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Page A14 Thursday, April 8, 1993 The Park Record Section A . UY TOM CLYDE 5 51 u IL 5) 0 si D i2j a Q The Premiere designinstallation li Affordable year-round maintenance and maintenance company in Park City. contracts. Y Experts in high altitude and drought T Environmentally sensitive treatments resistant landscapes. for weed and pest control. A Innovative rock and wafer features I Written analysis and estimates. - ponds, fountains, walls, etc. Call us anytime. It's the natural thing to do. H E vmmm WO M P A N Y I L D LANDS Cp4BpmSm B U mmmmm mm. em mmm mm q Etnaa mm nggo For the birds A sure sign that spring is almost here is the arrival of the birds at or in my house. San Juan Capistrano has its swallows returning like clockwork year after year. Hinckley, Ohio has its flock of buzzards that appear each spring on a festive holiday known as Buzzard Sunday. And at my house, I have the starlings who fly down the chimney in groups. I've been in this house for several years now, and so things that used to upset me in the early years have become pretty routine. The first year a bird flew down the chimney and got stuck in the wood stove, it was a great calamity. I had to save the bird at all costs. The problem was that the bird wouldn't come all the way into the stove, where I could open the door and grab it It was playing it safe, and hanging up in the stove pipe just above where I could reach it It's desperate cries for help touched my heart almost like its claws scraping the inside of the stovepipe, stove-pipe, with that incessant fingemail-on-the-blackboard sound, touched off the less desirable sides of my ' personality. The bird had to go. There was no way to reach it through the stove, but I had to end its suffering, and that horrible scratching on the stove pipes that resonated throughout the house all day long. I dismantled the stove pipes to rescue the bird. It had stopped scratching, and was, in my mind, lying deep in the chimney, near death, waiting for me to save it I had a glass of water and a piece of bread all set up on the porch, up high on the picnic table where the dog would leave it alone while it recuperated from its ordeal. But real birds are not like the ones we met in Disney cartoons. They are stupid, but also crafty. This one had figured out what was going on, and as soon as there was a tiny opening of daylight around the stove pipe, it blasted out like a bat out of helL It took a couple of circles around the living room, pooping wildly on anything upholstered, and shaking a three day accumulation of soot out of its wings. Then, in a last desperate act, instead of going for the patio door that was wide open and in a straight line from the chimney, it veered to the right, and smashed head first into another window. It dropped like a stone. Clean-up time, not counting putting the stove back together (or the trip to the hardware store because the screws holding the pipes together got vacuumed up), ran several hours. If good intentions can save, I've got it aced in the hereafter. If impolite language factors into the deal, I guess I'll be joining the rest of my friends below. So I learned a valuable lesson. Every now and then, a bird will get in the chimney. This is part of nature's plan. These are clinically depressed birds, birds with deep emotional problems. While they ought to be involved in a twelve step program to work through their problems, they are not, and as long as , they stay in that state of denial there is nothing we can s do for them. Many of them have juniper berry abuse , problems. They dive into the chimney of their own accord, and know the consequences. It's not an easy thing for a bird to get into the chimney. It's not an accident The chimney has a big sheet metal rain cap and spark arrestor thing on the top. It looks confined enough to me that I wonder how the smoke gets out A bird getting in there really wants to be there. One friend suggested that chimney diving is the bird equivalent to bungee jumping, and that the survivors sit around eating fermented berries bragging about it The less skillful end up flapping around in the stove pipe. Over the years, I've been able to count on about one bird per season. The robins get in there sometimes, and do an amazing job of cleaning the soot out of the chimney. The starlings get in there, and don't do much of anything. They won't take the obvious path out to the glass doors on the stove. They have a knack for getting into the deep recesses in die stove, back in the air intakes where they really get stuck and cause problems next fall when it's time to fire up the stove again. Some years, there aren't any birds in the chimney, other years there will be one or sometimes two over the course of the early spring. But this year, it has been like the Hitchcock film. Almost every day for the last . week, there have been a couple of starlings in the wood stove, scratching up and down the side of the chimney, and generally raising a ruckus. One day there were three in there. I fear a whole flock will make a run at it one day. A friend suggested putting a big bag or bed sheet over the stove, and opening the door so the birds could fly out of the stove and into the sheet The idea was to contain them in the sheet until I could get it outside, then open up and let the bird or birds go free (or, with my luck, let them fly back up on the roof to dive bomb the chimney again). This friend is in the carpet cleaning business, which made his advice seem a little suspect A neighbor suggested climbing up on the roof and putting a tighter screen over the spark arrestor on the chimney. That sounds like a reasonable idea, but the roof is awfully steep, and there is nothing to hold on to up there while sealing off the chimney. And I'd have to remember to take it off next fall. This neighbor, a retired chiropractor, still thinks that is the best solution. Time is my best ally. In a week or so, the starlings will have made it through this nest building frenzy. Those who got a nest built will lay