Siskiyou Writers’ Club- PARTY OF FIVE

PARTY OF FIVE

By Bob Mason

I got my birding style from my mom. She rarely went birding, and yet, she was always birding, ever alert for a passing call, a flutter in the bushes, or the magic of a hovering silhouette in the sky. I don’t know why, and it hasn’t required any therapeutic intervention, but I was never invited to join her for specialized trips like the annual Audubon Society Christmas bird count. I suppose the citizen scientists didn’t need the company of children to complicate their focused enterprise. I was a little jealous when my older brother got to go one year, but as I recall, that was only as a college student, home on break. How I loved the incidental experiences, though, driving on the back roads of Humboldt County, speeding down Highway 101, or stopping briefly in a park to walk a short trail or pause by a stream. I can still hear the chattering of the Winter Wren, and feel Mama’s joy as we peered into the underbrush, looking for that cute upturned tail turning this way and that. I can still feel the shock and awe as she shrieked, “Richard!”, as my Dad chauffeured us hurtling southward on highway 101, pulling over to see the then-rare sight of a Bald Eagle soaring above the Eel River. Much was to be experienced right at our own home, well-placed on the hilltop: the Western Meadowlarks singing their oratorios outside our windows, the American Kestrels perching and hunting along the fenceline, the White-tailed Kites grasping talons and pinwheeling in an extraordinary dance of courtship or conflict tumbling toward the ground. Mama would call us over to see what she was seeing, wonder at the objects of her wonder, to learn what she was learning. Every instance is a treasure in my heart, not simply as an experience to turn over in my memory, but as a bent that I carry on, a pattern in my own life–always looking, always listening, always wondering in wonder. The glitter of those treasured recollections and new delights in the world of birds is shadowed only by the new reality that is no longer new–the shadow of macular degeneration that has devastated my mother’s ability to see for the last 20 or more of her 91 years. It makes me hesitate oh so slightly as I follow the impulse to call her up and share the delight of a new sighting, an observed behavior, an avian resident or visitor to our acre in the country. I don’t want to magnify the sense of her loss, the pain of the sights she can no longer see. Every time, though, as I go on to describe yet another of those winged creatures she has always loved, there is no envy or sense of loss. The ease with which she went from driving to delight in my childhood, is the same ease with which she delights in translating my words into moving pixels on the vivid retina of her imagination and memory. Recently, cruising along one of the gravel-topped levees in the Klamath Wildlife Refuge, I saw her name displayed on my vibrating phone. I hesitated, not because of any safety or legal concerns. I was a passenger after all. I hesitated because it’s not really polite to be talking away on the phone while you’re on a big day of birding with three serious birders, no more polite than bringing a child along for a Christmas bird count back in the day. I had no choice, though. I had to take the call. And so, Mama came along with us, listening to me, listening to us as we talked about “Is that a Western Grebe or a Clark’s?” “There’s a Black Tern!” She put in her remarks and humorous quips with no sense of intrusion or need to hurry, just enduring joy and pleasure in the experience we shared. We were no longer a party of four. We were a party of five.

The Siskiyou Writers Club is open to folks with a passion for creative writing of all genres. We
generally meet the last Thursday of the month in various locations throughout Siskiyou County.
You are welcome to join us.
For more information about the club,
contact Bob Kaster, 530-598-5204, email [email protected],
or Mike Grifantini, 530-710-4882, email: [email protected].