Ok, Mr. Bluebird, I get the hint

A cold, steady rain kept me inside all afternoon but it didn't ruin the appetites of the birds outside. I guess if you're a bird you eat, rain or shine.

I had a nice brown creeper on my suet feeder as well as a downy woodpecker, a flock of finches on my thistle feeder, and nary a squirrel to be found. Apparently squirrels don't like the rain. Sissies.

I saw my first bluebird of the year, a fat thing sitting on my neighbor's fence. I've never seen so big a bluebird. He was beautiful. I think he was scouting the area for nesting possibilities, because I saw him more than once on the fence (either that or he has a fat cousin). I was so excited.

Then I sat down with my Sunday paper, and what do you know? The local bird column was all about the bluebird. And then, a bluebird plays a prominent role in a chapter of the Daniel Wallace novel I'm reading, Ray in Reverse.

Ok, I get the hint. I put the paper down and built a birdhouse.

The wood scraps I built it with, ironically, came from my neighbor's fence. The fence is a very nice shadowbox with each section topped with a convex arch. The fence installers, after cutting each piece of the arch, flung the scraps into the woods behind my neighbor's house, and I, being the descendent of various Depression survivors, packrats, and anti-litterers, gathered the scraps for future, undetermined use.

It's not a bad looking birdhouse, if I say so myself. I took woodshop in junior high and high school but carpentry was not to be in my future. I didn't have a blueprint (no pun intended) but the newspaper article said I didn't need one as long as my entry hole was 1 1/2" in diameter. That was the hard part because I was out of jig saw blades. Yes, I have a jig saw, a hand-me-down, avocado-green relic from Mr. DePaul, who is much handier with tools (and blueprints). I used a cheap keyhole saw, so the hole is a little rough and not quite round. We'll see how picky Mr. Bluebird is.

I noticed my grandfather's initials carved into the handle of the handsaw I used to square up my boards, and as I reached into my toolbox for a hammer I grabbed another castoff from Mr. DePaul. I hope Mr. Bluebird appreciates the three generations of craftsmanship that went into his new home, though I doubt he'll care. He probably has getting the missus in the family way on his mind, which is ok by me. That just means more bluebirds.

I have plenty of scrap wood left. Party on, Mr. B.

Chris Rocks the Oscars

I've paid only peripheral interest to the fallout as comedian Chris Rock was tapped to host this year's Academy Awards show, so forgive me if I don't have all my facts straight.

This is the Internet, after all.

It is amazing that so much attention is paid to the process of producing this mind-numbing spectacle. Often, the annual unveiling of the host rivals the awards themselves for drama. Will it be Billy Crystal, for the 42nd time? How about Steve Martin? He's between book signings. Say, what about Johnny Car... oh, wait, he's dead. A woman? Yeah, we need a woman!

As soon as Chris Rock was announced, the feeding frenzy began. He's too cutting edge for The Academy, some said. I can't believe Cates and Horvitz chose him, he's too controversial. Speculation was that The Academy would step in, say it was all a mistake, and give it to Bob Hop... oh, wait, he's dead, too.

Then the host-to-be opened his mouth. He said that black men don't watch the Oscars. Then he said that straight men don't watch the Oscars. Then he feigned shock that anyone would watch the Oscars.

Which is precisely the reason he has the job. To get people to watch the Oscars.

There is no controversy. Never has been. The producer and director didn't pull a fast one on the staid Academy Powers-That-Be as they sat in wicker chairs on a palm-tree-ringed veranda with blankets on their laps lunching on cold avocado soup and sourdough scones.

People, please get this, once and for all. Hollywood's biggest export is not film. It is hype. Marketing. Artifice.

Too often we fall for it. We even fall for it when we talk about the other one billion Oscar viewers who fall for it. Every single year.

So everyone please calm down.

If you were planning to watch the Oscars before Chris Rock was named the host, by all means watch. Get the firmest sacro-supporting pillow you can find, procure an ample supply of the three V's (Vitamins, Visine, and Vioxx), and hunker down for the duration (hopefully you went through your Oscar-watching drills during the Superbowl pre-game marathon).

If you weren't planning to watch the Oscars until you heard that Chris Rock would be hosting, by all means watch. He'll probably say some funny stuff. May even make some young starlet cry. Odds are that he'll get bleeped. Just don't beat yourself up too badly when it hits you that you fell for the hype.

If you weren't planning to watch the Oscars regardless of who will be the host, then don't watch. Read a book. Watch Prime Minister's Questions on C-SPAN. Go to a movie, even. Just don't pretend that you watched it when all your friends who fell for the hype talk about it on Monday morning. And please, don't try to quote the bleeped jokes off the Drudge Report. You'll never get the inflections right and you'll just look sad.

You know who I always hold out hope that they'll get to host the Oscars? Elvis Pres... oh, wait, he's dead, too?

Giuseppe painted, too?

Moretti murals surface near coal mine museum

(By the way, my profile photo is of Giuseppe Moretti with a scale model of his Vulcan statue. Now you know.)

I take back some of the nice things I said about MARTA

Televisions on MARTA trains?

Tombstone, Alabama

Aunt Bee was blessed with some unseasonably warm weather for her weekend visit.

As well as some rain. She enjoyed listening to the rainfall Sunday night. Apparently it doesn't rain much out west where she lives.

She had told me a couple of weeks ago that she wanted to drive up to our hometown and see how things had changed. I don't get up there much anymore so it sounded like a good idea to me. I asked her what she wanted to see, mentally mapping out the most efficient tour route of schools we'd attended, businesses we'd patronized, and houses we'd lived in or visited the kinfolks in. She predictably named a few of them before mentioning one specifically.

Will you take me to see Foozy?

Foozy. Wow. I hadn't been to see her in several years. Foozy was Aunt Bee's grandmother; my great-grandmother. She was a sweet thing, and I feel robbed that I didn't know her in her prime. She was stricken with Parkinson's disease shortly after I was born; my memories consist of her shuffling along behind an aluminum walker and her sitting cross-legged in a big naugahyde chair wearing a cotton house dress with her thumbs and forefingers clacking together uncontrollably like an ambidextrous telegraph operator. She died over twenty years ago, during my first semester of college. On the day of her funeral I left the college bookstore after spending the astronomical sum of $180 buying textbooks to find a parking ticket on my windshield for having my back bumper hanging over a yellow curb in one of those welcome-to-the-real-world-you-ain't-in-high-school-no-more cosmic coincidences.

Yes, I'll take you to see Foozy, I replied. But that wasn't all. She wanted to see where Foozy's sisters were buried, so I agreed to take her there. And then she wanted to see where her father's (my grandfather's) folks are buried, and I agreed to take her there. And to the schools. And to the businesses. And to the houses.

It was quite a list but I thought it through and had a pretty good route picked out. There were a couple of shortcomings with my plan, however. First, it would take a good bit of time and miles to fit it all in. Second, Zelda, Lovett, and Dora wanted to go as well.

I wasn't worried about Zelda. She has proven time and again that she will follow me anywhere. Dora was a natural concern simply because her age, attention span, and bladder capacity are all in the single digits. Lovett was a concern because, well, because he's Lovett.

Lovett and I often clash during those teachable moments between a father and a son. If I explicitly try to impart some knowledge to him about something, he sometimes rebels with exasperated huffs and eye-rolls. He told me the last time we were at Vulcan Park as I pointed out the cooling towers of Miller Steam Plant on the horizon, Please, dad, no more geography! Being cooped up in a van with him for a couple of hours of intermittent cemetery stops didn't sound like the best possible Saturday, but for Aunt Bee's sake I determined that if I could handle it, he could too.

We quickly checked the first two cemeteries off our list. Cemetery #1 is where Foozy's sisters, their husbands, and some of their kids are buried. We tried to recall whose funerals we had attended and whose we hadn't and why. Our people buried in cemetery #2 died way before we were gleams in anyone's eyes, but I had discovered the graves during genealogical research some years back and thought Aunt Bee would be interested. Back on the road, we did the school, business, house portion of the tour before stopping for a bite to eat to fortify ourselves for cemetery #3.

I drove right to Foozy's grave as if I visit it every day. It was just as I remembered. Foozy and Red, her husband (my great-grandfather), are buried between a dogwood tree and a white pine on a downslope near the edge of the cemetery. Foozy's mother, Mama R, is buried beside her. Mama R died when I was in first grade; her funeral is the first I remember.

