The other morning, I awoke to the sounds of my neighbors that are so typical for this time of year. The California quail calls rode the cool, water thickened air up through our cracked bedroom window. It’s a pleasure to share my block and start my days with these birds. Lately I haven’t heard as much of their three beat la-LA-la call as the single-note sounded out at regular intervals, which bears resemblance to the timbre of a smaller monkey. They’ve been rooting around the garden quite a bit, this particular group cleaving to the dirt for so many goodies and all achieving an almost comical plumpness that one wonders how the lookout can even flap itself up onto the six foot fence top. Later in the season they'll eventually appear in just pairs, and will take turns scanning from above for the resident fox while the other eats; when it's the male’s turn to watch his curved plume and proud posture makes him look like a Roman soldier of the bird world.
Like most spring mornings in our yard, where coast live oaks follow a grassy slope down to a creekside lined with mature bay laurels, the evergreen canopy is alive with birds. I’d already heard hooting a few hours earlier after waking prematurely: Hoot-who-who-who-hoot. An owl likes to perch high in the fir tree outside our bedroom, and the bird will fill the predawn quiet with the most soothing call. I don’t know if it is looking for a mate. It could be just as easily asserting its hunting domain to competitors or giving a courtesy warning to its prey—try to hide, cute squirrel, but I’m still going to come get you.
When my wife and 2nd- and 3rd-graders start stirring, I fill the kitchen with the industrial din of the burr grinder, then hold my fresh grind up to about chin level for a long sniff, inhaling to prime my senses. Not that anything was off, but I noticed the grinder’s container and internal parts could use a scrub; it’d been awhile and a good coat of bean oil had worked up on the container cone. The Moccamaster would do the rest. It’s not the prettiest machine; it hulks on the countertop. And it’s quite expensive, but it brews a great cup and has exceeded the promise of its seven year warranty, making our previous succession of faltering Cuisinarts look downright disposable. (Come to think, why did we keep buying the same coffee maker if it couldn’t reliably brew for more than a couple years? Does Costco just own stock in our brains?)
Coffee poured and steaming from English earthenware, the mugs’ gradient glazes make my mind flash to an old collection of William Blake’s I haven’t picked up in years. This includes the acid-rinsed panels he made to accompany some of the fearful symmetry era poems, like “Tyger, Tyger”. One of the stanzas from that poem trickles out of my memory and I mutter to myself with a raised brow, “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
I register for the thousandth time how time slips, and slice and toast plain bagels for the children. My wife isn’t scheduled to work today, and an easy morning is underway among the four of us with a mix of questions, recollections, observations, jokes, and then light commands to get ready for school. After breakfast and the rest of the routine, a couple of my son’s friends arrive at the house by bike, and while they goof around on the front porch before heading off to school, my daughter gets her sneakers on for the walk.
These are the days when a morning sweater becomes optional. My son eschews one while my daughter and I need a couple more weeks. He and his pals tear off and she and I head out the door up the lane past the homes of our two neighbors. Several pink jasmine line a shared fence of ours and we notice some of the small flowers starting to bloom. This is an eight foot tall hedge, thick and healthy. My wife is happy to concede gardening chores to me and I’ve always thought this one looks better trimmed than sheared. On past our neighbors’ almost perfect front yards: orange freesia have come up, and the gopher-resistant salvias and brilliant purple ceanothus are blooming, perfectly low-cut boxwood frames a walkway. Onto our cross street. This is my least favorite part of our walk. While we’re hoofing a decline, making our way past a continuous hedge of thick, red flowered feijoa and airy pittosporum with tiny leaves that quake like aspens, cars are launching towards us from the stop sign around the corner up ahead. Or they’re coming straight at us from the west end of town, where the wooded ring road’s turns give way to a straight shot. So many of these drivers reflexively stomp on the gas to head up the hill, which leaves us thankful for the few electric cars that leave no trail of exhaust in their wake for us to breathe.
What makes this particular morning’s walk stick in my memory is one of the craziest driving maneuvers I’ve ever seen. In spite of the 25mph limit and double yellow line on a two lane road, of kids nearby walking and cycling to two schools, is the sound of an engine coming towards us at full tilt, the car passing a large SUV with tinted windows that it had been tailgating as both approach an intersection connecting two courts to the arterial road they’re on, completing the pass in the intersection, and bombing uphill a hundred yards to a stop sign. The whole sequence took four seconds but it was enough time for a social contract governing common decency to be scoffed at, violated, unilaterally cancelled.
My daughter and I are stunned by the stupidity and selfishness of the act, the complete lack of consideration that to me felt momentarily nihilistic. Are we here, in the world of Mad Max now? For a moment it seems, yes. I think back to the Blake poem, about the tigers of the world. The dark triad types. The little spotted fawns and their mothers just starting to emerge from the creekbed and little sheltered gullies nearby, munching on the grass outside our kitchen window. I don’t have any psychology training, but I’ve read up a little bit. My instinct is not to correct people, it’s to let the lessons they need to learn dawn on them. It’s to remain humble and keep learning myself. But there appears to be a uniquely American strain of selfishness that is threatening the balance. Yesterday afternoon in the DMV, it was the first time I’ve ever intentionally checked for all the exits.