eggs and get on with it Those who didn't get a nest built in time will move on and try again next year. With any luck at all, Darwinian principles will work, and those starlings who carry me chimney diving gene will be unsuccessful breeders (stuck in the stove as they are), curing the problem in the long run. In the meantime, I've learned how to make these great barbecued buffalo wings.. ' Specif n C3 I Sttirnlke a Veto undau Runch 10:00 - 3:00p BY TEltl OlUt Grape jellybeans & Everclear U $13.95 g Adutrs U $5.95 y ChildRen M undo? 12 C&Rved CDeeo pResh Seafood l")or CnrRdes ImpoRted CC Oomesric Cheeses ,n CResh S&fods U U CsJ Homemade bRCAds w ; fResh fRuir P&8rRy Display M SpeaaX "Kids X2Mc j GMJD STEAK nESTflOFMIT AT PROSPECTOR SQUARE t Jill VI t 1 4 It is a holy week no matter how you worship. My girlfriend pointed this out on Monday a high holy day in her household. Since it was Passover one of her co-workers commented she hadn't realized my friend was Jewish. "Who said anything about being Jewish? This is the first pitch of baseball season. My husband considers this a holy occasion." I have gotten the specifics of religions fused and confused this week and in the end, I'm pretty comfortaable with that As my minister would tell you, I have missed more Sundays than I have made this year, but I showed up this week because it is the start of the Mark Heiss Farewell Tour. Mark has announced he is leaving the congregation in July to take a position with a church in downtown Boulder. Good for him. Bad for us. Mark did something rather risky in his Palm Sunday service, and departed from conventional worship. I won't try to explain all of that here, but he talked about sin being only those things that kept us from reconciling our relationship with God. Then he gave us a chance to nail those things to a cross. It was pretty powerful stuff . I got home to a message on my machine from a lapsed Catholic friend who said he hoped I was at church praying for his very lost soul and he was cooking tonight if I wanted to drive out of town for dinner. His cooking is always a high holy day for me, so I called back and agreed to make a Caesar salad if he'd make something unpronounceable and Italian. The evening evolved into a discussion on organized religion, his foray into things metaphysical, and a workshop he went to years ago in Big Sur where he learned the meaning of hie from a naked 70-year-old woman in a hot tub. He still harbored a sufficient amount of guilt from all things great and small learned in his east coast altar boy days. He confessed he believed in reincarnation and he knew that put him at odds with his church. My grandparents were Catholic and I understood, somewhat the church he thought he needed to wrestle with. I fell asleep that night with God and garlic reeking out of my pores. Monday was Passover and I haven't missed a Seder supper in probably 10 years. This year, rather than attend the large community celebration, a few of us gathered in a private home and ate and sang and read in Hebrew (OK they read in Hebrew) and in the tradition of great Talmudic scholars, we questioned everything. Everything meant Bosnia, Palestinians, Haitians and what it meant to "walk your talk" in a spiritual way. Our leader, fearless, kept using the scriptures as a springboard to the metaphors of bondage and oppression and also those things we should be grateful for. It was a very Jungian interpretation of the service. The young son sang the traditional thanksgiving song in Hebrew and the adults joined in for the refrain. Keeping the faith was passed from father to son and shared with the rest of us along the way. And then there were the ritual questions starting with Why is this night different from all other nights? I decided it was due to the fact I willingly drank Manischewitz wine. At the table, one man described the traditional beverage as akin to drinking grape jelly beans laced with Everclear. The stuff packs a mean punch and the night is filled with multiple toasts. Herein is a small confession we saw nothing unorthodox about bringing a bottle of decent red to the table as well. My mother finds my mixed belief system hereditary on my father's side of course. "You know your grandmother used to go to whichever church had the best card games. She loved to play cards and she figured God understood that I would just like to point out I don't know of any Irish Jews, although it would follow... with your liberal tendencies." Being liberal is close to original sin with mother. I don't argue with her anymore. For her, church is place of passings baptisms, weddings and wakes. Time spent at the ocean is worship to her and I respect that But if I were in Ireland today, my mother's family and my father's family would be fighting against one another for their polarized views of Christianity. Being Irish, in and of itself, is not a religion. In all my conversations this week about what is holy and what makes us holy I ended up hearing the same message no matter who was speaking. In the end, . God and whatever the deity expects of us is most likely whatever we make it There are some common areas of agreement learning from past mistakes and treating others the way we want to be treated-' -whether that means spending time feeding the homeless in Pioneer Park or reconsidering Israel's position on the West Bank. But in the end, it always comes down to the same thing for me and for those people I connect with the best it is about relationships. Careers come and go, possessions come and go, our health comes and goes and people in our lives, unfortunately come and go. I suspect if we're really honest there are times in our life when our relationship with God comes and goes. . Fundamentalists won't much like this but it strikes a vein with me if you can commune by sitting on the third base line with a bratwurst and someone special in your life next to you, than you probably will experience something holy just in the sharing. This week I rejoice in having relationships with people who are, blessedly, not exactly like me. Dinaynu. |
