To truly love a bird

A Green-Bridge is being constructed at my university, linking the campus by road to afor-separated suburbs. The verdure descriptive does not, I am told, give clue to the paint job of the completed bridge, but rather the environmental message it sends (only buses and pedestrians will be allowed to cross). Anyway, the building of this worthy connector has necessitated the closing of a road that I travel everyday to uni, forcing me to motor a detour each morning.

 

The detour is one of those windy roads that reminds me of engineering students (probably because it is near the engineering faculty, although I am making no assumptions), and has more than its fair allocation of pedestrian or zebra crossings.

 

As I was driving through these roads this morning I saw a little duck, standing nervously at the end of one such pedestrian crossing. Now a duck’s legs are short, and my Volvo is long, I think that I could have made it over the crossing before the duck hit the road. But conditioning was too strong for me, and the force of habit pulled the car to a halt at the stripy strip.

 

“Well go on!” I yelled at the duck, waving my hands in encouragement, as another car pulled to a sharp stop at the duck’s perambulation.

 

The duck honestly seemed to listen. He (or she) looked both ways, and then carefully waddled across the pedestrian crossing, never deviating from the road-rules sanctioned path for a second.

 

Wonderful things, birds, really. I like it when they act like humans, or when humans act like birds for that matter (the miracle of flight anyone?). Seeing the sweet little duck’s strange behaviour this morning brought to mind a couple of other poultry interactions I have had, one of which I will describe below.

 

One time, again at uni, I was sitting quietly on a bench outside my lecture theatre. I was enjoying an apple in the ten minute break afforded to me by the Nazi-lecturer. As I sat there, a crow flew by, and then dropped down beside me.

 

I looked solemnly at him, and he back at me. Now a crow’s gaze can be quite intense you must realize, so it was with unwavering care that I broke of a piece of my apple and dropped it softly on the ground in front of the crow.

 

The crow considered my gift, and then finding it acceptable, began to eat. We both sat there for the next little while, that crow and me, munching on our fruit and shooting the breeze with one another. He waddled around me (yes, I have used that word twice, but what word can so adequately describe the stunted walk of a bird!) pecking away, and I felt at one with this beautiful black bird.

 

Birds are my favourite animal, I feel a special kinship with them. The magpie, so cheeky! The Noisy-Minor, a perpetual skally-wag! The butcher bird, so regal! It all started with my pet Budgerigar, this personal love of the feathery kind. But I have to say, once you have yourself, truly loved a bird, you will know what I mean.

The Volvo Monologues

When my parents first brought a brand spanking new white Volvo 850 in 1995, I promptly burst into tears, and swore never to ride in it with them for fear of public scorn. It was not until a couple of years later, brattish teenagehood subsiding, that I deigned to enter its boxy leather interior. By that stage I had got my license (fourth time lucky), and I took that magnificent white beast on camping trips and picnics – ferrying with me hoards of people that the roomy backseat of the 850 allows.
When I moved to Brisbane to go to university my parents kindly supplied me with a beaten up old red Subaru with clunking gears, no airbags and unreliable breaks. I thought I was happy with it… but oh how wrong I was.
One weekend after staying with my olds I left the Subaru with them (ostensibly to provide my sister with a geared car in which to learn to drive), and took the Volvo back to Brisbane. The moment he (the Volvo is, of course, masculine) and I hit the road I knew that the bond between us was special – pure, true and not meant to be broken.
My dad was fond of saying, after a long drive,
“I called on the Volvo, and it answered.” These words summed up exactly how I felt. When driving an 850 you feel like you are navigating the road in a tank, a tank kitted out with armchairs on the inside. No journey is too long for the Volvo, as it eats up the kilometers hungrily and still asks for more. The drive back to Brisbane from my parents’ is about 2 hours long – but to me it was no more than two minutes, such was my comfort and exhilaration.
After that trip I refused to go home, telling my parents that I would come back when they promised that the Volvo could be left with me. Extreme measures I know, but sheer Volvo passion had taken over.
It is now 5 years on and that car means as much if not more to me now, as it did then. And so, to the present.
Two days ago, after a long slog at the alma mater I tracked back to where my Volvo was parked, and upon reaching it, slid my key its hallowed door. But nothing! The key would not turn! I fiddled and twisted but the door wouldn’t open.
“My love, my one, my own!” I mentally lamented, becoming slightly panicky as I considered the possibility of lack of safe passage out of St. Lucia.
Straightening up, I looked around, only to see my own sweet car three parking spaces down. I had been attempting to open someone else’s dearest treasure! I may be forgiven, of course, at times one white rectangle looks like another. Yet I should have looked for the telltale customization of stickers and scratches that is my boy, and recognized that I was trying to force upon another’s Volvo.
Not that I think the owner would have minded. See, there is a camaraderie between Volvo drivers. When passing another proud master of that swarthy Swedish steed, I raise my finger off the wheel (not the middle one of course) in a salute to the chosen. For a true Volvo driver is one since birth, I believe. Sometimes the grandmas and grandpas blink back at me confusedly, but other youthful motorists like me always wave and smile a knowing smile.
One time a sweet new Volvo C70 pulled up next to me, and the man driving signaled for me to wind down my window.
“I love my Volvo so much,” he said simply to me. “Do you love your Volvo?”
“I do,” I replied, “I do.”

