Learning to Love the Sparrow

 A philosopher (whose name I don’t remember) said that women will never achieve equality until people learn to love the sparrow.

 

At first that might sound like a non sequitur. But I think I sense its meaning. Just as we tend to look only at the flashy bird who appears seldom in our garden, we tend to only look at a woman when she is young and flashy, if we seriously look at her at all. We squeal with delight when a cardinal or a blue jay visits our birdfeeder, but we disregard the dun little sparrow who is fluttering around most of the time in the same way that we disregard the older, average-looking woman. Such a woman is often viewed only as an annoyance, one of too many.

 

But that woman might be someone who discovered what triggers some heart arrythmias. She might have written an award-winning book of essays. She might be raising good children single-handedly. Even if she has no worldly accomplishments to point to, she might have a rich inner life. She might be an interesting person. But no one really cares. Unless she’s young and attractive, her life doesn’t matter.

 

French author Yann Moix said “Women over 50 are invisible to me.” He got quite a bit of criticism for that. A lot of that criticism though simply consisted of providing examples of women over 50 who are still sexy-looking and who should therefore be worthy of Moix’s interest, women such as Brooke Shields and Christie Brinkley who have a diligently managed appearance. A smaller percentage of Moix’s critics did take to higher ground, protesting that love is not a matter of frenzy over a firm body.

 

The truth though is that Moix merely voiced what most people privately, perhaps sometimes unconsciously, feel. It’s not only men though who assume most women to be inconsequential. Women also disregard most other women. We really haven’t travelled very far from Joan Rivers’ jokes about the way in which men are favored over women. Rivers observed that while a female flight attendant will fawn over any man in her section, offering him extra bags of peanuts, eagerly delivering his drink order, flirting with him – his wife scrunched there in the window seat will usually get short shrift. If the flight attendant deigns to speak to the woman at all, it will be to advise her “Why don’t you open the window, dear, and get a little air.” Yes, if a mature woman gets suctioned off the scene, no one really cares.

 

At parties, most of the attention centers on the men. Unless a woman is Oprah Winfrey, she will take second place to her husband and will exist on the scene only as “his wife.” During the evening, no one will solicit her opinion on world affairs, no one will ask her to recount anecdotes from her day.

 

The average woman of any age is like the sparrow at the feeder. The homeowner wishes those sparrows would clear out and make way for that brilliant oriole he hopes to attract. This attitude is understandable. We lose the ability to see what is common. We take anyone who is predictably present for granted.

 

In his recent bestselling book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari considers why almost all cultures value men over women. He comes up with several theories but admits that none of them are really sufficient to explain the second-class citizenship faced by women all over the world. An experience I had some years ago perhaps provides a clue.to this mystery.

 

I lived for a while with a couple whose lifestyle was a hangover from the sixties’ hippie era. Since I have no living relatives, I had some notion of forming a sort of co-housing ensemble with these two generally like-minded individuals. I thought we could create our own family unit as a bulwark against advancing old age. This attempt at communal living turned into a disaster, as I think most such attempts did during the actual heyday of the commune in the sixties. But I was able to observe an interesting dynamic develop among us that perhaps sheds some light on how people come to be regarded or disregarded.

 

The husband of the couple was unemployed. His day consisted of the leisurely sequence of getting up, having breakfast, sitting down to strum on his guitar, then letting the day bleed into dinner and his quota of six beers. On particularly ambitious days, he would prepare dinner. Meanwhile, his wife was all astir. She had a job at a local restaurant, then she sometimes hired on as a caregiver to a senior citizen.

 

All this meant that she kept rather irregular hours. Work at the restaurant sometimes required her to stay late if there was a large party celebrating into the night. So one never knew if she would be home at 8:00 P.M. or 2 A.M. Then her senior client might be having a bad spell, requiring her to stay overnight. All this made her an unpredictable visitor to the household. The husband and I, the perennial stay-at-homes, never exactly knew when she might appear.

 

As a consequence, she definitely became the boss. Her naturally somewhat imperious nature blossomed under this arrangement. She could dictate, she could command - and not principally because she was the breadwinner. It was her coming and going, her unavailability, her infrequency, that really gave her the upper hand.

 

The husband and I had to shape our days around her. We had to wait for her, and by extension, this meant we had to wait on her. Her arrival, like a gust of wind from the great wide world beyond, was always an event, an advent. It set us in motion as if we were wind-up toys in the hands of a bored child. Our day’s lethargy was suddenly blown away. We hustled to reheat dinner and to make an acceptably appetizing presentation of what were now leftovers. We marshalled the best tidbits of novelty from our day that we could come up with and presented them to her, our meager contribution to what were surely her already stuffed coffers of interesting incidents. “Oh, I saw some rabbits gather on the lawn at twilight. They started to dance. Literally, it looked as if they were dancing, weaving in and out as if they were doing a minuet. It was amazing.” I’d trail off, aware of how relatively lame my observation was compared to the ignited saganaki plate that had almost set her whole restaurant afire.

 

It was all for her. It was all about her. We came to live through her and for her. She became more than boss. She became master.