Lovett soon wandered off as we stood in reflective silence over the graves. After a while he called me to come check out a soldier's grave marker he had found. Then, he found the grave of someone born in the 1800's, and then someone who lived into their nineties, and then someone with a familiar name. He began to connect husband's graves with those of their wives and then their children. I showed him the grave of a congressman's wife and then a grouping of Jewish merchant's graves, clustered together on a hillside in much the same order as their stores were arranged on Main Street. I showed him the grave of one of my neighbors growing up whose daughter he knows. Suddenly and inexplicably, in between simple stones and ostentatious monuments, the past connected with the present for Lovett, and it was almost all I could do to get him back into the car so we could make the remainder of our stops before dark.

We drove past Foozy's and Red's old house and Mama R's last residence on our way to cemetery #4. I found my great-great-grandfather's grave, and I remembered a story my grandfather told me about how they loaded his grandfather into a wagon after he died to take him to the highway because the ambulance wouldn't come to the farm to get him. It was so cold they had to build a fire to thaw the ground enough to dig his grave, so cold was the winter of '32 in Alabama. As I passed the story to Lovett, it began to rain.

It was an emotional day, for me and Aunt Bee more than the others; for Aunt Bee most of all. After all, she was 1,800 miles away from home and didn't know when she might pass this way again. I was glad I could share it with her, and I was glad that Lovett felt a spark of interest for something that I didn't prompt. I hope he never forgets the day we toured the cemeteries with his great-Aunt Bee. I know I won't.

And yes, Foozy, we still miss you.

Rapid Transit Follies

The DePauls made a roadtrip to Atlanta today to pick up my Aunt Bee who is visiting from out west.

Aunt Bee doesn't get back this way very often anymore, but she has a professional association meeting in Atlanta next week and she flew in early to spend a long weekend with her favorite nephew and his fam. We were all too happy to meet her at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

It isn't every day that I jump at the chance to go to Atlanta. Atlanta is high on my "been there, done that" list. I mean, one traffic jam on I-285 looks like another, and once you've driven down one street with Peachtree embedded in the name you've driven down them all. To me, the only saving grace to the whole city is their mass transit system, known as MARTA.

As soon as I heard about Aunt Bee's trip I immediately began to contemplate the stress-free journey from the Hamilton E. Holmes station (W5) to the Airport station (S7) with no traffic, parking, or other concerns inherent to our culture's obsession with all things automotive. We left our modest suburban driveway a little before 7:00 a.m., and two hours later we were standing in the drafty Holmes terminal, trying to get the token machine to work.

Now, I had already figured out our fare requirements for the day. Dora, being four, could ride for free, which meant that we need three tokens to get to the airport (me, Zelda, and Lovett) and four to get back (DePauls + Aunt Bee). At $1.75 per, I needed $12.25 to by the seven tokens. I had a twenty, a ten, and a couple of ones in my wallet, and of course, no machine in the building would take my ten. Which meant I had to use my twenty, which meant I purchased four tokens more than I needed. And that griped me. What am I going to do with four extra MARTA tokens? I mentally screamed at the machine(s). Thanks for nothing!

But my private rant notwithstanding, Zelda, Lovett, Dora, and I boarded the train and were soon locomoting through the Atlanta cityscape. Five stops to the Five Points station, a transfer to the southbound train, and seven stops and an escalator ride later we were waving across Delta's baggage claim concourse to Aunt Bee, who had just arrived and retrieved her bags from carousel 5.

Zelda grabbed Aunt Bee's backpack, Lovett grabbed her small carry-on, I grabbed her large rolling suitcase, and Dora grabbed her hand and we all traipsed back to the MARTA station. We were in the airport terminal maybe ten minutes, max. Northbound train to Five Points, transfer to the westbound train, and five stops later we were wheeling luggage toward the exit in anticipation of pointing the DePaul chariot back to the Magic City.

I was about to hoist the big bag chest-high so I could maneuver through the exit turnstile when Aunt Bee uttered some pretty ominous words. You know, I don't think that's my bag. I screeched to a halt before the turnstile and did a did-you-say-what-I-think-you-said 180 degree turn. I sat the bag upright on its wheels and I noticed for the very first time a small white tag containing the name and address of the bag's owner, which unfortunately did not match the name of my Aunt Bee. We had someone else's bag.

