We get weeks of entertainment for what we’d spend on a couple of movie tickets and popcorn.
We buy a bag of bird seed, fill the feeder, and sit back and watch the action.
Our bird feeder hangs from a limb of a white oak tree just outside our dining room window; since we are on a steep hillside, that means the feeder is 25 feet or so above the ground. It is attached to a line which runs through a pulley so I can lower the feeder to refill it.
I’ve had to fill the feeder a couple of times a day lately as we have witnessed what could be described as avian food riots. I’m almost afraid not to refill it when so many of them seem to stare in the window impatiently waiting.
Goldfinches predominate at this time of year. They are not yet the canary yellow that will identify them later on Instead the are a sort of yellowish green.
They teem in the trees, contesting for perching places on the feeder. Squadrons of them drop to the ground like rocks, gleaning seeds that have been spilled.
A red-bellied woodpecker steams into the feeder like a battleship among destroyers, scattering the smaller birds, which return as soon as the larger bird departs. His smaller cousin, the hairy woodpecker, doesn’t cause that kind of alarm.
Other birds come to the feeder, too: chickadees and house finches and titmice and nuthatches, those funny little birds that walk down a tree trunk facing down, and the occasional sparrow. Brilliant male cardinals and less flamboyant females sit on the branches looking longingly at the feeder and make an occasional pass at it, but they are too large to feed easily.
Squirrels play chase around the trees, leaping from one pencil-sized limb to another. They sometimes venture out on the limb above the feeder and even hang by their back legs and try to access the bountiful supply of sunflower seeds, but they find that the shutters close -- or that I will lean out of the window and yell at them -- so they mostly scurry around the ground under the feeder, claiming spilt seeds. They are joined by the doves, also too large for the feeder.
A trio of mallards occasional waddles along the ground under the feeder, even the odd crow shows up briefly.
From early morning until later afternoon the area around the feeder is as frenetic
as at an anthill that has just been kicked.
When the gold finches depart, traffic at the bird feeder will drop.
But we’ll soon be putting out the hummingbird feeders and it will be warm enough to sit on the front deck and watch their aerial antics.
Meanwhile, we sit comfortably behind our double glazed, lingering over lunch and marveling at the show outside.
Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
TR's words have contemporary ring
On my way to re-reading President Eisenhower’s farewell address, I got sidetracked by Teddy Roosevelt.
It was not a presidential speech that snared my attention, but one that he delivered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Oct. 14, 1912.
Roosevelt had already served as president as a Republican and was now running as the nominee of the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party that he had created.
He delivered the speech with an assassin’s bullet still in his chest.
We think of ourselves as a peaceful people, but presidents have not fared so well. Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy are perhaps the most famous victims of assassination, but there were also James A. Garfield and William McKinley. And attempts were made on the lives of Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. That’s 20 percent of American presidents who have been the targets of violence.
And then there is Roosevelt, who ascended to the presidency upon the death of McKinley.
The campaign of 1912 was a bitter one, with William Howard Taft as the Republican nominee, Woodrow Wilson as the Democratic nominee and Roosevelt as the major figures. The Socialist Eugene V. Debs was a minor figure.
Roosevelt’s life was spared in Milwaukee because a folded copy of the speech he planned to deliver and a steel spectacles case in his breast pocket were enough to slow the .38 caliber bullet.
Roosevelt didn’t deliver all of his prepared speech in Milwaukee, but here are some of the things he did say:
“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet - there is where the bullet went through - and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.
“... I want to say something very serious to our people and especially to the newspapers....
“Now, I do not know who he was or what he represented. He was a coward. He stood in the darkness in the crowd around the automobile and when they cheered me, and I got up to bow, he stepped forward and shot me in the darkness.
“Now, friends, of course, I do not know, as I say, anything about him; but it is a very natural thing that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months by the papers in the interest of not only Mr. Debs but of Mr. Wilson and Mr. Taft.
“Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party; and now I wish to say seriously to all the daily newspapers, to the Republicans, the Democrat, and Socialist parties, that they cannot, month in month out and year in and year out, make the kind of untruthful, of bitter assault that they have made and not expect that brutal, violent natures, or brutal and violent characters, especially when the brutality is accompanied by a not very strong mind; they cannot expect that such natures will be unaffected by it.
...”What I care for is my country. I wish I were able to impress upon my people – our people – the duty to feel strongly but to speak the truth of their opponents. I say now, I have never said one word on the stump against any opponent that I cannot defend. I have said nothing that I could not substantiate and nothing that I ought not to have said – nothing that I – nothing that, looking back at, I would not say again.
“And now, friends, this incident that has just occurred – this effort to assassinate me – emphasizes to a peculiar degree the need of the Progressive movement. Friends, every good citizen ought to do everything in his or her power to prevent the coming of the day when we shall see in this country two recognized creeds fighting one another, when we shall see the creed of the "Havenots" arraigned against the creed of the "Haves." When that day comes then such incidents as this to-night will be commonplace in our history. When you make poor men – when you permit the conditions to grow such that the poor man as such will be swayed by his sense of injury against the men who try to hold what they improperly have won, when that day comes, the most awful passions will be let loose and it will be an ill day for our country.”
Roosevelt’s words, spoken nearly a century ago, sound uncannily contemporary.
Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com
It was not a presidential speech that snared my attention, but one that he delivered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Oct. 14, 1912.
Roosevelt had already served as president as a Republican and was now running as the nominee of the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party that he had created.
He delivered the speech with an assassin’s bullet still in his chest.
We think of ourselves as a peaceful people, but presidents have not fared so well. Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy are perhaps the most famous victims of assassination, but there were also James A. Garfield and William McKinley. And attempts were made on the lives of Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. That’s 20 percent of American presidents who have been the targets of violence.
And then there is Roosevelt, who ascended to the presidency upon the death of McKinley.
The campaign of 1912 was a bitter one, with William Howard Taft as the Republican nominee, Woodrow Wilson as the Democratic nominee and Roosevelt as the major figures. The Socialist Eugene V. Debs was a minor figure.
Roosevelt’s life was spared in Milwaukee because a folded copy of the speech he planned to deliver and a steel spectacles case in his breast pocket were enough to slow the .38 caliber bullet.
Roosevelt didn’t deliver all of his prepared speech in Milwaukee, but here are some of the things he did say:
“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet - there is where the bullet went through - and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.
“... I want to say something very serious to our people and especially to the newspapers....
“Now, I do not know who he was or what he represented. He was a coward. He stood in the darkness in the crowd around the automobile and when they cheered me, and I got up to bow, he stepped forward and shot me in the darkness.
“Now, friends, of course, I do not know, as I say, anything about him; but it is a very natural thing that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months by the papers in the interest of not only Mr. Debs but of Mr. Wilson and Mr. Taft.
“Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party; and now I wish to say seriously to all the daily newspapers, to the Republicans, the Democrat, and Socialist parties, that they cannot, month in month out and year in and year out, make the kind of untruthful, of bitter assault that they have made and not expect that brutal, violent natures, or brutal and violent characters, especially when the brutality is accompanied by a not very strong mind; they cannot expect that such natures will be unaffected by it.
...”What I care for is my country. I wish I were able to impress upon my people – our people – the duty to feel strongly but to speak the truth of their opponents. I say now, I have never said one word on the stump against any opponent that I cannot defend. I have said nothing that I could not substantiate and nothing that I ought not to have said – nothing that I – nothing that, looking back at, I would not say again.
“And now, friends, this incident that has just occurred – this effort to assassinate me – emphasizes to a peculiar degree the need of the Progressive movement. Friends, every good citizen ought to do everything in his or her power to prevent the coming of the day when we shall see in this country two recognized creeds fighting one another, when we shall see the creed of the "Havenots" arraigned against the creed of the "Haves." When that day comes then such incidents as this to-night will be commonplace in our history. When you make poor men – when you permit the conditions to grow such that the poor man as such will be swayed by his sense of injury against the men who try to hold what they improperly have won, when that day comes, the most awful passions will be let loose and it will be an ill day for our country.”
