a cardinal virtue

I heard the sonorous chirp of what almost sounded like a cardinal, but somewhat off, truncated. It was as if the familiar (to me) sound loop of the male cardinal were skewed, off a few notes. No, more like it was a tape of a male cardinal being played backward, abbreviated. Picture the wind-up bird of Haruki Murakami fame being wound down or rewound.

I looked up.

High in the honey locust tree (I think it was), shading me if I were to stand under its foliage, was, yes, a male cardinal.

The sight shocked me, arrested me.

I was expecting to see a different bird, something unexpected.

But the cardinal himself stopped me, gave me pause as he went through his routine, which I had mistakenly taken to be a tad uncardinalish.

I watched him. And listened.

I wanted to do my mockingbird thing and imitate a typical cardinal song, to see if it would answer my call. (Was the perceived modified male cardinal song modified as some sort of mating ritual?)

But no.

I just stopped and listened.

I wanted to bow or make the sign of the cross through the air.

I did not.

But I was grateful enough to do either.

the silence of the iambs

I just finished a novel by Haruki Murakami imbued with silence. It was as if silence were a character in the novel (in the text; academics like to say text). "Silence descended over them," or words to that effect, appeared on the page many times. As a reader, I felt those silences. They were like white spaces on the layout of a page, or white scenery on a stage, or deep pauses in a conversation, as in a Harold Pinter play. Sometimes the silences were comfortable, reflective; other times, they were painful, anxious. Isn't that a strange thing about humans: that a silence can be rewarding or agonizing? Have silence scientists figured out a way to measure it, gauge its import, its flavor? I suspect they have. And I would not at all be shocked to learn that our bodies give off a smell to provide a clue (or a cue, for that matter) as to what sort of silence is descending, a salubrious silence or a malevolent one. Ours is not a time of silence. Our culture does not care to abide silences. There is little silence of the lambs or of iambs. (Couldn't resist that bit of English-major snobbery.) Silence of the child at the mother's breast, the purring of a cat, the cough in the cathedral pew, the silence of the beads being told. All silences punctuated my minor sounds. Or silence of the phone not ringing, the voice that is no more, the word unkenneled, the interval between lightning and thunder. And so much more. So much less.

white canvas

As is the character in the latest book by Haruki Murakami, am I colorless? I think not. In fact, my lack of colorlessness, my heated hues of opinion, bias, prejudice, and passion, often define me, not in ways I always prefer. Such is what it is, what I am. No, not colorless. Not colorless like Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, a fictional character who saw himself, at some point in his life, as drab, background, plain, unnoticed. A white canvas.

Speaking of white canvas, over by the Erie Canal trail in Minoa, New York, today I read about Canvass White. Great name. And quite the inventor and among the greatest civil engineers. He patented hydraulic cement. No small invention. Hardly a colorless background sort of guy. Or maybe he was, in his personal life. (I don't know.) Can you imagine, though, how hugely important the Erie Canal was? Sort of like the Internet of its day.

Give a tip of the cap to Canvass White, ye technocrats. Kudos to Canvass White, you bridge-builders, skyscraper builders, and highwaymen.

Harold Pinteresque Day

It has been said the plays of the late Harold Pinter are noteworthy not only for what the characters say but also for what they leave unsaid. The unspoken says more than the spoken. Eloquent silences, you might say, to use an oxymoron in a positive light.

Yesterday was a bit of a Harold Pinteresque day for me.

The tirade held in check.

A remonstrance reined in.

An inquisition not implemented.

A showdown averted, deferred.

Listing these, I read them and they present themselves as a rather noble and virtuous inventory, though they may just as easily mask cowardice, depression, or lethargy.

And I can't even tell you which is true.

Plus, I'll never know what the other players felt, skating along the merry edges of Lake Superficial, will I?

Waiting

Doctors use the term "watchful waiting" to describe a form of treatment for cancer patients. The prescription handed to me by the Unseen Hand ordains watchful waiting for me at this post-termination jobless Job-ish-feeling time (okay; I admit to just a teaspoon of melodramatic self-pity). Waiting is hard for me (and for most Americans), never mind adding an Advent-riddled watchfulness to it. So, what am I waiting for? Good question. I am waiting for that one call, e-mail, inquiry, letter, offer to make all things right. And as I write that, I see the fallacy of it. Or should I say the fallacy of IT (uppercase bold oblique underscore 48 point)?

In Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the unemployed narrator, Toru Okada, spends long silent stretches of time in a deep, dark, dry well. He spends days down there, waiting. And the waiting (sometimes watching the ever more blazing stars from the well) wasn't all that bad, was it? He did it on purpose (or was compelled to do so.) He went down to the well, to sit, to wait, to listen, . . . to be.

I am in the well.

Waiting.

I'm not very patient by nature (and after all patience comes from the Latin verb for suffer). My coltish impatience, with its unruly recklessness, sort of got me into the well to begin with. (Or did it? Was it inevitable anyway?)

But I will wait.

I am waiting.

And who isn't waiting?

p.s. I did read Waiting, by Ha Jin, several years ago. I recall that I enjoyed it, but my memory is dim at this hour.

