I’ve bumped into Phil at Idylwilde, at Skip’s, at our breakfast place on Main St. (he calls it the “deli”), and at the rookery. On my first rookery walk with Diane two years ago, Phil showed us the beaver dam that created the swamp. Phil told us he walks from his house across the street from Idylwilde, to the deli to the rookery and back to the deli every morning. Yesterday, as I was headed in, warm in my truck, I passed Phil, on foot, bundled against the cold. He strode down Littlefield Road, parallel and away from the rookery . I waved, but his eyes sandwiched between the bill of his hat and the scarf over his nose, were locked straight ahead.

I turned right, off the pavement and into the deep snow. I drove with my left tire a foot away from the iron rail, and the passenger side of my truck bounded by steep banks of snow. I followed one set of fresh tire tracks all the way to the trail that leads to the nests. I parked as far from the tracks as possible, got out and walked past the now-buried refrigerator, under the snowy overhanging branches and onto the ice.

When I returned, there stood Phil, peering into my truck.

“What a day,” I hollered against the wind.

“What?”

“Great day, isn’t it?

“Yes, but cold.”

“Not so bad back in the trees.”

He’d spoken to me the day before at Skip’s, but I’m pretty certain he didn’t remember.

“You walked back in? In all that snow?” I liked the compliment.

“I sunk to my knees, but the workout kept me warm. I see you walked in my tire tracks.”

I guessed he had turned to see me drive off the road and had decided to investigate.

“I walk here every day. With the deep snow, I was happy to see the tire tracks . I saw four blue birds … .”

“I’ve never seen a blue bird.”

“…a mockingbird, a cardinal, a red-tailed hawk…I think that’s what it was.”

“And you walk alone? No wife?”

I can only stand talking about birds for so long, and besides, I was tired of my own stories about Phil.

“No, no wife” he laughed, “I’ve been alone a long time.”

“You must have been married, what, thirty years?”

A complete guess on my part, but given his age, his eyes… .

“Thirty-two years, thirty-one…no, thirty two.”

“And you’ve been divorced for a long time, maybe twenty years… ?”

“Over a decade. I like being alone. Lots of men get divorced and jump right back into marriage. It can be catastrophic.”

“Catastrophic?”

“I have a friend, Ron, who lives in Houston. He got divorced and was thinking about remarrying. I gave him a list of things to consider. I think there were eleven items on my list.”

“Words of caution?”

“First, do you want to provide food and shelter for the woman? Secondly, do you want to be responsible for all her medical bills?”

Phil wore gray woolen mittens with a flap that allows access to your fingers. He pulled the flap off so he could tick off his list. The thumbs of his mittens reminded me of my father’s. They were wrapped in masking tape as if to repair tears. I didn’t interrupt him; I laughed out loud. He is not so much older than I, but still trapped by that old-time view of women. I grew up with that, not in my home, but as part of the social fabric.

“Do you want to network with all her relatives? Interact with her cousins and aunts and uncles, and her parents?”

“I’m pretty sure the correct answer is, no.”
Phil
Another nest photo

After braving thin ice this morning to capture the nests in the Heron Rookery in Littleton, I returned home to find this email from Adam: “I forgot to mention the observation that had actually prompted me to call as I passed your house yesterday — how cool the Heron Swamp on Rt. 2 looked, all snowbound and with a heavy overlying fog in the pink/purple setting sun. ”

The interesting/disappointing thing is, from Rt. 2, with the added elevation of ten or so feet, the nests are much more impressive than when seen from ground level. I always want to stop and shoot from the side of the road, but there is barely a shoulder and I have visions of getting arrested or erased.

Because I have done this myself.

Diane hiding from the rain in Switzerland.

I had an estimate this morning and I met, in addition to the woman interested in me doing the work, Jazz.

This is the 500th entry.

