People-watching at 8Th & Fig. Had been there waiting for my wife for about the
hundredth time. I have developed coping mechanisms. I watch. I meditate on people.
I hate. What I was hating here was people NOT curious about the performance art
piece that someone had cracked up while placing along the sidewalk. It was the
shape of a bird in flight: wings and tail splayed as if a floor billboard you get
in the cracker aisle of the grocery store -- in a mid-air veer, but grounded. The
artist had probably placed hundreds of similar shapes around the crowded city, and
was videotaping, or masturbating and telling fortunes from the seminal streams or
whatever artist shit passed for art this week. Fine.
What pissed me off was that NOBODY saw the thing. Mini Manhattan that it is, 8th
and Fig is not a place people stroll. They motor, or they wait.
Now accessing my VAST AND ENDLESS OCEAN OF ANGER, I decided to get aggressive. I
would crouch and defend my territory over the outline image, demanding attention
for the artist and from the passersby. Halfway there, I knew I was on weak ground.
The thing was wiggling!
It still could have been wind. Could have. But wasn't. I knealt. and found myself
eyeball to crown with a small bird. No obvious trauma. Eyes open. Warm. Wings spread wide. A live bird that I had to now rescue.
My lifetime record for rescuing "wounded" animals was around 0-35 including any bug or sea monkey I purchased through the mail. I tried, I tried, but I just kep on getting dead birds, or grasshoppers, or plants, or sea monkeys. I followed directions up to a point, though I was mostly guided by intuition. And after all, won't we ALL be the same in a century?
I won't touch the thing. Mostly because I am picking up my wife and she would FREAK. So I find a newspaper in back and pancake spatula her onto a transition surface well before considering where in the hell I was going to put her.
I watched her ignore all of my efforts for half an hour and then without preamble, bound into the air and switch-back path fly herself up and out of my two dimensional world.
As I looked up searching and marvelling, I saw a CLOUD of similar avians swarming, pooling, schooling, crowding up in the thermals that form off the glass fronted buildings on LoveMe Avenue. I had stumbled onto the path of the swallow migration. I felt like the guy in Field of Dreams. "Where did all these birds come from?"