 

It was evident that a role reversal had taken place. The subsidiary role that I and the hippie husband played in this outwardly busy person’s life was the role customarily played by women in men’s lives. Before women so frequently joined the workforce, they were the stay-at-homes who had to arrange meals and entire schedules around the man’s estimated times of departure and arrival. Again, it’s not so much the independent income that finally granted modern women some modicum of control and some respect during her career years. It was her here-and-then-gone-again, her bustle, her having places to go, people to see. It was the occasionalness that this outside activity lent her. Working outside the home boosted some women up to the status of rara avis.

 

Men’s superior muscle power did likely establish them from prehistoric times onwards as the ones who ventured beyond the home fires. They were the ones who went out to hunt. They went to war. The women stayed at home, ladies-in-waiting. Some houses in New England still have what are called “widows’ walks.” These are second-story wrap-around balconies or cupolas atop family homes, the places where wives used to stand vigil, looking out over the waters, waiting for their fishermen husbands to return. All the emotions of the women and children were invested in sighting that speck of a boat out on the water, the boat that would bring the menfolk back safely into harbor after long precarious days on the rough waters.

 

A woman shaped her days around the man’s coming and going, and everywhere became secondary in the process. When the man returned from whatever wider, wilder mission he’d been on – it was a joyous reunion, a reawakening of the family unit. We see the same dynamic operating today. At least a few times a week, the nightly news features some heartwarming surprise return of a father from Afghanistan or some other battlefront. He appears in the crowd watching his son’s soccer game. When the son finally sees him – it’s a shriek of “Daddy!” The child rushes over, crying with joy and throwing himself into his father’s arms. The boy’s mother takes her turn flinging herself joyously into the arms of the hero home from the hills. The woman herself almost never experiences such a reception because she has likely been more constantly present in her family’s life. They know she’ll be there - waiting. She’s not rare enough or endangered enough to count.

 

So although modern women now have gained some status through their daily removal into the workplace, their absences are still nothing compared to the absences of men. Men can’t be counted on to always be there. Their schedules, their more outward natures, their rambling-straying ways make them more unpredictable. In addition, it’s a sad truth that their greater propensity for rage and violence also makes them more unpredictable and therefore more exciting. The bad boy, the adventurer, the lothario, all keep us on our toes, watching, wondering, secretly thrilling to their lack of restraint. You never know when a man will “go off” like a firecracker lobbed into life’s dry sermon.

 

It’s difficult for most women to assume such roles. Unless a woman is young and pretty, she just doesn’t have the same power to make us wait and wonder. She isn’t capable of existing vividly in our imaginations while she holds us in suspension. She isn’t the stuff of a Hollywood dream. What has made Shane the quintessentially romantic figure is that he rode away.

 

Women can’t realistically “move on” in the same way. As much as feminism has advanced women out into the world, a woman still can’t not be there without getting charged with child abandonment or other forms of neglect. A woman can’t just ride off into the sunset. Moreover, she usually doesn’t want to. She doesn’t migrate and then appear just for a few days in brilliant springtime plumage. Instead, she’s predictably there all year, seemingly indistinguishable from all the rest of her kind, brown-and-gray in her ubiquity.

 

But the solution is not for women to force themselves to become more random, more removed, more violent and ejaculatory. The solution is for all of us to become more attentive, to learn not to take the constant for granted. It’s up to us to learn to see the extraordinary in the ordinary.

 

Following that philosopher’s lead, I decided to pause and to look, really look, at the host of sparrows that were always at my birdfeeder. Instead of sitting there wishing for a cardinal to appear, I decided to concentrate on what was already there. I went so far as to take a class in distinguishing the different species of sparrows found in the Chicago area. Their differences can be subtle, but in the subtlety lies the beauty.

 

There are so many ways in which initially elusive differences can become beguiling distinctions. The different species sing different songs at different times. The vesper sparrow, true to its name, sings at twilight. Others chirp throughout the day. Sparrows will flush in different ways. The Savannah Sparrow will fly to a perch and face its pursuer. The Chipping Sparrow takes flight in a similar way, but often issues a clarion note as it takes off. Others will dive into some adjacent patch of grass headfirst. The different species behave in different ways and build different kinds of nests. Then there is the more difficult difference of coloration. Even within a single species, the variations of color can present like a slow turn of the kaleidoscope. Each individual has a slightly different meld of earth-tone markings. As is alleged with snowflakes, no two birds are exactly alike.

 

Discerning the subtle differences between sparrows can be as thrilling for the naturalist as making use of the subtle difference between synonyms is for the writer. Just as there’s really an age of difference between the similarly defined words “spry” and “sprightly,” so there’s a fascination of difference between the similarly marked American Tree Sparrow and the Chipping Sparrow.

 

But it takes a special commitment and concentration to pause and appreciate that difference. The sparrow doesn’t grab your attention. You can’t be manipulated into granting the sparrow importance as a result of the sparrow’s making a false show of itself. You have to freely give your attention. I had to constrain myself to look and not to simply overlook these numerous members of the Passeridae family in my garden. With this attention, the sparrows gradually emerged as being, not drab, but beautifully dappled.

 

In studying the sparrow, I learned how I might lead a slower, more observant life in general. Just as attentiveness transformed the sparrow for me, so attentiveness could perhaps transform the “plain” woman, the woman over 50, and every woman for the likes of author Moix and for us all – to make her equal in our eyes to the eagle.