Monday, July 17, 2006
King of the Mountain
I work, as I never seem to tire of saying, in a pretty gritty environment. It’s all blacktop around plazas abutting good-sized buildings, with cars and trucks and motorcycles and pedestrians swirling like platelets through urban arteries. The sky is peppered with freshly-ungrounded aircraft, and the sun is often hidden from me as I march through the concrete and steel canyons. From near or far this landscape is emphatically the work and the province of humankind. If I ever see anything other than my own species, it’s a pigeon or a rat or some homeless dude’s dog. Homo Sapiens rules the roost.
Except: A month or so ago I left work to see telescopes and high-powered binoculars set up on tripods across the street from my building. I followed their sightline and saw a smudge about fifteen stories up on an otherwise undistinguished façade. They offered me a magnified peek and I took it. Through the high resolution optics, clear as glass and 60x closer, was revealed a fuzzy little head.
“Peregrine?” I asked.
“Fledged two days ago,” the self-satisfied ornithologist beside me crowed. I peeked again. The top of the head was white, darker around the very prominent eyes. It looked wild. It looked right at home.
Since that day I’ve seen the ‘scopes every day or two, sometimes in the a.m., but mostly in the p. Sometimes it’s one watcher; sometimes it’s an excited little clutch of ‘em. But whether they’re there or not, I know, though I can’t see it, that I’m no longer alone at the top of the food chain. The peregrines are canyon hunters, and it looks like they’re here to stay. Keep your pigeons indoors, good people, and watch our for your weinerdogs.
The boy has finally fallen asleep, after nearly 3 hours of hysterical crying. Damn but that sucks the energy out of a room. We had a great weekend with multiple parties and exercise and sunny days in the park; I watched my favorite episode of Ascent of Man (yay relativity!) and
played some solitaire. Zach is experiencing the joy of molaring and we’ve got a world of work to deal with before my sister and her clan show up at the end of the week. Am I making excuses for being a lame blogger this week? I don’t need to make excuses. I’ll just loathe myself silently from a distance. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Till the intensity passes, though, even if I don’t update as often as usual, I’ll cherish your memory in my heart. There’s plenty of room; I just passed a cardiac stress test. Yeah, that’s how it’s been lately - triumph in the midst of inconvenient exertions. I’ll let you know how it all turns out. Plus, there’s the legend of Boy Bawang and the SHNNING to share with you. In the industry, they call that at “teaser.” I call it time for bed. Later days, Ubernurts.