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Emma,
What I remember is Matt at 4 and Kate at 2 climbing up those little stairs they placed outside the nursery for siblings to see the new little one at St. Joseph Hospital in Nashua. They were so excited and they were so cute, and you were so beautiful.
And then you were in your Mom’s room, and they were sharing a chair, and you were so little and so beautiful.
Godma

Heath Hen Meadow, Acton. Feburary, 2001.
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E.D. In Coma

In her mind, in bare feet
she is walking among

April’s first
cold
pubic violets, still

here, heaven haunted
her eyes

and lips
closed:
Soon

so soon I’ll be a part
of all that I
now merely
see

Franz Wright

I post-holed toward the garage in pursuit of more black sunflower seeds to fill my empty bird feeder. I turned and saw the Andrew Wyeth . (Btw, what do you think of this crop, dissenter?) I ran back to get my camera, certain the sun would set in seconds, not hours, and snapped away. But I couldn’t translate what I saw onto the screen, and I couldn’t crop it to my satisfaction. The storm window interrupts the white wood frame. The final version is not perfect, but I agree with rakkity, there is a lot to look at, and I do like the way the small image bleeds into the dark grey background.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with my brother, Brian, on Friday. I was praising Dakota’s eye when he said, “I’ve never set up a photograph. I shoot away and wait to see what develops.” I replied, “I’ve never gotten what I’ve set out to shoot. It I plan a shot, it’s always a disappointment.”
The flip side of that is I get all kinds of surprises. Yesterday’s comments, for instance.

Here’s yesterday’s version, Jennifer. It was posted for maybe five minutes.

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Thought of a lot a lot of good opening lines*tried this one out on Mike and it got a laugh, so*

Mike, your worst fears are realized. I am still alive, proving that I don’t have to be dead to continue to haunt you.

(Thought I would share an interesting surgical experience, but now, having written it, it feels awfully narcissistic, and like, who cares? But what the hell*maybe it’s medically informative to the 1% interested*)

The eeriest thing about my pterygium excision and conjunctival graft was that I felt totally alert during the one hour procedure, even wanting to chat and jibe with Richard and Loraine. I wish I could say I had been one of those out-of-body perspectives from the ceiling so I could have seen exactly what was going on. Instead, I was fully in-body, with only my blurry pterygium-eye to reconnoiter, while Dr. Rodman pokes sharp instruments into itóbut without me feeling a thing.

I said at one point “so you went to Brown?”. “No” he responded. Bull * I did remember that correctly. Maybe he misunderstood me. Linda kept telling me afterwards that I was mumbling. Maybe I was mumbling then and having a drug-induced conversation mainly with myself.

An hour or so later I was dozing drowsily in my reclining wheelchair in the recovery room, eye patch in place, hearing some guy to my left angling to be let go, and then Linda coming in looking for her husband. I roused briefly to claim my jacket out of my clothes bag, tried to say goodbyes to all the nice people that had helped me along the route from prep to recovery (Aaron the prep nurse, Mary who took my vitals, anesthetist Dr. Liu and her anesthetist nurse Loraine, etc ̱ but I could not remember them all, and I was again probably still mumbling) (PS Рno one knew Rob Steinberg).

As I was wheeled upstairs via the large elevator, I remember thinking (saying?), “So, this is what it’s like to be Arthur !”. Helped into the front seat of the car, we were off to CVS for pain meds and then home to bed. Where I slept for fifteen hours, rousing only my Tylenols with codeine, lest my bruised eye start to complain too heavily.

While I thought I could play up the eye-patch-invalid-can’t-work-or-anything thing for several days, Dr. Rodman threw away my eye patch during my post-op visit the next day, saying my graft looked great (if he may say so himself), and that all I needed was “one drop four times a day, and come back in two weeks.” “I’m off to El Salvador tomorrow, to excise pterygia where they are plentiful among the natives [that work the fields and are in the near-equatorial sun all day]”, he said. (In those parts they have a much more mundane name for pterygia: carnosidad , meaning fleshy outgrowth , which describes the murky, blood vessel-filled, flap on the cornea). It is nice to know that this very successful Boston ophthalmologist still has a Socratic human side.

My pterygium is gone, the swelling is down, I drove around a bit yesterday, and declare myself back on-line.

A close-up for the ophthtalmologically curious. The red part is where the pterygium was (should have take a before shot). Looks worse now, but the idea is that the redness will go away, leaving my eye not looking bloodshot much of the time, and hopefully my reading glass prescription will come back into the normal range as the astigmatized eyeball regains its normal spherical shape.

Emmaís birthday cake, her matching tee shirt, and a must see

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Emma’s actual birthday was a week ago, but we had this second celebration with her family, Flo and Susan.

Flo and I napped on the drive home.

Somewhere in France. 1981.
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