My Name was Supposed to be Elizabeth Ann

Shortly after I finished cleaning up my backyard secret garden, hubby and I sat on the bench enjoying a beautiful mid-spring evening when a little black and brownish bird hopped among the limbs of a nearby pine, then darted into the birdhouse I’d suspended for decoration. I thought it was a chickadee but couldn’t say definitively. There was too much distance and too little light, and I worried I would scare it off if I moved closer to see. When I posted online, asking for help naming my visitor, several friends recommended the Merlin app, which allows you to identify birds by sight and sound. 

I downloaded it right away, but unfortunately never discovered my new birdie friend’s name.

Funny isn’t it, what you learn when you pay attention? When you’re open to new ideas and experiences?

According to its jacket blurb, Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles is “a gorgeous, witty account of birding, nature, and the beauty around us that hides in plain sight.” I purchased a copy on a whim, about the same time I worked on my garden, because I wanted to learn more about birds and was curious about Tan’s fascination with them, which began “in 2016, [when] Tan grew overwhelmed by the state of the world.”  

It took me over three months to read. Partly because of its structure, mainly because I wanted to savor it. I wanted to learn. The book contains no chapters, rather dated entries punctuated by Tan’s penciled illustrations, all distilled from five-plus years of her observing and recording her meditations in journals she originally never intended to share. I would read only a few pages at lunch each day, or at night before I resumed whatever novel I was mid-binge. 

And I began my own birdie chronicles. At our place upstate, I filled my new feeders with two different kinds of seeds and waited on the back porch–coffee in hand, binoculars at the ready–to meet my new birdie friends. The sparrows arrived first, three days later, followed by mourning doves and finches, cardinals and grackles, chickadees and tufted titmice, red-winged blackbirds and rose-breasted grosbeaks among others. Of course, I knew none of their names initially. I would use the app to identify them by sound or feature, then–thrilled by each discovery–add each visitor to my ‘Life List.’ I would listen to their chirps and calls, and learned to distinguish a blue jay from a chipping sparrow, a chickadee from a chimney swift. 

Funny isn’t it, what you learn when you pay attention? When you’re open to new ideas and experiences? 

For years and years–our whole lives, actually–hubby and I heard the hoo-hoohs from within the fields and finger woods surrounding his family home and said definitively, That’s an owl. Even though we’d never seen said owls, never observed them hitting those mournful notes. Never questioned why we heard ‘owls’ at all times of day, even though owls are nocturnal.

Turns out what we thought were owls hooting were actually mourning doves cooing. 

Turns out, I didn’t know there were so many varieties of sparrow, that birds ‘bathe’ in dirt, that–magnified–blackbirds are iridescent. I didn’t know that bird voices are similar to human voices, in that they change depending on why they’re vocalizing, on ‘whom’ they’re addressing. That squirrels, when agitated, chitter like monkeys.

Back home a few weeks later, I bought more feeders, more seed, and a conical squirrel baffle to discourage invaders, then sat on my deck–coffee in hand, binoculars at the ready–to meet my new birdie friends.

Turns out suburban birds aren’t as sociable.

The same bookstore trip I bought Chronicles on a whim, I on-purpose bought Salman Rushdie’s Knife. I’ve read nearly all of his other works and had agonized about his recovery from the August 2022 knife attack that almost killed him. I wondered, how on earth can anyone move on after such deliberate, personal violence? Not just physically, but emotionally. Psychologically. How do you answer a world seething with hatred, with destruction? 

I read his memoir over two days. Turns out, he and Tan have similar outlooks. Similar motivations for their most recent books. 

Whereas Rushdie had been literally, physically attacked by a black-clothed, would-be assassin he calls the A–, Tan felt figuratively attacked by a world she no longer recognized. Which is not the same thing, of course, not at all, yet here’s my point–Either or both could have answered violence with violence. Could have sought revenge or their attackers’ destruction. 

