Not Unbeautiful Entirely

The flock of pigeons on my block has been growing unnervingly bold over these swampy summer months. They strut around on the abandoned porch next to ours, roost on the roof in increasing numbers, and wait until the car tires almost touch them to get out of the road.

They line up along the power line outside our second-story window and stare into the bedroom with their little orange eyes in their spasmodic heads, their dirty gray necks dusted in iridescent pinks and greens catching the afternoon sunlight. Ok. Not unbeautiful entirely. And I like when they take collective flight at dusk. But my mom’s mom passed on her disgust of these sky vermin to me when she told me she knew someone who went blind from getting pigeon poop in their eye.

The idea of their filthy infectiousness took root in me at an early age. And so I have trouble seeing their beauty. Or seeing their inherent innocence of simply being alive on this planet as I am a creature alive on this planet. It’s likely none of us know how we got here, why we got here, and where, if anywhere, we get to from here. All of us just trying to make our way—a little food, shelter, rest, and shimmers of pleasure as we peck away at the days.

Which brings up the whole space-time conundrum. I’m very much here on earth—made of it, clothed in it, eating it, expelling back into it…and shaped by time, that strange motion forward that sucks the color from my hair. And, at the same time, time is my undoing from space.

On a tough day, when I’m feeling weak and achy in the center of my bones, I sense the elemental presence of my body unraveling—feel the biology loosening its grip, the center force giving way to chaos and release. Beauty and ugliness fade when the question, “Will I soon not be here?” starts to rise in the mind—the mind that seems to be watching it all from behind an unfathomable curtain, anchored in the steady knowing that there comes a point of surrender where we have to let go of earth and drop the body to feed the earth. Poof! Blink! Gone! Swept away into the tides of memory. Alive only in the flickering of neurons of those who still walk the earth and breathe her rarified air; those who heard our laughter and saw the light in our eyes.

Ever since my friend drowned in a riptide in El Salvador, I’ve had the soundtrack of Peggy Lee’s “Is that all there is?” singing softly in the background of my mind. Is that all there is? It’s not an entirely depressing question. Just a question that wants to know more. I was caught in the riptide too. Neither of us knew to swim parallel and so we wore ourselves out trying to get to shore. But I was rescued and she wasn’t. I dug my hands in the sand and cried and cried and then went numb for a long long time. That was almost thirty years ago.

And here I am now, wincing at pigeons in Kensington, Philadelphia, wondering who our new neighbors will be since the retired horder cop and his home-bound brother moved out months ago.

How much of my time in this body, in these decades since that day being pulled from the ocean have I spent bristled, bracing, racing? Bonking around, bruised, sullen, disgusted, furious and deep in my disappointment? Soaked with grief? How did I learn to dance this way? As if someone is always stepping on my toes? My two dance moves—recoil and try to re-order this messy world.

And it is a messy world!

We found a dead pigeon this morning in some stagnant old rainstorm water under a parked car, belly up, feet frozen straight and stiff. Next to trash piled up near the curb of the cobblestone street. Next to weeds sticking straight up through the sidewalk pavement. Potholes, sinkholes, trash holes, and little bags of dog shit plopped around like upside-down gopher holes. You don’t want to step there.

Someone’s car horn alarm was beeping a few blocks away while we decided what to do with the dead bird. Minutes on minutes on minutes, the car bleeted like a lamb lost from its mother.

We wrapped the pigeon in a plastic bag and threw it in a dumpster. And then went inside for coffee and the paper. Not the actual paper, an online scroll. Have you ever clicked through the “Best photographs of the day” section? It has the effect of what I imagine a whirling dervish might feel when everything individual, distinct and storied becomes unified. A blur. A transcendence. Everything tantalizing, awe-inspiring, disgusting, mystifying and horrifying, soon becomes the stillness behind all things—the source of color, not the colors themselves; the source of emotion, not the tears that meet the monsoon. It’s the thing before the fire and flood…and after it too.

Right now, farmers are harvesting pink lilies in a canal in Bangladesh. The flowers bloom during the flood season. Pink pink pink.. the birth canal again. The white-painted face of a Bosnian bride staves off the bad luck of centuries. Painted like a ghost to spook the spookiness of life. An activist in a cow mask who super-glued his hand to a glass window feels his mind go blank for the first time. Ecologists bang their heads against the same glass window wondering what to do about the once-beloved bradford pear tree that has escaped its suburban confines and turned feral.

Cue Peggy:

Is that all there is, is that all there is?

If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing