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MINNESOTA FOX TALES
For the Birds
Sarah, I never thought you would stoop so low as to discuss baseball in order to fill up a column. I've given some thought to this, and while you're
the only person I know who can make baseball sound remotely interesting, I've found a subject that lends itself to the same kind of commentary as you see in sports announcing, especially baseball, and amazingly, I've never seen
it done!
I don't know if I'm the first, but I do claim this is my own original idea. Bird watcher announcing! I took it up for the first time this morning while I was having breakfast in the
Keeping Room. We have a bay window, with several bird feeders directly out the window. Also, next to the feeders is a lovely plum tree, which is in glorious bloom with thousands of lovely small white blossoms.
Here's a sample announcement:
There's a bird sitting in the plum tree. He hops up to the next branch. I can't quite make out who he is--black and white markings on the back  side...he hops again...and turns. It's a rose-breasted grosbeak! A male. I can see the
splash of rosy red on his breast. He hops again. A little higher in the tree this time. Another hop, upwards and sideways. Now he's in the very top of the tree. He's got
a better view of the feeder. He eyes it. He glances to the right and to the left. To the right again. To the left. To the right. The coast is clear. He flies to the top of the
wrought iron brace which holds the feeder. He hops to the pole. He's sideways now, eyeing the feeder. He flies to the top of the feeder.
He looks to the right. He looks to the left, to the right, to
the left again.
Oh, wait! Now there's another bird at the feeder! It's a female grosbeak. Wow! She just came out of nowhere!
He peeps, warning her off. He's coming in for the food! She flies off. She's in the plum tree now. He flies in for the food. He's on the base of the feeder, and he picks a seed.
No, he doesn't like it! He fumbles, he drops the seed!
He picks another one, and he likes this one. He flies off with it in his mouth! He's...he's
gone! He's way out of the yard, over the fence! WOW! What a performance. I think he flew up into the aspen trees, I can't even see him now....
In a community where curling is a big sport, I think bird announcing will be a hit.
I don't know if you've ever watched curling? It is sort of like shuffleboard. The object is
to get your puck, or rock or whatever they call it, pushed or swept or whatever, as close to the mark as you can get it. It is done on ice, however, and the contestants wear
skates. The really odd part about it is that after the initial shove of the rock, the contestant skates in with a broom! And then starts sweeping the ice, which, while the
rock is still in play, is supposed to cajole the rock to settle in the right spot.
If you did this sort of thing in golf, it would be illegal, but in curling, it is considered a high
art. It is the only sport I have every witnessed in which the ball, or puck, or rock or whatever, is moving so slowly that its progress is almost imperceptive, it is so slow motion.
It is in this environment that I feel emboldened to introduce bird announcing. I think it will go over BIG.
Yours truly,
Dot
your faithful correspondent,
© 2001 by Rachel Scott
NEW YORK UNEASY
Memorial Day
Last weekend was Memorial Day weekend. I can remember many Memorial Day weekends spent in many different ways. One Memorial Day weekend five years ago
we flew to Kansas City to help my father cope with my stepmother's release from the hospital after she had been treated for a devastating aneurysm.
Marion was weak and disoriented, but glad to  be back home. My brother-in-law Jerry, a big strong guy, was there to help my father
navigate Marion up and down stairs and in and out of bed. I was there to cheer up my dad, help with Marion and cook and clean. Olivia, my daughter, was there to cheer up her grandparents.
On Memorial Day, my father, who was then 75 and had served in the military during World War II as a flight instructor, took out his treasured flag and hung it up in the bracket he had mounted himself.
My stepmother's first husband had been a soldier overseas during the war, and had been captured crossing the Italian mountains and held as a
prisoner of war until the Italian surrender. My brother-in-law had served with the military in Viet Nam, keeping his head down during combat on the plains of Plei Ku (now
spelled Play Cu). I was cooking dinner for the group, and I looked out on the front lawn and saw my father and brother-in-law teaching my eleven year old daughter to fly a
miniature jet fighter. It was buzzing around the front yard on a string with some remote control apparatus making it fly high and then dip and loop. I saw the happy joyous faces
on all of them, the flag flapping and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Marion sat quietly, head down, her hair lank around her face, remembering nothing.
Marion died the following year, and we lost one more person whose life had been irrevocably changed by the Second World War. After her husband had been captured,
she heard nothing about his fate for over a year and as a young bride quietly endured the hardship of not knowing whether she was a widow or a wife, like she had quietly
endured the Depression. Marion quietly endured many hardships in her life, giving far more than she ever took.
This year, with the old soldiers marching towards death, it has been popular in this
country to make Memorial Day synonymous with respect for the Americans who had joined the Allies in 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and had fought formidable
adversaries to win a necessary war. This movement has been popularized by Stephen Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Ben Affleck and others through their movies. Before this current
wave of World War II canonization, after the Vietnam war ended, Memorial Day became a personal holiday, an American Day of the Dead, where families rode out to cemeteries to put flowers on th e graves of the ones whom they had loved and lost to death. If one of the graves contained a soldier; well,
that was something of a personal matter. Now that the sting and acrimony of Vietnam is behind us for twenty-five years, Memorial Day is coming back as a military remembrance day. I have mixed feelings about that.