I can tell you that all kinds of questions go through your mind when you are standing at an exit turnstile holding someone else's bag, such as:
1. Is there something illegal in this bag that's gonna land my careless, didn't-verify-the-claim-check butt in the Fulton County Jail?
2. Has [unfortunate owner of bag] already left on his/her flight to Brazil for a month-long Amazon expedition without their life-saving supply of insulin?
3. You mean I'm gonna have to ride the train all the way to the airport and back before I can get to Cracker Barrel for lunch?
4. Is that why neither token machine would take my ten and I had to buy four extra tokens?

The answers to those questions are:
1. I don't know
2. I don't know
3. Yes
4. Yes

So off we went. Again. Five stops to the Five Points station, a transfer to the southbound train, and seven stops and an escalator ride. I began to feel like a MARTA regular. I actually thought at one point, man, we're at Oakland City already? We dropped off [unfortunate owner]'s bag at the baggage service counter and backtracked to carousel 5 to find Aunt Bee's bag still traveling around in circles.

I kinda know how the bag felt.

Welcome back to Birmingham, Aunt Bee.

Full Disclosure

In keeping with the spirit of the times and in the interest of full disclosure, I must confess:

Chris DePaul is a pseudonym, and I'm not really a journalist.

I have never, however, had my likeness used to promote a male escort service. The similiarities end there.

Well, that, and I've never thrown GWB a softball.

Though I am losing my hair. But not like this.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

Fourteen stitches and a week later

Today is seventh day of Zelda's ordeal with her finger and the fourteen stitches.

I finally looked at the finger today.

Y'all think I was trying to be funny about almost passing out in the ER last Monday night. I wish it were true. I've spent the last week peeking around corners to make sure she didn't have the gauze off while she cleaned the wound. I did get close enough to it to help her tie off the new gauze on occasion, but even that was almost too much.

I even got queasy talking with her about it on the phone one day last week.

But today I accepted her offer to look at it. Words cannot describe. Trouble is, there's no observant nurse at my house to grab me by the arm and make me take a big mouthful of crushed ice.

Pardon me while I go stick my head in the freezer.

By the way, my friend who had the emergency surgery went home today. He has a long recovery ahead of him but he's on his way.

Healing, in my little corner of the world, has begun, at least for now. Thank you, Lord.

Crisis situation? Count me out...

Zelda fell and cut her hand today.

Lovett called me at work to come take her to the emergency room. I pulled up to the house and she was standing in the garage, her left hand wrapped in a beach towel. Not the most pleasant welcome home I've ever received.

The kids were nowhere to be found. Lovett walked Dora to [neighborhood playmate's] house, Zelda explained. Can we go now, please?

A few minutes later I dropped her off near the entrance to the ER and I miraculously found a curbside parking place just around the corner. I confidently strode through the sliding glass doors (well, as confidently as a man can stride while hiding his wife's purse under his coat) with that ER adrenaline flowing through my veins. I gotta tell ya...

...it ain't like it is on TV: doors flying open, gurneys skidding around corners on two wheels with 18-member medical teams hanging on for dear life and pouty, blonde interns yelling Stat! like Parris Island drill instructors. The real ER is peopled with bored clerks typing insurance information, green-around-the-gills flu sufferers holding their bellies, and old folks hobbling back and forth to the restroom. And people sleeping while sitting up. 'Cause in the real ER, you do an awful lot of...

...waiting.

If Zelda had not fashioned a homemade tourniquet to stanch the flow of blood, we might have seen a lot more action, but as it was, even after the triage nurse examined her, we waited for two hours before being called into a room.

And then the fun really started.

