mulberry jam.

There's one exception, though, to my amazing failure to grow anything edible. A couple of years ago, Iain and I were at Pike's and we bought a small lemon tree. The tree was in a pot, small enough it could be easily moved; it reminded me of the orange tree my dad used to have in my parents' kitchen. So we set it out in the front yard, in front of our house, and there it  bloomed, and made some small green fruit, but the small lemons it made ended up all falling off. The tree ended up spending the first winter on Kathy and Steve's porch and when I got it back in the spring it had lost all its leaves. The leaves grew back, and it bloomed several more times, with wonderfully fragrant blossoms, but it didn't make any lemons. It spent last winter in our foyer.

But this year after it bloomed the little lemons didn't fall off, and they grew to be lemon-sized.  They stayed green for month after month, and I didn't think they were ever going to ripen (maybe they had heard what happens to ripening fruit in our yard).  But then they turned yellow, and suddenly we had real lemons.



Last night, right after I look this picture, we picked them. They are beautiful.



I told Iain I think we need to make something special with them.  Maybe we'll make a lemon tart and some marmalade.  But definitely something special, with these glorious bright yellow lemons.