My Oh! My

With all the hoopla over Barry Bonds's chase of Hank Aaron's home run record, you seldom hear the name of Sadaharu Oh.

You should. We all should.

The guy's not gettin' proper props on this homer thing.

A fellow by the name of Jim Albright, at his BaseballGuru.com, makes an impressive case for Oh's enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame. And I concur. Oh-san belongs there.

My introduction to Mr. Oh (as opposed to my clumsy intro to Ms. O in my youth, HAHAHAHAHA) was about twenty years ago, in the superb biography Sadaharu Oh: A Zen Way of Baseball by Sadaharu Oh and David Falkner. (It's actually quite difficult to find this truly excellent book; I should check out that blogger again who was paring down his library for free; now who was that?).

Oh suffered discrimination because of his mixed ancestry; was a pitcher early on, just as Babe Ruth was; played through excruciating pain in a critical game; and -- get this -- swung a samurai sword at a tissue dangling from a string tied to the ceiling to perfect his swing. The key is waiting, waiting. Very Zen. Very Haruki Muakami. Oh. And he hit 868 homers. That's 8-6-8.

Anyway, great baseball players (including Tom Seaver, Davey Johnson, Pete Rose, Hal McRae, Don Baylor, Frank Howard, Greg Luzinski, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, and Don Dyrsdale) have attested to Oh's greatness -- and have all said he would have excelled even in American Major League Baseball. (This is underscored now by all the great Japanese players forging very fine careers over here. Many players can be named. I personally saw Masanori Murakami play at Shea Stadium with my brother in 1964 before a crowd of more than 50,000. It was not only Murakami's debut; he was the first Japanese-born player to play in an American game. And, according to the linked story, he said it was easier to pitch in the U.S. than in Japan.)

So, why the cold-as-fresh-shushi shoulder?

The youth of sports reporters? Xenophobia [which isn't very Zen-like; and why doesn't that word start with a Z, huh?]? Just-plain ignorance?

Don't know.

But, way to go, Mr. Oh!

The Calls of the Wild

Haruki Murakami has his Wind-up Bird; I've got my Unwind Bird. I've even got my Unravel Bird, my Unwindable Bird, and my Long and Winding Road Bird.

I once spent the better part of a year writing haiku, as directed by a spiritual mentor. It was a good suggestion. It forced me to observe the world before me more acutely. And awareness is what It's all about, in't? (Years later, I found the little red notebook I carried around with me while commuting daily from Jersey to Random House in Manhattan. It was pretty cool. In the same book is an autograph of the author James Baldwin, spotted at a Hyatt Hotel lobby in Chicago. But I mentioned this in some previous blog. Oh. That's right. Doesn't matter. Blogging is all about The Eternal Now, baby. Incidentally, in case you missed it at the beginning of this paragraph of digression, the haiku link is perfectly splendid. Really.)

Well, blogging sometimes provides me with the same observational motivation.

I walk out at lunchtime.

I hear the purple finch. I know its lighthearted corkscrew of frivolous song.

In the evening, or sometimes the early morn, I discern the lyrical, slow repetitive lament of the robin, or a mourning dove.

Or the grackle's onomatopoeia.

These are sounds that give me pause. Why does most writing (including blogging) focus on the visual, rather than the olfactory or the aural? (Of course, exceptions abound, such as Marcel Proust, or Patrick Suskind [can you tell me how to add the umlaut over the u?], author of Perfume, which was made into a movie.)

I know perfume can get my tail wagging.

Sometimes flashing neon lights in Naughtyville get me all flustered.

But sounds?

The unmistakable crisp click of heels on a hardwood floor.

The languid reverie of a cardinal.

The "mermaids singing, each to each."

The crack of the bat.

An endless trickle from the aquarium's filter.

The closing of the elevator doors.

The mating-call whisper of the unhooked bra.

The cry of the titmouse (how could I resist?)

An unfettered laugh.

The tap on the keyboard.

The I/O switch.

(A tip of The Laughorist's beak to Naturesongs.com. I've taken poetic liberties in my descriptions, for fun. But this is a seriously great site.)

Sounds used are copyrighted to Naturesongs.com, 1999-2007.

Mr. Wind-up Bird

Haruki Murakami's book The Wind-up Bird Chronicle features a "wind-up bird" as a significant character. It's a bird that makes a strange screech that sounds as if it were winding up the world. . . .whatever the heck that means.

The real-life Mr. Wind-up Bird is Barry Zito. He's the pitcher who shows up at spring training with a new team, a new $126-million contract, and, um, a completely new wind-up.

This is unsettling to Giants fans such as myself (since 1955, the year AFTER they won the World Series, which they have not won since). Mr. Wind-up Bird says it's because he wants to improve. Fine. But I must add he is a pitcher who's never missed a start in seven years, a pitcher who has won the Cy Young Award as recently as 2002. He says he's been working on this for last month and a half, unbeknownst of course to his new employers. Zito compares it to the fabulously successful Tiger Woods's adjustment of his fabulously successful swing in 1997. (Notice how I inserted that traditional [trad] apostrophe S, unlike most journalists.)