Dr. Red Duke danced into Examination Room 10 to have a look-see. I, your humble reporter, tried everything within my power to refrain from having a look-see. I held The Periodic Table at eye-level, effectively blocking Dr. Duke, Zelda, and more importantly, the parts of Zelda that began bleeding when Dr. D ripped the gauze away. Can you bend this finger? Dr. Duke asked. OOOOWWWW!?! Zelda cried. Uh-oh... I moaned, as the room began to spin. I dashed from the room to keep from fainting but the head rush I got from standing up so quickly only made matters worse. I'm gonna faint in front of all these nurses if I keep standing here I reasoned, wondering if my insurance would charge me two co-payments if I did. So I wobbled back into Room 10 and sat down again. Dr. Duke left to retrieve his bone saw from under the seat of his buckboard as I tried with every ounce of strength I had to regain my composure.

I didn't fool a soul.

A nurse, who had seen me standing up against the outside wall, followed me into the room. Are you about to faint? she asked.

Yes, ma'am, I am.

Come on, we got to get you outta here.

I'm afraid to stand up.

You got to go she said as she dragged my pale, clammy butt out of the chair, shoved a cup of ice into my hand, and pushed me outside into the fresh air. When you feel better, you go back to the waiting room she ordered, muttering something about men's and women's thresholds for pain.

So I meekly took a seat in the waiting room along with the other moaning sickfolk. I was being no help to anyone. And I hated it.

I had received a disturbing e-mail earlier in the day that a good friend had been rushed to emergency surgery for a problem we thought had been fixed months ago. Zelda was behind the swinging doors getting bits of glass dug out of her fingers. Some guy across the room was doubled over in pain between trips to the restroom to, well, you know... And I wasn't doing a bit of good for any of them.

I tried to pray but I felt so impotent. What does it mean to pray for one another? To pray for God's presence, which he already promised us? To pray for healing, which may or may not be in His will? To pray for His will, which may mean that they suffer (say it Chris, say it: or that they die)? That He "bless" them and the doctors and nurses? What does that mean?

There, in that waiting room, I felt very, very small.

Emergency! Crisis! Adam, go boil some water! Bill, grab some bandages! Chris, bend over and put your head between your knees! We don't need two invalids.

Intrusion detection

Zelda had a brilliant idea the other day.

To combat the intrusive squirrel's access to my birdfeeders, she sprayed the poles with nonstick cooking spray. She and Lovett and Dora spent a riotous morning watching the squirrels repeatedly jump on the poles and slide back down to the ground. I was both impressed and pleased with her ingenuity as I heard their report at the dinner table.

The next day, after an apparent predawn war council (intelligence is sketchy on this), the squirrels stepped up the attack. They went after my suet feeder.

The cake was about three-quarters gone (the woodpeckers and nuthatches devour it), so I attributed the squirrel's success to that and bought a new cake on my lunch hour.

This morning I went out to fill the feeders, and the suet feeder was lying on the ground. Open. With the cake missing. The whole cake. AND THE CHAIN.

Boy, was I miffed. A pox on you, squirrels, and your progeny! I cried into the woods. I hope the little buggers get ptomaine poisoning or their peanut allergies kick in or a hawk grabs them as they struggle with the weight of the cake or they get so sick of suet cake that they vow never to touch the stuff again much as I did that Christmas long ago when I devoured one of those huge Hershey's Kisses in a single afternoon and swore off the stuff for many subsequent years.

I feel violated. They took the chain?!?! What an insult. Makes me feel like an idiot.

Speaking of which, I worked for parts of three days this week to update my virus scan subscription.

Perhaps you are familiar with the scenario. Subscription about to expire. Explore renewal options. See updated version of software for a price comparable to the renewal expense. Choose that option. Have internet connection crash during purchase verification. Verify that no purchase was actually made. Attempt purchase again. Download setup. Get error message that you are missing the proxy server info that you just finished typing. Spend twenty minutes on the phone and follow fifteen levels of phone options only to have a prerecorded voice scream a phone number that you frantically write down and call to find it no longer valid but another prerecorded voice directs you to the website that you are looking at but can't find contact information on. Finally send a desperation e-mail to somebody somewhere to get a response thirty-six hours later that is irrelevant to your error message. Then by divine inspiration decide that maybe turning the proxy server off on your connection is the answer and by Gates it is and the sixteen terabyte download begins with a countdown clock that you figure it will be finished about the time your yet-unborn grandchild graduates from high school but you realize your sensitivity to the process and patiently clean the house while the download continues, jiggling the mouse every time you pass the computer so the screen saver doesn't kick on and kill your session. The download finally completes and now you are faced with installing and activating the new version but only after you try five times does it occur to you to uninstall the old version and finally, FINALLY, you have new virus scan software, but wait, you must download the updated definitions, blah, blah blah...

