Will You Please Be Quiet Please?

April 06, 2008

Filed in: The Home Front, The Middle Ages, The Way We Live Now

It’s weird to be pitching a book about falling in love with America again when in fact I am less and less in love each day with our economic system of government. It’s kind of like going to a marriage counselor when you already have one foot out the door.

Poor Swellville is in such dire economic straits we are in danger of having our town name changed to UnSwellville (and who among us could endure a tragedy of that scope?). It just doesn’t make any sense to fund public education from tax revenues that go up and down (and down, and down).  Really, what am I supposed to say to my kids, sorry for the gaping hole in your knowledge bank, but that was the year everyone stopped going to Best Buy?

I have been working with a lot of other people to try and turn that around somehow, but all the while in the back of my head a little voice is saying, isn’t this pointless?

It was with a head full of this kind of crap that I took Pip out for a walk into a spring morning that, in typical New England fashion, was neither sunny nor warm. Because I was blasting Pearl Jam on my iPod in the hopes of shutting up the noise in my brain, I missed the warning cries from the crows and the sudden dead quiet from the littler (and smarter) birds that would have told me a hawk was nearby (a juvenile red-tail, as it turns out. I looked it up when I got home.)

So I nearly jumped out of my skin when he swooped about a foot above my head and gave two sharp, economic little flaps and sailed to the top of the tallest pine. He ruffled up all his feathers and looked down on Pip for a moment, wondering if she were worth a fight (she’s not), then turned back to his job of dispassionately surveying the Swellville horizon and freaking out the crows and the jays. 

Was he a message from God?  It was Sunday morning after all. A sign from Buddha? I should be hawklike in my resolve? Or maybe I should majestically rise above all these petty social concerns? What did it all mean?

Nothing, I decided as Pip and I rounded the corner toward home. Not a damn thing. It was a hawk in spring, and if he could talk he’d say, My message to you Tracy Mayor is: shut up.

Which I will.