Instead–

Tan sought peace in the natural world outside her window. 

Instead–

Rushdie sought healing, not only of his body but of his psyche. Not so much asking himself, Why did this happen to me? But rather, What is the meaning of this thing that happened to me? 

His answer? “One of the most important ways in which I have understood what happened to me, and the nature of the story I’m here to tell, is that it’s a story in which hatred–the knife as a metaphor of hate–is answered, and finally overcome, by love…. One has to find life….One can’t just sit about recovering from near death. One has to find life.”

Yes, I say. Absolutely. 

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I too become overwhelmed  by the barrage of hatred and division in our world. 

I too choose to push back against it.

I garden and hike, I observe the natural world and build my backyard sanctuaries because doing so settles my anxious, fretful brain.

I read to find answers, to discover new voices and perspectives, because while I may sometimes feel alone in my journey, I know I am not.

Some call those pursuits hobbies. I call them engines. They power me out of my first person default and remind me I am part of something bigger. That there are forces, yes, beyond my control, but also that the creative impulse–the urge to “find life”–possesses greater power, greater healing, than the urge to destroy, and that I have an obligation to share that understanding.

Which is why I write.

Which is why Tan shared her journals and Rushdie shared his recovery.  Both recognize that the creative urge is a life force, the antidote to despondency and chaos. 

“It has been said, I have said it myself,” Rushdie explains, “that the powerful may own the present, but writers own the future, for it is through our work, or the best of it at least, the work which endures into that future, that the present misdeeds of the powerful will be judged. But how can we think of the future when the present screams for our attention?…A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all our satirists are heroes. But we are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that the song is stronger than death.”

But we are not helpless.

Yes, I say. Absolutely. 

*****

A day or two after my birdie friend and her mate occupied my birdhouse, rain moved in and hubby and I headed upstate once more. I looked for them upon our return home several weeks later, but they had vanished. The house’s back door lay on the ground, twigs and fluff from their nest lay scattered upon it. Within, there were no eggs nor remnants of shells. Had they been chased off? Or had they flown off willingly, their babies successfully launched? I never discovered their fate. 

Meanwhile, red and gray squirrels had circumvented my feeders’ defenses. They had learned to unlatch the suet cages, to jump on the feeder roofs and scatter their seeds to the ground. A few diehard sparrows pecked at the leftovers, but other songbirds refused to visit, instead settling as was their habit on the tallest branches of the surrounding pines and maples. No matter where I moved my feeders, no matter the variety of seed I offered, they remained determinedly aloof. Now fall has arrived, and the night skies fill with migratory flocks while I sleep.

No matter, I’ll keep trying. I’ll continue building my backyard sanctuary. Because spring will return and so will they.

I hope.

I’ll keep you posted. 

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Reading Challenge Update:

As of September 30, I’ve read 82 books toward my 2024 goal of 100, which Goodreads tells me is seven ahead of schedule. I’m nearly finished Judi Dench’s pseudo-memoir Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, and I’ve just begun Victory City, which Rushdie had finished shortly before the events discussed in Knife. 

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Excited to share….

My short, short story ‘He Could Have Read Her Signs’ appears in a recent issue of Quail Bell Magazine. You can read it here.

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Coming up on MY NAME WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ELIZABETH ANN….

Yep, this post is a week later than normal–Hubby and I were away celebrating our 35th!! wedding anniversary. Because when you find a good one, you hold on and you definitely, definitely celebrate. Here we are back in July, celebrating our friends’ daughter’s wedding:

And here we are on our own wedding day, back in October 1989:

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Next up in November, a profile of one of my reader friends (fifth in the occasional series ‘BOOKS THAT MATTER AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM’),

And in December, I’ll be revisiting a series on media literacy I began in 2021 (but never finished!!). You can read the first posts here and here.

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Any impulse books in your TBR pile? Any books you’d recommend I add to mine? Drop a comment below 🙂

Thanks for reading!! Thanks for sharing!!