Not a Sparrow Falls

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don’t want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________

I went to Chicago’s North Park Nature Center the other day – to learn about sparrows.

Just going to the Nature Center itself always provokes flights of fancy in me. The Center’s conservators are currently devoted to turning the acreage back into native prairie and wetlands conditions. Walking along the trails lined with goldenrod and bluestem grass is interesting. But I remember when this land was devoted to another, equally interesting use. I remember when it was one of the last tuberculosis sanitaria in the U.S.

Right here, in the middle of Chicago’s busy urban north-side, there was this asylum for victims of “consumption” (the old word for tuberculosis). The last residents of the sanitarium were relocated (where were they sent?) in the 1960’s. After that, the land was hotly contested for several years, with competing interests vying for ownership. The conservationists eventually largely won out over the condo developers. A few senior citizen apartment complexes were nestled back in the parklands. But for the most part, the land has been handed over to the Park District as a place where citizens can come to study and commune with nature.

I often walked the ground when it was in transition though. It had a haunted, fading quality. The extended arbors on which the tuberculosis patients once grew grape vines as part of their fresh-air regimen were collapsing. The glass panels of the greenhouses were shattered and sharded. It was like a page out of a Southern gothic novel – beautifully bygone, but dangerous with bitter loss. The huge red brick building that used to be the “natatorium” where the patients could swim is still there. It was rehabbed and is a more generalized gymnasium now. However, there are nooks and crannies about the place that are still as they were in the days of the insidious TB bacterium, old hiding places where I would hate to poke a stick.

But the other day I went to my sparrow lecture in full sunshine. Most of the nature classes are held in a smaller, cozier red brick building. There is a fireplace in the main room where we gather. And the rafters of the room are usually decorated according to the season – twinkling white lights in the winter – papier mâché butterflies made by children in the summer.

A panel of expert birders was there to walk us through the fine points of sparrow identification. They handed out charts that labeled the different external anatomical parts of the bird, emphasizing the parts we could use as points of distinction. There is the superciliary (the eyebrow), the malar (the mustache area), the crown and whatever median line runs through it.

One of the best tips we got though was to observe the overall form of the bird. Look at its silhouette. If it is relatively small and has a long, narrow tail, it is likely to be a member of the Spizella genus. Around Chicago, that means there’s a good chance it is either a Field Sparrow or a Chipping Sparrow. If the bird has a stubbier tail, it may be of the Ammodramus genus. Maybe it’s a Grasshopper Sparrow, or if it has more lines on its face, it might be a Henslow’s Sparrow.

Another valuable tip to identifying sparrows – watch where they feed and watch where they flush to when they are frightened. Some species almost always forage in groups on the ground and flush further away into the grass when they are frightened. Some don’t like a background of trees at all. Other species may feed singly and flush into a shrub or a tree when they sense danger. I wouldn’t have thought to look at such behavior as a key to identification.

One instructor said that learning to distinguish the different kinds of local sparrows was like becoming a fine wine connoisseur – without the elitist connotations of that term “connoisseur.” But the point is – everyone can specify a preference for either “red” or “white” wine. Almost everyone can distinguish a cardinal from a bluejay. But if one would truly like to think of oneself as a nature lover – if one would truly like to travel down the path to becoming a naturalist – that means learning how to make finer distinctions. It means being willing to abide in nature long enough, lovingly enough to become aware of subtler distinctions.

I liked that analogy. And then another analogy involving sparrows came to mind. I remembered one noted feminist saying that women in this society could never be truly free and equal until people learn to love the sparrow.

She didn’t elaborate on this rather enigmatic remark. But I think I know what she meant. Unless a woman engages in time-consuming, straining measures – she won’t be noticed. In order to stand out, she must paint on a lot of flash. She must regularly prune herself into a strikingly artificial topiary form. Otherwise, she will be relegated to the status of sparrow – common, unremarkable. She won’t have the command of a typical man who is taller, more muscular. A man, with his bushier eyebrows and bolder, more prominent features, just naturally tends to be more vivid. And certainly a man, at least in many age categories, is a much rarer bird.

Older women are the sparrows of our society by virtue of numbers alone. Convalescent homes and senior citizen living facilities are notoriously female preserves. Almost everyone resident there is female. Women live longer. Surviving men perhaps are likelier to have younger, still healthy mates to take care of them in their own homes. So it’s women, women, women, you see out and about on tours and on retirement cruises, doing volunteer work, in gardening clubs.

It is easy to view them as an undifferentiated mass. It is easy to become dismissive and to look over their shoulders in the direction of that blaze of red cardinal. Even the nicest media stars take a dismissive tone when they refer to their matinee audiences. They say that they will be performing that afternoon for the usual “flock of little old blue-haired ladies.” They do their best to disassociate themselves from this demographic. They sigh and shrug, as if to underscore the fact that they play to these individuals not by choice, but simply as a matter of contractual obligation.

Well, perhaps it is true that they will be statistically less likely to find someone in those matinee audiences who will appreciate the edgy, avant-garde nature of a performance. Still, there “might be giants” out there. There might be genius that can appreciate the script better than even the performer himself does. And there almost certainly will be beauty. But the beauty will be the beauty of a sparrow, requiring more commitment and concentration before revealing itself.

Until people can learn to be interested in their fellow human beings selflessly – without the urgencies of sex or profit prodding them – then women are indeed doomed to being second-class citizens in society, to being the sparrows. When they are younger, they will be tied to the labor of bringing out their best features with mascara and lipstick and diet in order to be visible to the casual observer. When they are older, they will fall irremediably under the heading of “flock.”

Everyone’s attention will be turned to the soar of the masculine eagle, to the bright self-assertion of the woodpecker. And all those sparrows underneath, with their drabber, more difficult tones, will be invisible – except to the most discerning eye.