Bird baths have an inherent optimism to them. For one thing, they are sort of a physical instantiation of the glass-half-full principle—you have to be happy on rainy days, because it’s filling the bird bath. Secondly, you put out a bird bath with the awareness that you’re investing time and money in something that might never have birds in it. My cats have a variety of discarded and disregarded toys, scratching posts, and beds that they have never shown the slightest interest in (the nicest bed I ever got them was so completely ignored that I use it to sit on the floor of my office).
Wild birds are similarly unpredictable—you don’t know if they’re going to show up. They didn’t find the bird feeder on my porch for months, but when they did, the seeds disappeared almost overnight. That’s how it goes with things for birds—you just offer them in a spirit of generosity, and wait for takers.
There’s a meme that as millennials get older, they show more interest in birdwatching, but so far that hasn’t happened to me. Or rather, the bug for identifying and listening to birds has not yet happened—perhaps because it happened much younger, when my avid birdwatcher grandparents pored with me over pages of vividly-illustrated species and lent me binoculars that were too big for my small face. I had a tiny pair of binoculars of my own, and I can still remember their heavy weight in my hand and the strange, smooth way they folded and unfolded—a classic example of a single-use object.
I guess people do still use binoculars, but I rarely see them. When I think about it, I guiltily realize that when I see something interesting, I’m much more likely to reach for my phone than a pair of binoculars. There’s been a shift toward documentation of the moment over the experience of it, and you probably don’t have time for both with a bird—you can take a picture of it, or you can see it.
I haven’t gotten obsessed with birdwatching yet, but I do find myself occasionally fascinated in the moment by a bird, often as not by a tiny brown bird hopping its way across the sidewalk, the kind that birdwatchers call a “LBB” (little brown bird) because of the plethora of species that look like little nondescript crumb-eaters. I also do not personally have a bird bath. The farthest I have gone is my birdfeeder, which I suctioned to the third-floor window of my apartment before I got a house. Sometimes I see a bird bath, though, and some part of me thinks that an optimist lives there, or at least someone not pessimistic enough to give up on the birds.
Recently, my roommate and I watched The Fast and the Furious. I don’t even know enough about those movies to know which one we watched—full of angry men and low-rise jeans and supercharged engines. I don’t really understand car racing, sports cars, or anything in the genre, but I found myself rooting for the blonde, blasé protagonist as soon as the first race started.
I can’t figure out why car racing is interesting—to my untrained eye, used to automatic gear shifts and slower-than-Internet-Explorer hybrid engines, it’s impossible to tell how skill plays into it. Cars just—go fast, right? And some are faster than others? Somehow there is skill involved and I don’t understand it enough to know why it fascinates me. I just know that somehow you can coax more speed out of a hunk of metal even when it seems to be going as fast as it can, and some people are better at that than others.
I’m from L.A., so I’m aware that most sports cars are not for racing—they’re a statement. I know many women love cars but in my experience it’s mostly men who have a real fascination with them, who will talk about cars until they leave me far behind in a dust of vocabulary. Maybe there is something masculine about it—some deeply-wired capacity to throw your wife and your kids and your gun into a car and just go. Like St. Joseph going into the desert or a dusty pioneer on the Oregon Trail. Maybe even if that capacity is never called upon, it’s still latent in all of us, especially us Americans—the hardwired capability for flight, hopefully toward something better, but probably away from something worse.
Maybe it’s that impulse that inspires people to get red sports cars even though they’re more likely to get tickets, to drive orange McLarens on the congested L.A. highways at 38 miles per hour. Maybe the people who know can feel all that potential vibrating under their feet, and even if they can never use it, they know it’s there. Maybe buying a sports car is like buying a bird bath—optimistic, in service of some sort of ephemeral dream. You do it because you can imagine yourself flying across the desert, too fast for anyone to catch you. When you imagine what it’s like to be in flight, you feel a little closer to being there.
Maybe we all need things in our lives that symbolize that kind of possibility. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes about the importance of luxury in a chapter on abundance:
And so, when it comes time for us to choose between a cherished dream and a lousy current drudgery, we often choose to ignore the dream and blame our continued misery on God. We act like it’s God’s fault we didn’t go to Europe, take that painting class, go on that photo shoot. In truth, we, not God, have decided not to go. We have tried to be sensible—as though we have any proof at all that God is sensible—rather than see if the universe might not have supported some healthy extravagance . . . In order to thrive as artists—and, one could argue, as people—we need to be available to the universal flow. When we put a stopper on our capacity for joy by anorectically declining the small gifts of life, we turn aside the larger gifts as well.
Both the sports car and the bird bath have that spirit of luxury. (Cameron offers as an example of luxury a weekly pint of raspberries—and specifically eschews sports cars—but the spirit of what she’s saying still applies). When you put a bird bath out in your yard, you’re opening up the possibility of something happening to you that you haven’t seen yet. There it stands, a monument to your optimism that could feel stupid if the birds never arrive. But you think they will arrive, so you keep the bird bath out there, even if the birds never come. Sports cars capture the same sentiment—hope that someday you might use their speed, awareness of the possibility of glorious victory in a mad dash down the highway, the possibility of escape, of flight.
The conversation about cars I tuned out of: here.
What I’m getting at: is, of course, Emily Dickinson.
Come back in two weeks: for a patron-only post on why geese in the street are like jury duty.