Another Week: Number 123

This was wildlife week at my ramshackle residence.

On Sunday, slightly later than usual, I performed my first lawn mowing of the season. It was really more of a vacuuming and leveling.

Then I dug out the remaining Maltese Cross perennials rapidly bulging up below my bird feeder. I had put five plants in during that first COVID spring, and they multiplied like crazy. They’re attractive early on, and hummingbirds love them — but they’re top-heavy, and any significant wind eventually knocks them over into a ratty tangle. A Russian Sage will replace them.

As I pulled the plants out, a robin was at my heels, eager to gobble up all the earthworms I was uncovering.

Later, while watching TV in my living room, there was a flutter of wings in my front window — big ones. Walking over to check it out, I found a young Cooper’s Hawk looking to wrestle with a young rabbit. The bunny had found refuge beneath my yew shrubs, and the match was at a standoff.

For one day each spring, the local rabbits let it all hang out. They show up together and race around in circles, leaping and spraying, sniffing and humping in a frisky frenzy. Monday was that day, but this year’s jamboree was more relaxed. There was as much lounging as there was running riot.

In addition to the usual sparrows, robins, chickadees, finches, and cardinals, some more transient birds are making their annual visit. A Brown Thrasher has been manhandling my leaf litter. A Gray Catbird sipped from my birdbath. White-crowned Sparrows are conducting grid searches all over my lawn. A Blue Jay was squawking from the canopy.

I planted some lavender beneath my back window and some Dianthus under the crabapple tree. A couple of milkweed plants did not travel well and may or may not survive.

The Deer didn’t make it. After a few final bursts of power, the Milwaukee Bucks ultimately rattled apart at the end of Game 5 in Indianapolis, and Tyrese Haliburton’s dad aggravated Giannis Antetokounmpo. The 2021 world champion Bucks are officially history.

Meanwhile, our country is fading fast. This week marked the first hundred days of Donald J. Trump’s current reign, and opinion polls are already grading him an unprecedented disaster. Trump suggested that children may have to cut back from 30 dolls to just two, inspiring Lawrence O’Donnell to nickname him “Donnie 2 Dolls.”

Donald is said to be desperate for any trade deal at all with any country. Is that a good negotiating position? I wouldn’t know. I haven’t read The Art of the Deal — and neither has he.

I walked 2.87 miles this week.

The Story of Medieval England: From King Arthur to the Tudor Conquest

Every month on Prime Video, there’s a different no-extra-cost sample from The Great Courses aimed at getting you to subscribe. I have watched four or five assorted lectures, but never a complete course until now.

April’s free course was The Story of Medieval England: From King Arthur to the Tudor Conquest, presented in 36 half-hour lectures by Professor Jennifer Paxton and released in 2010.

As TV, it’s extremely dry stuff at first glance — a minimal set with a lectern and an unimposing woman talking for 30 minutes at a stretch, plus a few illustrations and some helpful graphics now and then.

But Paxton is an outstanding lecturer. Each installment is impeccably organized and skillfully delivered as part of a coherent framework. She makes clear where she’s going, and then she takes you there.

Most enjoyably, she talks about these kings and clerics from centuries ago as if she’s gossiping about the neighbors. A thrill is visible in her gestures and her voice as she shares the amazing details of their lives and decisions.

I learned a lot about the development of England’s property ownership and legal system — like how due process originated with the Magna Carta, and how parliament evolved to counterbalance the brute impulses of kings, and even beheaded one of them.

Of My Own Making author Daria Burke on Fresh Air

Awake a little too early on Wednesday, I listened to a recent Fresh Air episode in podcast form: ‘Of My Own Making’ recounts a painful past — and what it takes to change.

Having worked on my own do-it-yourself, post-grief identity project for the past year, it felt very serendipitous to hear Daria Burke talking about her mother’s substance abuse, and her grandmother’s death.

My dad was an alcoholic. I know how it feels when your family’s electricity gets turned off — and I lost my wife after a ten-year breast cancer odyssey.

The most intriguing thing, however, is Burke’s exploration of neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to adapt — and “the stories that we tell ourselves.” This is something I have been piecing together for myself, through “books and films and songs,” as Jackson Browne once put it.

Not enough of the interview was spent on these revelations, so I’m sure I’ll be reading Of My Own Making: A Memoir in the very near future.

Paper Moon (1973)

Saturday at my mom’s, after a brief panic in trying to find something to watch, I surfaced with Paper Moon, currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Somehow, despite all of its publicity at the time — and Tatum O’Neal‘s Oscar win for Best Actress — neither Mom nor I have ever actually seen the movie.

Set in 1936 Kansas, Ryan O’Neal stars as “Moses Pray,” an itinerant con man whose signature grift is selling overpriced, personalized bibles to recently bereaved widows. His real-life 8-year-old daughter Tatum plays his 9-year unacknowledged daughter Addie, whose promiscuous mother has just died. The kid is far shrewder than the swindler.

The two hit the road together and their adventures commence.

Peter Bogdanovich directed this black-and-white Depression comedy-drama, and László Kovács did the beautifully bleak cinematography with its Orson Welles angles.

The performances are delightful — including Madeline Kahn as a gold digger Mose picks up along the way.

We both enjoyed it.