during my mother’s ordeal, and after her death I’d harked back to that fateful winter morning stroll on the beach when the majestic sea bird had expired at my feet. The sight of dead animals, road kill, but especially birds, would forever elicit surges of melancholy and angst. The grief I felt had not a trace of spirituality. What I sensed was visceral, dark, menacing.
Many years later, as I went on assignment to Central America, the sight of dead birds would take on a new aura. Alive, birds symbolize freedom from earthly bounds. Dead, especially when placed on someone’s doorstep, they telegraph a warning, the threat of a looming calamity. Several investigative reports I’d written had earned me ill-omened accolades: a dead pigeon whose unfurled wings had been stapled to a small funeral wreath and propped against my hotel room door at the Casa Grande in Guatemala City; two dead sparrows similarly positioned on the stoop of my rented studio in Copán. I’d somehow managed to keep one step ahead of my would-be assassins but I would never look at dead birds the same way again.
It was not surprising that the sight of the mutilated baby grackles, less than a week after I’d moved to Dranomos, would stir feelings of anxiety. I’d come down from the small cloud-shrouded mountain town of Patchahei to the high desert plateau where the sky is almost always blue and the sun percolates for months on end. Long, bitter snowy days and frigid nights at 4,000 feet had taken their toll and the prospect of gentler winters and warmer summers had beckoned me down from the summit. Little did I know.
Then, one day, I heard it: a whisper, a distant murmur; throaty at first then high-pitched as it subsided, like the sigh of a mortally wounded beast or the wail of a restless spirit. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It ebbed and flowed like the tide, like an intermittent rustling of leaves. Like a draft squeezing through some narrow aperture.
A more thorough search for the source of these gloomy squalls took me to the laundry room, a small area with a door leading to the garage. To my relief, it was only the wind insinuating itself under the garage door and whistling with every gust.
I also thought I’d heard, merging with the reedy crescendo and ebbing of moans and whimpers, what sounded like laughter -- no, not the resonance of gaiety or merriment, not the giggle of children or the chortle of men telling salty jokes. What reached my ears, I thought, was a sequence of long sepulchral wails, otherworldly, warped by the newness of my circumstance in this austere, taciturn expanse of rock, sand, stunted Joshua trees, clumps of sagebrush and roving tumbleweed.
I’d spent the winter settling in, arraying the furniture, lining my favorite books on the shelves, placing bric-a-brac and curios on the mantelpiece and other outcroppings, adorning the walls with the pictures I’d painted and the lithographs I’d collected over the years. A happy loner too busy to be bored, I’d put off any interaction with my neighbors, few as they were, until spring. Now and then I’d spotted a couple of lonely figures dashing in and out of their houses, scurrying across my field of view as if they were being pursued by some menacing presence. It’s not that I’d waited for the Welcome Wagon or a neighborly invitation to a family brunch. I could dispense with these niceties. I considered them pointless, synthetic and somewhat intrusive. It’s just that I’d found it odd that my presence in this gated hamlet, this remote, desolate mesa ringed by barren, cratered hills had been largely unnoticed, if not ignored. So I’d happily gone back to work on what would perhaps be my magnum opus, my one-way ticket to the blue Mediterranean, the deliverance that penury and anonymity had so far denied me.
“We had our first snowfall,” I wrote in my journal. Bad choice of a pronoun, I’d exclaimed. We? This is not an editorial position. I rewrote the sentence:
“It snowed last night. The mountain tops are peppered with white. A thick, ground-hugging fog is slowly chewing up the scenery. It’s time for the Wellbutrin and a change in screensavers -- from the red and gold of a New England autumn to a sun-drenched islet set like an emerald on a turquoise sea and ringed with white sandy beaches and dotted with tall coconut trees swaying in the breeze. It’s time to let my mind roam. It’s time to hunker down, brave -- no, endure -- winter and watch for the first signs of spring.
I was what the gallant French refer to as “entre deux âges,” [middle-aged] and blunter Americans obliquely describe as “well past his prime”: an old man who’d managed to ward off the ravages of time and the onset of decrepitude by keeping busy, stretching time.
Time is not a renewable resource. What cannot be prevented or changed must be weathered.
I’d always thought that every man has a “tale” locked up within him that, as it unfolds, struggles to emerge. “Every life is a best-seller.” I’d come up with this aphorism when I lived in Queens, New York on the 14th floor of a 16-story building. At night, across the playground, a building of equal stature revealed through dozens of lit windows a patchwork quilt of silent dramas, each circumscribed by time and space. The diminutive creatures in my field of view, I’d suddenly realized one evening, some unwinding in their living rooms, others readying for bed, others yet quarrelling or fixing dinner in closet-sized “galley” kitchens, each acting out a preordained scenario, must surely have a compelling story to tell that will never be told. I remembered feeling empathy for the strangers I spied upon in moments of introspection, each framed in his own shadow box, each engaged in life’s mind-numbing, often absurd pantomime.
I’d learned a great deal about dignity and vulgarity, refinement and boorishness, solitude, boredom and carousing, and I’d realized that I too, at some time or other, must have been the object of someone’s absent or amused scrutiny.
It had all happened so fast. I’d taken early retirement, left genteel Connecticut and set out on a five-day, 3,000-mile drive across America. Its vastness and awesome beauty had filled me with exhilaration and appeased for a while the emptiness within. The emptiness returned when I reached the desert. Behind me was the narrowing perspective of an arrow-straight road merging into the horizon line. Ahead lay a barren, petrified expanse. Alone in its vast, sallow bosom, overwhelmed by the immensity and desolation around me, I stopped, got out of the car and looked at the limitless blue vault above, dotted with strange cloud formations, some the shape of flying saucers, others wispy and elongated like lines of cocaine, others yet splaying like supernovas or metastasizing cells. I surveyed the tawny parched earth at my feet. Everywhere, clumps of sparse, stunted shrubs and contorted Joshua trees clung stubbornly to life in this lifeless citadel. I felt lost. I wanted to scream. The scream died in my throat as I set my eyes on a lone yellow poppy, its dainty orange petals quivering in the breeze. Memories cascaded through my mind. I remembered the wild blood-red poppy fields of Abu Gosh, outside Jerusalem, where I’d gamboled as a boy, taking in their heady aroma, napping under a blanket of undulating blood-red blossoms and dreaming Technicolor dreams. I remembered the wistful French love song of my youth, “Comme un petit coquelicot,” [Like a little poppy]. I’d been swept in a vortex of indescribable emotions every time I heard it. Poppies are still my favorite flowers. And I remembered Paris, the city of my birth. Words, images, colors and aromas danced inside my head, faint, disjointed, stranded at the limits of consciousness. I felt my tongue forming silent thoughts, like prayers or mantras. Emboldened by self-discovery, delivered from their cerebral bonds, the words gushed forth. It was a soliloquy of stupefying candor and sorrow, part confession, part supplication, words driven by longing, by despair, by a fear of madness, words one only dares to utter in the desert’s deafening silence. I looked at the sky. Then I looked at the poppy and the babble ceased. It had wilted in my hand. But its subtle, intoxicating scent still lingered on the tip of my fingers, in my nose, on my lips.
“I should have never plucked it. I should have never set eyes upon it,” I heard myself wailing as my eyes now strained against the milky glare of day.
Somewhere at the edge of a gray town, a cookie-cutter
