Rick Moody – on birds and memory.

Fishers Island, New York
November 21, 2000

Dear Paul,

When I’m really getting into procrastinating, I construct these sequences of homely chores. For example, where I live, there’s no garbage pick-up, so most people take their own trash down to the dump. There are a lot of feral cats at the dump, dozens of them. Mainly these cats are tabbies. Or variations thereupon. The guy who oversees the dump has mounted a sign above one dumpster calling our attention to the beauty of his cats, but I don’t think they’re beautiful, because I think the cats prey upon local birds, which is what this letter is about. About how I love birds.

After I go to the dump, which has a beautiful view of Long Island Sound (on a good day you can see the Montauk lighthouse from there), I usually go to see Mary and Lili at the post office. Last time I was in there, Lili was complaining about how the U.S.P.S. is entering into a joint operation with FedEx and UPS, and Lili thinks it means the end of postal service in many rural areas. In my town, for example. But she will be retiring before this happens. That’s what she told me. I don’t think, therefore, that her organizational theories are much more than nostalgia for a simpler, less complicated time. A nostalgia I share, even though I am not old enough to be nostalgic in this way.

Usually, I get gigantic amounts of mail. People send me things. It’s one of the things that I really enjoy about my job, the fact that people send me things. They send me galleys of books, and books, and tapes, and CD’s, and copies of their short stories, and literary magazines, and book review digests, and so forth. There are a lot of bills in my mail, too. And among the many catalogues I receive (which are sort of distracting and which generally go directly into Mary’s recycling bin), is one from Duncraft, a company that specializes in birdseed. They send me catalogues because I buy fifty pound bags of birdseed every couple of months. The reason for this will be clear in a minute.

After the post office, when I’m on a binge of procrastination, I go down to the village market (there’s just the one; it usually has just a couple of green peppers and a cucumber, and that’s about it) and pick up the newspaper. The paper doesn’t come until about 8:15, because it has to be shipped to the island from the mainland, shipped in the literal sense.

Once these preliminary chores are completed, I have to get more creative on procrastination. I have to get creative, that is, if I want to avoid writing all the way until lunch, which is my goal. So usually what I do after these preliminary chores I’ve described is feed the birds. This isn’t really a chore, in my view, this is more like a devotional act. I love the idea that wild animals rely on coming to my yard. I like that they can sustain themselves here all winter long. And I actually believe that the birds are waiting in the trees around my house, some mornings, waiting for me personally to get my shit together and fill the birdfeeders. I can hear them in the trees, squawking. I can hear that pair of blue jays with their harsh braying, I can hear the blackbirds chattering, and therefore it is time to feed them, lest they should have to go up the street somewhere.

There are two birdfeeders. One is small and copper and looks like a gazebo. The problem with this birdfeeder is that it hangs over a branch, and is therefore completely accessible to squirrels, who simply climb up the tree, waltz out to the end of the branch and reach down. Some days I have to come outdoors two or three times in a morning and chase off the squirrels, so that the birds can eat in peace. Also, in winter, crows like to settle there on the feeder and keep off the smaller perching birds. They are easier to drive off than squirrels. They will lift off if I merely wave my arms madly in the kitchen.

The worst day of all, in my struggle to keep birdfeeder #1 available to any chickadee or sparrow or oriole, came this summer when I woke to find A RAT on the birdfeeder. A big motherfucking rat. A country rat. Scared of nothing on this earth. With a tail as long as my forearm. I usually keep a few rocks just outside the screen door to heave at the squirrels on the birdfeeder (I try never to hit them), but I had to pelt this rat several times to get him to desist, and I now believe that it is this rat that empties the birdfeeder overnight, every night, so that I have to refill it in the morning. A pox upon all country rats, I say.

The rat and the squirrels and the crows who skulk around my house ultimately necessitated the acquisition of birdfeeder #2, one of those impervious ones that stands on a metal pole and which has perches that are designed to fall away from the feeder automatically if a bird weighs too much. You know the design, right? It’s fun to watch crows attempt to land on one of these feeders. They fall off the thing and get frustrated and move on. Once, in the middle of the night, I heard a raccoon try to leap onto feeder #2 from the porch. He mangled himself and went wailing off disconsolately toward the harbor. Never to be heard from again.

I love all the birds on my two birdfeeders. I love sparrows and grackles and chickadees even though you see these guys every day and they are nothing special. I love mourning doves, even though my father, who lives only a couple of miles from me, thinks they are mere pigeons. I love red-wing blackbirds, even though they can destroy crops, even though they can empty a birdfeeder in a few hours. I love blue jays, even though they menace other birds. So much do I love the blue jays near my house, that I imagine I have a personal relationship with them and occasionally talk to them. I love robins. I love orioles. But above all I love cardinals. I think the cardinal is among the most beautiful animals of the northeastern United States (only the tiger swallowtail, a regional butterfly, is prettier), and their movements are so gentle and so methodical, and their devotion to their mates is so overpowering that I can watch them for a very long time without wanting to do anything else. I think I would be happier if I were a cardinal. I also love herons (we have one in the harbor), I love even Canada geese (because I don’t give a shit if they ruin the golf course or not) and likewise the lowly herring gull, and all varieties of ducks, but above all, I love the cardinal.

Which is to say: I fill birdfeeders and stare vacantly at birdfeeders to avoid writing, of course, just as I compose e-mail messages late into the morning to avoid writing, but today these aren’t the reasons I’m doing these things at all, Paul. Today I’m doing these things because this time of the year brings the anniversary of a certain death in the family. And while, on other days, I might amass chores like going to the dump and going to the post office and going to the market and filling the birdfeeders to avoid writing, today I am doing these chores to find a way around thinking about a certain person who is no longer here. I’m sure you get a lot of letters about this, and I wish I didn’t have to write letters on this subject, and I wish I didn’t have to keep thinking about this and talking about it, and I wish I had never written all the things I’ve written about grief, and I think the numerological obsessions of the grief-stricken (today would have been her birthday or today was the day when we went rowing on the lake or today is the half-anniversary, etc.) are ridiculous and contribute nothing to our lonely march here, but my heart knows nothing of skepticism, and so I do the same things everybody else does, especially at this time of year. A certain plunge in the temperature, a certain gust of wind bearing upon it a half-dozen yellowed leaves, a carved pumpkin, a child in a Halloween costume, any of these and I’m back in a sequence of memories and impressions that I don’t want to have.

So I go into the shed, where there’s an old beat-up garbage can containing a fifty pound bag of Wild Bird Mix. The shed has my sister’s old mountain bike in it, and the lawn mower belonging to my friend Sylvester, and a Weber barbecue I have never used, and I push these things aside, and I find the highball glass that I use to funnel seed into the birdfeeders, and I drag these things out onto the lawn, the bag of seed, the glass, and then I go get the two birdfeeders. The first of these is easy to fill, but the second one takes some time, because it will take a fair amount of seed, and it’s good that these things take such time. The repetition of household chores ennobles me, I believe, and when the feed is in the birdfeeders, then the chickadees will descend, always first among local birds. The interesting thing about a chickadee is that he or she will always leave a perch after taking A SINGLE SEED. They fly off to a nearby branch, eat the seed, and then return to the feeder. One morsel at a time. They’re the smallest of my birds, but the most impetuous, and it’s only when they have demonstrated that the coast is clear that the others birds of my neighborhood will start to visit. The cardinals get interested when there has been a lot of spillage. Soon I see them rooting around in the underbrush and on the lawn. I think cardinals know nothing but the joy of being a cardinal. Maybe one autumn soon I will know that kind of joy too.

Best wishes for the holidays, etc.,

Rick.