When we were children, long before America had become drawn into the Vietnam conflict, Memorial Day was a day of respect for the military, and the military graves were always well decorated. But no
one honored one war over another. The graves of our great-grandfathers, who had fought in the Civil War were as well decorated as the graves of the few who had fought in World War I, the
many who had fought and died in World War II, and the scattering of graves from the Korean conflict. General Sherman had famously said "War is hell" and we didn't doubt
that one bit. War was in the cemetery. War was death. War was flowers given only when flowers could no longer be smelled by the receiver. Glorification of war was
conspicuously absent. Most of our fathers had been in the service during the war but there was no resurrection of regiments to march together in memory of military service
past. In fact, it took close questioning of any adult man to find out what branch of the military he had been in, where his war time years had been spent and what -- exactly -- he did in the war.
The American male reticence about World War II and its attendant acts of heroism, some of them happy accidents and some of them genuine acts of courage, was a
monument in itself to the rejection of war as a way of life and war as an expression of national identity. Flowers were taken to the cemeteries, but the adults spent the
evenings of the three day holiday with the neighbors, drinking mixed drinks, playing croquet, badminton or horseshoes, grilling hamburgers and hot dogs on the barbecue,
and watching the kids catching fireflies. No doubt they were also balancing their checkbooks in their heads, mulling over mortgages, car payments, and the looming
expense of college for those kids playing in the yard. Meanwhile, we, who were innocent of the recent world convulsion, never caught on to the reasons for the adults'
reticence. We had our jars of fireflies, and whoever caught twenty-five fireflies in one evening was an ace. You know, a flying Ace. Americans love flying Aces, as we proved in the Gulf War.
And in the Gulf War, we found the perfect solution to Sherman's horror. Keep the hell on the other guy's ground, away from us! The Flying Aces: let them do the damage! So
we won that one too, rather handily, and the world became ruled by Pax Americana. But this time through, there was no occupation and rebuilding, no Marshall Plan for a
new society; just a ravaged country with an intact and despicable foe. So Pax Americana became lax Americana, as the problems that bolster the aggressive
dictators, whether in Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo, Rwanda, or the Congo remain festering along with the civilian corpses we laid into the ground in the deserts of Iraq. And in
Vietnam, where we lost, they are losing too, with 37% of the country in poverty and the government reeling from the loss of Soviet aid.
How did we celebrate Memorial Day this year? By not joining the mass exodus out of New York City to the surrounding exurban countryside. (New Yorkers feel their lives are
not complete unless they sit in a long traffic jam going to the country. To be able to do so is a non-negotiable mark of  status, despite the hours of misery and boredom involved.) Olivia is much older now, and though remote control airplanes and cars still fascinate her, she is even more
fascinated by the forces of history that make the wars come and cause the wars to end. Required reports on Kosovo and the Congo made her aware of the terrible and pointless civil suffering and strife in those regions;
Saddam Hussein is discussed frequently in our house with disgust and loathing. On Memorial Day, we did grill a hamburger for her and a salmon filet for me over a small barbecue, not in a lush green backyard, but on a fire
escape. We won't go to see "Pearl Harbor." We didn't see "Saving Private Ryan." Neither of us wanted our thoughts of the great battles of the Second World War to be reformulated
by Hollywood. We both know that books are far more accurate and even-handed than any movie. To speak quietly about it, it is our fathers, and our grandfathers, and
our great-grandfathers, on up the chain of history, who have served and suffered in American wars. No one was happy about it at the time of service; all were grateful
when the job was done. Harry S. Truman served in the First World War, and his memory of the waste, corruption, and needless loss of life, stayed with him all his life.
Senator Harry Truman rose to prominence (while Vice-president Alvin Barkley fell from grace) through his investigative hearings in the Senate on the quality of equipment
going to the troops and the possibility of World War II profiteering. And when President Roosevelt died and Senator Truman, having been booted up to Vice-president, had to
go to Potsdam as the new American President to negotiate the peace, he recalled the house he stayed in as the nightmare house and couldn't wait to return to the free air of America.
So beware of war, hucksterism, whether it is the subtle and powerful maneuvering of what our great soldier, Dwight Eisenhower, called the "military-industrial complex" or
the glorification and escapism of Hollywood. To the victor go the spoils, but the spoils can sicken and prove unworthy of the sacrifice. To the defeated come ashes -- and
without someone to help rake the ashes, and clean and rebuild where the ashes lie barren; we leave a site for the rise of another dreadful phoenix.
Your New York Uneasy Correspondent.
© 2001 by Sarah Scott
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