Maybe it will work out fine for Mr. Wind-up Bird. Maybe not.

It's akin to Ernest Hemingway switching to a new publisher and submitting a draft of James Joycean prose straight out of the likes of Finnegans Wake.

Or The Meloncutter changing stores and presenting himself as a meatpacker! (There's a word to mull over.)

Or a pole-dance teacher showing up to give instructions on trout fishing.

Or a failed entrepreneur-fratboy-politician trying his hand at U.S. president.

The Door

I've heard it said "when one door closes, another opens." But what happens when one door closes, then opens, and then remains open? Such was my experience this morning. It was very cold, just a little bit above zero degrees Fahrenheit (a German word, if ever there was one; isn't their word for zero "null"? I'm boning up on meine Deutsch in preparation for my odyssey to Berlin, on Friday). This morning was crisply frigid with the sound of crunchy snow under my feet. Invigorating and lustrous. An incandescent beauty greeted me as I looked down from Tipperary Hill onto gleaming wood-frame houses, many -- like ours -- more than one hundred years old. White smoke rising straight up (as if the whole community were announcing "habemas papam") against a cerulean sky. A scene that could be more poetically and mystically described by The Secretary of Dawns. I brushed a veneer of snow off my car, holding my gloves in my hand (if I can remember back that far). (Why do I do that with my gloves? Is it laziness, impatience, or self-destructiveness?) I placed the key in the car door. It is not a car door that can be unlocked or locked electronically. The 1999 Ford Contour (listed on the registration as green but it strikes me as more olive-tan) is not paid off (technically, yes, but it was paid by borrowing money at a cheaper interest rate than the original loan), and sports very retro manually locking (or unlocking) doors. I turned the key right, left, then right again, then left, encountering frozen resistance, which I expected, since the lock had recently been sticking, largely owing, I felt, to the moist weather followed by sudden temperature plunges. Happily the door opened. (In that preceding use of the adverb happily, does it refer to the door or the act of opening? Well, if it is truly functioning as an adverb, it must refer to the verb opened. Admittedly, it is an adverb that squintingly tries to modify the whole sentence -- as does the word admittedly in this sentence.) But the door did not close. More accurately, it did not stay closed. (This was not a shock; the same thing happened earlier in the week.) I slammed it, figuring that a jarring thrust might do the trick, dislodging ice or frigidity, as if the door were an illuminating and glistening sexual metaphor. No luck. I lustily slammed it several times, and still the door would not latch closed. I sprayed WD-40 onto the keyhole, onto the door's locking mechanism, and onto the latch on the frame of the car. You might say I sprayed both the male and female lock components. I even sprayed the manual lock lever on the inside of the driver's (moi) car door, leaving an oily smell, but not nearly as much as I had expected, perhaps because of the cold. All the while, the car was running, defrosters going. I felt that perhaps the environmentally suspect act of warming up the car might generate a cumulative de-icing effect (I have a small de-icer spray device, but I didn't bother; it didn't work the other day). I even tried closing the door tenderly and gently, as if treating it thusly would coax it to surrender romantically into its rightful niche in the universe. No deal. I tried to lift the door up while closing it, imagining it may have been misaligned (as opposed to maligned, hence the slamming). Time was ticking away. I was already late for work (typical). The morning was still beautiful. Lambent. I pictured neighbors (neighbors are very close by; even a driveway is a treat; the house of our down-the-hill neighbors, renters, is maybe five feet from our house, a proximity that bestows upon one and all the obligation to refrain from loud arguments or boisterous carnality, especially in summer). After a few more futile slams of the door, I decided to drive to work. As is. After all, I had managed to drive my youngster to school like this the other day, and the situation ultimately cleared itself up after I arrived at the school. The drive to work is under three miles. It went well, if comically. Oh. Let me point out that I drive a standard shift. So, picture The Laughorist, true to his appellation, driving the car, shifting gears, and holding fast the door with his left hand (I am left-handed), and perhaps managing a self-effacing smile garnished with my new DKNY Euro-style hip frames and newly acquired (last night) progressive lenses. I refrained from listening to the Bob Dylan Modern Times CD because I did not want any distractions. Right turns were especially problematic. Physics dictated that a right turn hurled the door orbiting outward. I got a little tired out before even entering the hallowed temple of Labor. But I got there. And not too grouchily or miserably. I didn't especially feel as if This Is Happening To Me, Poor Me. (Okay, a little bit.) I call this grace. (For the record, a car repair place near work fixed it for thirty-eight dollars and change; cleaning, greasing, etc. They had to open the door up. We'll see. No guarantee it might not happen again.) The whole episode strikes me as a scene out of Haruki Murakami. What lessons can I draw about my encounter with the door? What have I learned, and what greater metaphor applies? What did my friend the door teach me, just for today?

One door opens, with difficulty, then stubbornly stays open, then (with help) closes. One driver smiles. What is the sound of one hand holding the door?

Laugh. Or....

Else.