...all because some squirrels somewhere have nothing better to do than write malevolent software with the sole intent to intrude and disrupt your computing environment.

A pox on you, squirrels, and your progeny!

...secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity...

Bumper stickers on adjacent vehicles in a parking lot this morning:

George W. Bush is a Punk-A$$ Chump
George W. Bush Presidential Prayer Team

You know what today is...

Today is Groundhog Day, that day on which Americans collectively cease exhaling until some rodent up north sees his shadow (or not) which is supposed to portend six more weeks of winter (or not).

Not that I desire to delve into Groundhog Day history, but it must have been awfully cold and boring to have wanted to celebrate that inanity the second year. "Say, Benjamin, shall we jocularly coax the groundhog from his den again this year? Maybe the petticoats will fly as they did last!"

It does help the TV news people, though, fill dead air between the hospital-bed interviews with the poor ladies who give birth to the first babies of the new year and the codependent, enabling postmasters who pay postal clerks overtime to stand curbside offering last-minute postmarks to the goobers who wait until midnight to file their taxes on April 15.

Count me as one who doesn't get it.

It has nothing to do with my like or dislike for the animal kingdom. Zelda has most people we know thinking that I dislike animals, which isn't true. I like animals just fine.

Faithful readers of this blog know of my love for birds. I delight in the folly of my feathered friends as they foray through forest and field. I have four feeders (alliteration continuation is coincidental) up now: one with birdseed, one with sunflower seeds, one with thistle seeds, and a suet feeder. This past weekend I was blessed with three different woodpecker varieties as well as a beautiful white-breasted nuthatch on just the suet feeder.

Last Saturday morning, as I was filling the feeders, I found myself exchanging stares with a four-point buck who was following a doe along the creek in the woods below. I ran back to the house and grabbed Dora so she could see them (she's big on Bambi right now). Our hearts pounded as we stood on the edge of the yard watching their white tails disappear up the hollow (ok, mine was pounding from running, but it thrilled me no less). Dora will never forget it.

I faithfully renew our membership to the Birmingham Zoo every year so we can pop in and out at will (well, during normal business hours). A couple of Saturdays ago, Lovett wanted to go to the library and Dora wanted to go to the zoo, so we compromised and did both. We made a quick pass through the large-animal house to smell, I mean, see, the hippos, elephants, and rhinos, who were all indoors eating hay and expelling digested remnants of same. Then we hopped over to watch the seals being fed. Eat like a horse? It should be eat like a seal. Those things scarf down dozens of whole, formerly-frozen fish without chewing. No wonder they flop around and bark.

I'm glad we got to see the elephants, because in this morning's Birmingham News comes word that Susie died Monday. Susie and Mona have been at the zoo since the 1950s. I marveled at them as a child, as my children have. A few years ago, before Dora was born, Zelda, Lovett, and I attended a fiftieth birthday party for the pair. Lovett loved it (hey, that rhymes). It was during the heat of the summer (it may have even been around July 4) and the zoo staff had prepared huge frozen fruit popsicles for the ladies to nosh. Nothing like a popsicle on your birthday.

And now, Susie is gone, Mona is alone, and Dora will be sad. She already worries about one of our gorillas who underwent heart surgery recently, and she was heartbroken when our grizzly bear grizzled away. I almost want to keep her detached from these animals to protect her but she must learn that death is part of life. I can't shelter her forever.

No, I don't dislike animals. They fascinate me. I don't, however, want to live in the same house with one. That opens a whole other can of worms (to mix a metaphor). I get the "bad daddy" stares from people when they see me turn a deaf ear to Dora's pleas for something furry to shed on my furniture and pee in my floor. I've learned to ignore the stares, though, and search for solace with kindred souls, as scarce as they may be. One solid and faithful soulmate blessed me the other day with her mirthful appreciation of the bumper sticker which says "My karma ran over my dogma."

We love-em-as-long-as-they-stay-outside-where-they-belong animal people gotta stick together.

Happy Groundhog Day.