Roosevelt’s words, spoken nearly a century ago, sound uncannily contemporary.
Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com
Friday, February 5, 2010
Putting the Shards Together
“It’s a semi-true story, believe it or not, I made up a few things and there’s some I forgot…”
Jimmy Buffett song
Although we are only a year apart, my sister and I have some very different memories of childhood – not just points of view but entire episodes.
That came home to us on one of my recent visits to my hometown. We were talking as we drove to one of her job sites, and for some reason the conversation turned to childhood. (Of course, reminders of childhood are everywhere in my hometown, more so since Sis’s house is only a few feet from where the house where I grew up stood.)
I recounted an incident that had a lasting impact on me one that happened when we were five or six years old. I was surprised that she did not remember it at all.
Other events from childhood bubbled up, and we realized that each of us had an entire catalog of memories that the other had long forgotten.
I am sure we have different recollections of the same events, too, though we didn’t get that far in our conversation.
So we made a bargain of sorts.
I told her that I would write down some of the things that I remember and will send that collection to her so she can add her own memories and perspectives on the things that we both remember.
Eventually we will pass it all along to our brother, who is four and a half years younger. He will, I am sure, have memories that are totally foreign to the two of us.
I am up early, and sunrise lately has found me at the keyboard, savoring a cup of coffee as I engage in my own form of time travel. It is curious how one memory leads to others, and I pause to jot down the topics before they wing away.
Some of the memories are happy ones –we tend to use those to crowd out the demons from the past – and some still bring a twinge of pain. Some, perhaps, are best left buried.
I do not know what my sister and my brother and I will do with this project, assuming we actually finish. We are not writing autobiography or even a coherent narrative. Rather we are putting together pieces, rather like trying to reconstruct an old pot when some of the shards are missing. One day our children or grandchildren may want to explore the relics.
At some point I will have to decide that childhood has been covered. Not too soon, though. I keep thinking of stuff that Sis might be interested in.
“...But the life and the telling are both real to me, and they all run together and turn out to be a semi-true story.”
Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com
Jimmy Buffett song
Although we are only a year apart, my sister and I have some very different memories of childhood – not just points of view but entire episodes.
That came home to us on one of my recent visits to my hometown. We were talking as we drove to one of her job sites, and for some reason the conversation turned to childhood. (Of course, reminders of childhood are everywhere in my hometown, more so since Sis’s house is only a few feet from where the house where I grew up stood.)
I recounted an incident that had a lasting impact on me one that happened when we were five or six years old. I was surprised that she did not remember it at all.
Other events from childhood bubbled up, and we realized that each of us had an entire catalog of memories that the other had long forgotten.
I am sure we have different recollections of the same events, too, though we didn’t get that far in our conversation.
So we made a bargain of sorts.
I told her that I would write down some of the things that I remember and will send that collection to her so she can add her own memories and perspectives on the things that we both remember.
Eventually we will pass it all along to our brother, who is four and a half years younger. He will, I am sure, have memories that are totally foreign to the two of us.
I am up early, and sunrise lately has found me at the keyboard, savoring a cup of coffee as I engage in my own form of time travel. It is curious how one memory leads to others, and I pause to jot down the topics before they wing away.
Some of the memories are happy ones –we tend to use those to crowd out the demons from the past – and some still bring a twinge of pain. Some, perhaps, are best left buried.
I do not know what my sister and my brother and I will do with this project, assuming we actually finish. We are not writing autobiography or even a coherent narrative. Rather we are putting together pieces, rather like trying to reconstruct an old pot when some of the shards are missing. One day our children or grandchildren may want to explore the relics.
At some point I will have to decide that childhood has been covered. Not too soon, though. I keep thinking of stuff that Sis might be interested in.
“...But the life and the telling are both real to me, and they all run together and turn out to be a semi-true story.”
Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com
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