A sight for sore eyes or a sore sight for eyes? Bird droppings and rust fragments frame the neighbor's humming air conditioner. Each displays the impact of decades of outside exposure. Hardened dust shadows the unit's once shiny aluminum veneer. Piled twig fragments layer its rectangular top. The scarred but still active machine, for us a steadfast sixteen-year presence through Superstorm Sandy, summer droughts and the Coronavirus pandemic, rests directly across and merely twelve feet from our kitchen window. The sight greets me each dawn when I come to make coffee. A nod shows my regard for its role.
I trust that the air conditioner still cools our neighbor on hot summer days but it's not much to look at for me. Yet life is not a fashion show and snap judgments make appearance deceitful. What’s inside matters, and this inanimate object somehow has heart. The air conditioner withstands police abuse, social protest and all worldly turmoil. It's been poised since the pandemic erupted in March and though I can’t foresee when our health crisis will end the unit will surely outlast it. That for me is soul-soothing.
“Everything exists according to its own nature,” a Zen tenet says. “Our individual perceptions of worth, correctness, beauty, size and value exist inside our heads, not outside them.” Space for unexpected insights comes with retirement since I structure but don't fill up time. Instead of hitting the trains to an interesting Manhattan lecture or the Devils hockey game in Newark, I keep eyes wide open right here.
The air conditioner extends innate grace as a pigeon family's home and safe haven, an aviary for three generations thus far. The current occupants have been cordial company during quarantine. Two three-week old snow white birds launched themselves yesterday on an epic maiden flight between our two windows. They were perched on a ledge one floor above and right over their hearth as I began chopping onions, jalapenos and peppers before cooking dinner. Had they found that new viewing angle intriguing?
Born to their parents' choral chirping, the nesting infant pigeons called squabs — pink-beaked yellow fuzz balls! — languished alone as mom and pop foraged for food, the air conditioner's extreme height and narrow width protecting from predators. Mealtime squeals showed the babes' anticipation or anguish; their elders, one white feathered, the other blue and black speckled, forced fast food scraps or seeds down their chasm beaks.
I wondered days later what the young thought at teenage through lengthy sit-and-stare sessions. I addressed them as I do our beloved rescue dog, but they like her said nothing. I hoped they took solace from my soft vocal tone.
Soon several tentative flaps helped each one discover its wings, reminiscent of the Wright Brothers rotating the blades of their biplane’s propeller in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina — their milestone 852 foot, 59 second flight reflecting what generations of pigeons had already achieved!
The natural world has much to teach us as it nurtures its young, handles one task at a time and trusts the process unfolding before it. Each pigeon plays a part in the drama my priceless box seat provides.
Three to five years of life await these fast-growing urban birds, research shows, and their precocious aerodynamic aptitude made clear they’d soon leave the nest’s shelter for an enticing yet threatening world. The peregrine falcon, a predator, has had several Prospect Park sightings. Children chase them, adults seem bothered by them and they can’t call for takeout.
Still, nature’s creatures can harmonize with skill sets humans are unwilling or unable to master. Boey, our dog of lab/pit extraction, lunges outside at Tuxedo Joe, the apartment building community's feral cat, only when the picket fence safely divides them, at other times calmly strolling past as when Joe on the front step samples his catered cat food or accepts kids’ cooing words.
An intricate evening choreography once engaged dog and cat with a visiting pigeon on the sidewalk by our building’s front door; each wend its way at a leisurely pace in turn between the other two, a minuet proving each felt assured of safe passage. Boey nibbled weeds and tracked scents, the pigeon pecked at the curbside, Tuxedo Joe acknowledged passersby. Each played its role in peace while we can't count on humans to shield each other from sickness with facemasks.
Aware of an impending pigeon departure as the siblings gained strength and became more adept, their parents sure to follow, I felt sorrow pangs, grieving loss through tension at not knowing when they would leave me — till the fateful moment brought lightning bolt joy.
Safe travels, friends!
Pigeons, too, are quarantined, the tired old air conditioner their safe haven.