What!?: a muse on projection

This mid-July day is starting to cool. Time to do outdoor work. I am preparing my home for sale and there is so much to do that I can start anywhere. It won’t matter where. There is an entire estuary of sucking need, rampant growth and entropy around me. The time I spend on any one task will drain into the quicksand of numbered days and jobs beyond number. So I slow down; way, way down to "notice mode."

“Baby, Baby, Baby just talk to me. Where does it hurt?” I ask, showing the quiet, positive regard a mother might show her child, or a nurse a terminal patient. I am sitting in the front yard, peering under the hood of the little tractor trying to figure out what his reluctance to get up and get going is all about.

A cardinal, the cardinal, is checking his reflection in the side-view car mirror, hopping victoriously on top of it, bending over to look again, “Damn, still there,” I can hear him say as he flies down for another face-off. He’ll do this for hours. I wonder when he eats, fights with his wife, goes to the movies. This bird has no life.

 The ritual has been going on since mid-February and is only one of several ways he has been obsessing with interpretations of his own image, which he finds everywhere. They are the enemy. He protects his family from his image at my bedroom window, my office window, the car mirrors, car mirrors of all my guests and the sky lights in the living room ceiling. Five months now. 

I’m trying to learn something from this.

The oil in the tractor is perfectly clean. I changed it last week. Filters, air and fuel; all fresh. There’s Sea Foam in the gas to dry any water and keep the carburetor clean. I diagnose spark-plug crud and go in search of a socket wrench and new plug.

 On my way I see not the beautiful view, nor the simple handsome house, not the wild flowers: nothing but work that needs doing claims my eye. How have I managed this house and all this land for 30 years? More importantly, why? But I know why. The knowledge is like distant music, just slightly subliminal, repetitious, sung in a language I don’t speak.

I find a spark plug box in the sparkling clean, newly painted tool room but the box contains only a used spark-plug. Now why did I do that?

Yesterday that tractor and I had one of our near death experiences where I lost control on the edge of the hill and it began slipping sidewise. I got the blades turned off but the motor was still on and the transmission engaged when I jumped from the high side, again. Some things just don't bear repeating.

 In hindsight I see that the tires, wet from mowing over newly watered grass, just lost purchase on the hill rim. Thirty years of mowing this place and I had not encountered that particular scenario before. Who knew? I stood above watching it claw and crab its way to a lower altitude.

“Please don’t roll.  Please don’t roll.”

 It didn’t. We both got off lucky this time.

I’m tired. And I regret picking this particular job today. The cardinal woke me up, “tap-tap, tap-tap. tap-tap. . .” on the bedroom window before dawn.

I observed him and his two-tap message, accent on the second beat, over the rim of my coffee cup. Five months ago, against a late winter snow, he’d been glossy with birdie health. Since then he has double-pecked his own image in the glass a conservative three million times and he looks it. His beak is blunted, the handsome black accents around his eyes have taken on the sunken quality of a late life heroin user. And maybe, I’m projecting here, but I think his color is fading. The light in his eye has changed from a spark of life to the small empty bowls of the suicide bomber.

Don’t tell me I’m imagining this. I can hear you. Just look at the pictures. It’s obvious he’s homogenized his brain. How does he do it? And why?  But we know.

“Whit whit whit whit, birdie birdie, chew chew chew chew chew chew.” That’s his favorite refrain. There is no trusted translation and I will not assign them meaning, though I’ve had to de-fuse a few responsive verses of my own involving BB guns, you know, when he just goes on and on and on. It’s his message and he’s sticking to it.

It’s obvious I need to get out more. All I can think to write about is equipment and wildlife. I imagine myself at a gathering of friends, having exhausted the uses of positive regard and the listening skills I practice with the tractor, my turn to actually contribute something to the conversation, and I find myself standing straight of spine, fingers laced at chest level, doing a medley of bird song. How did I get here?

I got here the way the cardinal did. We were drawn by pretty much the same things. And I stayed, as he has, driven to finish what I started. You know you are done when you’ve made something beautiful enough, rich enough, to walk away from with a full heart. That feeling is the fuel that nourishes the  next work of art. It sounds like “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” and when you are full-up with yes, moving to a new work of art is just the thing to do.

“Just so, just so, just so,” I sing. “And that, and that, and that.”

I clean off the old spark plug, skinning my knuckles as usual putting it back in. My poor hands! I think about a manicure. Heels. I imagine a red dress. The tractor starts.

“Whit, whit, whit, whit . . .” I will wear this red dress on a date with a kind man. We will have a leisurely dinner. He will hug me. We will dance slowly, slowly, slow. I will rest that night. And then in the morning I will make something new, something really good. What, what, what what . . ?