Cyclones, earthquakes, tsunamis, and grackles

Two natural disasters within two weeks in the southeast region of the world have been keeping the nightly news buzzing with the latest death counts. The May 3^rd cyclone that slammed into Myanmar is now said to have a death count of 137,000 or more, and the latest death count from the recent earthquake in China is not at 57,000 or more.

Considering that it’s only been two and half years since the Asian Tsunami that claimed over 200,000 people, that region of the world has experienced an unprecedented loss of life and destruction of property. In some places, entire families and villages have simply disappeared.

It is hard sometimes to imagine what it would be like to sit on a set of stairs of what once was your home and realize that not only is your house gone, but so is your entire family and community. Even in our own country, with the recent tornadoes of the Midwest said to be the worst in ten years, similar scenes have also been broadcast on our nightly news.

I’ve never considered myself to be a pessimistic sort of fellow. I like my glass half-full, thank you very much. But as I think about the events we have experienced these past few years, about my own son fighting over in Afghanistan, it has become increasingly more difficult to be on the sunny side of anything, especially with our looming economic crisis brought on the by the high cost of oil.

The only other time I can remember that even compares to the turbulence and agony we’ve sensed and experienced since 2001 is the 1960’s. However, most of the events that occurred during that time— the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, the DC street riots, Watergate—had more to do with changes in our politics and culture.

As John Lennon sang in “Give Peace a Chance,” it was the decade of “Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism, Ragism, Tagism, This-ism, That-ism.” And as much as it may have been a chaotic time anchored by the war in Vietnam and the counterculture movement that swept the campuses of America, we were able to adjust to the anarchy generated during those years just fine. We embraced the music, accepted the hippie’s mantra of peace and love, and moved on into the seventies no worse for the wear on our collective psyche.

But there is something different about this decade, something that seems more ominous and uninviting. The turbulence and agony experienced thus far, beginning with 9/11 and the events that have followed—the War on Terror, Katrina, the Asian Tsunami, and the recent events in Myanmar and China—has created a pall of despair that makes what happened during the sixties seem almost benign.

It used to be I liked watching the news, but I’m finding lately that the “sensory overload” sometimes is a bit more than I can take. I can no more do anything about the events transpiring around me than I could with the events that transpired during the sixties. And so it gets to where I have to shut the TV off and focus on the things I can attend to.

As I’m writing this, I hear what sounds like a spoon scraping against the side of a plastic pitcher as it stirs the contents of an ice tea mix. I look out the patio door and discover the source of the unusual sound is a great-tailed grackle perched on the top of my bird feeder. It doesn’t surprise me, though. Since living here in Houston, I’ve learned that great-tailed grackles have an impressive repertoire of chirps, chortles, screeches, whoops, and metallic clacking noises.

It is almost as if they are fascinated with their own voices and seem to constantly try and create a new sound to out rival the others in its flock. With these birds I’ve heard “gronks,” and high pitched shrills that mimic the sound of an ambulance siren as it comes up to an intersection, but I haven’t heard anything like what this bird is doing now as it grates the inside of the pitcher with its incessant “scrape,” “scrape,” “scrape,” “scrape!”

My feeder attracts an impressive assortment of birds, mostly sparrows, but also frequent visits from cardinals, waxwings, yellow warblers, and nuthatches. The patio window makes for great “kitty TV” for my cat, and for hours on end he’ll lie outstretched on the carpet in front of the glass with a lazy eye on all the activity without any real concern or excitement.

It is with the great-tailed grackle, though, that my cat has a certain nervous trepidation. Ever since the day one came hob-bobbing across the patio and stood within inches of my cat, separated only by the patio screen, did my cat become phobic about grackles. Just as my cat lifted its head up to see what this bird was all about, the grackle suddenly stuck up its chest, fanned out its back tail feathers, and let out a screech that sounded like a car in need of a serious brake job. It almost looked like a scene out of “Jurassic Park.”

My cat lifted a good foot and half off the floor, did a one-eighty, and split for the back bedroom closet. It would be another two hours before he would come back out again, albeit slowly and tightly wired. Just a small scuff on the carpet with my foot was enough to make him freeze in a prickly hunch until he realized it was just me. I picked him up and patted him until he finally settled into a more relaxed purr.

It would be another two weeks, though, before he would even consider going back to his favorite spot that catches the morning sun he so loves to stretch out in. He’s OK with a grackle on the birdhouse, but as soon as one flits on the patio, that’s it; he’s gone.