Indiscriminate Love

Recently a lot of people have been talking to me about love, that heady or pragmatic (depending on whom you talk to) state. I am given to understand that when reached in a relationship this ‘love’ precipitates bells ringing, birds singing and both parties living out their lives together in a state of perpetual nervous ecstasy.

I consider discussions of the aforementioned emotion as both fraught and embarrassing, however I persist in them, my eyes rolling back in my head as I imagine committing my own special brand of hari-kari that consists of slitting myself open lengthways, as opposed to the more traditional horizontal disembowelment.

I once met a boy at a nightclub in Darwin. We had but a brief meeting – he attempted to lick my armpit and I attempted to catch the first available taxi back to the apartment at which I was staying. The upshot of this one-time encounter was a frenzied series of calls over the next month or so which would usually transpire thus:

Me: “It is 2am.”

Boy: “I love you, I know it is strange to say it so early, but I really think that there is something about you….. I LOVE YOU!”

No such namby-pamby ineffectual and unrealistic declarations on my behalf I assure you. I have only said I love you to a boyfriend once, and in that case I had known him since childhood and it took me a full ten years to build up to it. Even then, I am not sure that “Do you want to go to the movies?” constitutes as a full declaration.

In fact, I have a relatively small list of people I love (note to self, possibly make wallet sized card of said list and monitor change over a year), and my love for them has shown itself to be enduring, and more often than not based on blood ties, deep feelings or a track record of stable support and friendship.

All this to say that I do not take love lightly.

And yet…

I went to a Beatles tribute concert the other night and sitting in front of me was a be-jumpered, clearly bored, man with Downs Syndrome.

“I love you,” I thought as I looked at him, the words diving directly into my head. And I felt it.

Driving to uni today I passed a group of disenchanted council workers, scratching their heads as they surveyed the seemingly unchanging mess of witches’ hats, stretched tape, and gravel. My eye was caught by a bearded fellow who looked to be around 65, still smart in his orange helmet,

“I love you,” I thought, and then shook myself.

I remember very clearly walking around Toowong a few years ago, and being caught up behind a slow old codger, dressed shabbily in what would have been his 1940’s best. As I stumbled behind him, trying to measure my stride, I saw him pull out a comb from his back pocket, and comb back his thinning greased hair. Who was he doing it for? I wondered at his desire to appear his best, given his age, and situation. He was so neat, so futile and neat.

“I love you,” I thought – and I remember this one very clearly because it played on my mind for weeks. I had a mad desire to sweep him up and read to him, clean his house and fill it with flowers, and make sure that he felt appreciated.

In terms of vociferously loving things, I have also noticed that I frequently declare my love of inanimate objects and foods, cheese high among their number.

With my guarded and limited dolling out of love I think that it is somewhat ridiculous and contradictory that I can be so judgmental and serious about that emotion, and yet seem to feel love indiscriminately for strangers and objects.

I begin to wonder if people I feel sorry for, and cheese, have a monopoly on my love.