A bird trapped in a rectangle
The Column: 07.30.26
A sunny day in New York and we left the doors open to our balcony and suddenly I heard flapping, a sort of panic of wings, and a teenage robin was in the living room bumping off the ceiling. I guess he’d never experienced a ceiling before. We have mourning doves nesting on the balcony, the mama roosting on the nestlings, the papa out shopping for seeds, and a pair of mockingbirds has raised their young and flown off, but this was our first robin. I shut the doors to the dining room so the poor guy didn’t get lost in the maze and Jenny got a dish towel and a cellphone and got the app that does bird calls and she flapped the towel gently, trying to herd the bird toward the open doors, but he couldn’t get his bearings.
I had a moment like that myself last week, trying to find my way to the library on Amsterdam Avenue, which I thought was on 83rd but was not. My eyesight is fading and I have a hard time with signage and I hate the idea of using GPS to find my way around the neighborhood, and then a young guy in his 50s said, “Can I help you?” A kind New Yorker. The city is full of them. So he got out his cellphone and located the library on 81st and I thanked him, we shook hands, and he said, “You’ve done so much for me over the years, glad to return the favor.”
An old radio listener. You never think of this when you take up broadcasting, the fact that you’re making friends — I went into radio because it’s easy work, started out as a newscaster — my evangelical upbringing gave me the ability to be solemn — and then I was an early morning DJ and then I did a Saturday evening show — and he’d been a fan of that.
He said, “I remember hearing you recite the counties of Minnesota very rapidly once and you said you’d memorized it but tell me — you were reading it off a script, weren’t you? Why would a person memorize all those names in alphabetical order? It didn’t make sense.”
So I stood there on Amsterdam Avenue and recited all 87 counties from Aitkin, Anoka, Becker, Beltrami all the way to Wright and Yellow Medicine. I told him I’d memorized it when I was ten to impress my aunts and also learned the streets of Minneapolis, Aldrich, Bryant, Colfax, Dupont, Emerson, Fremont, Girard, Humboldt, and so forth.
He didn’t seem to be in a hurry so I gave him my spiel about memorization. I believe in it. I believe in having beautiful things in your head, ever available, poems, song lyrics, Scripture, the Lord’s Prayer, the 23rd Psalm. When I do shows, I always have the audience sing and it amazes them, how beautiful they sound — I start singing “Wise men say only fools rush in” and they join in Elvis’s old hit and it’s stunning, the beautiful harmonies, and I fall in love with them. They know, “My country, ’tis of thee” and some Beatles hits and “Battle Hymn,” three verses, including the one with the circling camps and flaring lamps and dews and damps. Miss Helen Story had us memorize a Shakespeare sonnet in 12th grade English and it’s still in my head, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.”
It was a sweet moment in Manhattan. I made it to the library and sat down at a long table and worked on a book and put in a paragraph about the streets of Minneapolis and how it gave a sense of order and logic to my childhood. I miss my aunts, the stories they told, all about family history going back to the 17th century and my ancestor Samuel Cox, a seaman on a British man-o’-war, who jumped ship in Baltimore, a capital offense, and made it inland and started a family.
You never forget where you’re from. When I stand at a urinal and it’s slow to come and I think prostate cancer, I just imagine Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis and it loosens me right up.
The teenage robin flew out the open door and resumed his life and we cleaned up the evidence of his panic and all is well. At 84, you take it one day at a time. No need for long-term planning. Seize the day. Let tomorrow worry about itself. But remember to refill your prescriptions.
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Ah, memorizing! As a music undergraduate, I had to perform a one-hour memorized organ recital in my junior and senior years. Forever afterwards, I was convinced that the reason I always knew everyone’s phone number from memory was the brain pathways created and now available after I graduated. Now, at 71, it’s hard to remember some of the movies I’ve seen. But I’ve never met a hymn or church music response I could forget.
A beautiful day in the neighborhood!