Greylocks - by MRM
April 15th & 16th, 2024
I remember reading a book about Greylocks when I was a young child running barefoot and tanned through the Sonoran Desert. Greylocks was a cool cat protagonist who spent some time trying to catch a fat robin.
I was learning about local birds - using a paperback Golden bird guide my mother had loaned me. I knew the mocking birds and the mourning doves, the pigeons and the house wrens. We didn’t have robins in Yuma. Greylocks’ color pencil-sketched robins on fibrous pages were vivid and alive in my imagination.
We had roadrunners in Yuma; we’d see them running across the tops of houses. They’d jump from one roof to the next, scurrying so fast - they looked like a long dark streak with sharp eyes and a beak. They zipped along as if their feet were burning; maybe they were.
I knew what a cactus wren looked like, though I hadn’t seen one. But we didn’t have robins, and I wished that we did. Robins lived where there were tall green trees and thick, woodsy undergrowth - where vines climbed tree trucks like I did back then. Robins were a sign of a place that was more alive.
My sister and I kept lists of all the birds we spotted and heard, early mornings when we went walking before the desert sun rose. We made lists of pre-dawn birds, insects spotted under street-lamps, secret places to hide, the names and occupations of stuffed animals and Little People.
Bishop Blocks and Lincoln Logs could build and destroy whole worlds in a day. Some of those towns lasted for weeks, or even years, rebuilt by the victors and the victims from memories made in the good times and the bad.
The sun scorched its way through orange groves and alfalfa fields we ran without a single thought about the future or the past. Its cycles etched cracked earth the Colorado River-fed canals flooded daily with a richness we could scarcely fathom - without a care in the world. Always there. Never ending.
Robins are a fixture in our yard and at the city park in the town where my wife and I live now. They hop and peck, often seem plump and happy, more contented in appearance than many of the other birds that scurry more, fight more, seem desperate more. Many robins have rich, perfect feathers like the ones in that old book did, but not all do. Some are much more tattered and worn - those tend to be thinner - not as contented - yet here they are being their best robin selves just like all the rest, each one happy to find a worm.
This afternoon while I was sitting on a park bench, a mourning dove cooed from somewhere not far away as a woodpecker climbed and darted, pecking its way up a tall, dying tree trunk. There is something new here to see when you’re looking for it. I see robins everyday now. They’re everywhere. They were a symbol of all that I wanted but could not have.
A brother and sister walked through the sand cliffs at sunrise, to see a burrowing owl mama with babies in a hole. As vivid as if it were just this morning, golden sun rays spill over the bluff and bathe that memory in a soft, warm glow. A child spirit visited me in a whisper of the wind - he said that perhaps I should cherish these robins - and that desert - more.
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