Woke up irritable. Breakfasted distractedly. Spent precious working hours last night employing various finicky tools and bits of gaffer tape and cotton pad struggling to eliminate a barely perceptible ticking noise from the right side of my spacebar, literally just like the guy from Bartleby. (His name’s Nippers. See paragraph 11.)

Echo of what the guy at Bay View Printing said the other day when I did the fun little workshop with A–: “There is no perfection here.”

Reminder to self that this, the pigeons, anything like this, can be whatever it turns out to be. There are no rules except one pigeon a day. Take your non-negotiables by the teaspoon-full, that’s what I say.

OK, with all that preambling out of the way, I think it’s time to see what today’s pigeon is.

But I kind of want to draw it out. Sustain the suspense. So far I have checked off three pigeons out of a total of 1,572 (although that total is still growing). Pigeons are named randomly after common nouns, so the name has nothing intentional to do with the content, but it’s fun to see what connections end up being there anyway. Synchronicity. Today’s pigeon is named “accent,” but I haven’t yet opened the file to see what it contains, because I want to ride the crest of this tiny little moment, the moment where the pigeon turns in mid-air en route to its next destination. Graceful, elegant, kind of bug-eyed. I love pigeons so much. Dull as pebbles, deep as galaxies. And sassy! Here comes “accent,” bobbing and weaving, giving me the bulbous side-eye. What? she asks. What? You got a problem? I spread my hands in mock surrender and try not to let my grin seem derisive.

pigeon

“You’re going to have a pool party someday and you won’t be able to enjoy yourself!”

said BD’s girlfriend. Poor girl. Didn’t know what she was getting into. None of the rest of us knew precisely either, although today we have a term for it and that term is “borderline personality disorder.” But this isn’t about BD (or BPD). There’s other pigeons that are.

It was 1983 and we’d had the pool for one year already. My youngest daughter excoriates me regularly for failing to appreciate how good I had it. “Can you even possibly begin to fathom how amazing that would be!?” Having a pool in the backyard AND my own room with a sliding door leading to a little deck with stairs going right down to the pool area. “It’s literally like something out of a TV show!” She’s right, of course. What was more or less normal to me will never have been normal for my kids. That’s largely my fault, partly the whole enshittification of capitalism thing, etc, etc; this isn’t about that.

I think I must have appreciated the pool then, though, at least as much as possible within the constraints of my youthful perspective, because I was constantly tending to it. Yes, initially because mom told me to, but once given the directive I ran with it. Sweetgums off the deck. Bugs and frogs out of the skimmers. (If you were too late, the frogs were dead and that was sad and gnarly; if you were timely, you could cup them in your hands and run them down the hill to the little lake and set them free, assuming/hoping the chlorine hadn’t fatally blasted their senses, knowing there was a good chance the dumbasses would end up right back in the pool anyway next time it rained, but hey, you have to keep trying, right?) Leaves out. Vacuum. Backwash. Clean the filter. Put in the sweeper, dunk the head, set the switches. Test the chems. Adjust the heater. Remember to turn it off—we may have a pool but we’re not filthy rich. And so on.

So I must have been constantly doing one or more of those things that day when BD’s girlfriend was over. All the ages swam together, from teenager-plus (like BD and his cohort of ne’er-do-wells) down through regular old teen (like my brother) to me and my middle school best friend from next door (other pigeons, another time), to the squawking little kids my mom’s friends would shuttle over for summer lunches. Discrete worlds, juxtaposed. So I was there and yet not there, in the presence of the “old” kids, not really kids anymore, but BD’s girlfriend was nicer than most (poor girl) and went out of her way to include me. She must have found my fastidious antics bemusing. I was a kid, why wasn’t I slacking or playing or just doing whatever?

“Relax! Let that stuff go for a minute!” she said, peering sympathetically into my social future. “You’re going to have all your friends over for a pool party someday, and you won’t even be able to enjoy yourself!”

Little did she know, I only had like one actual friend. Little did I know, that was going to change in approximately three years. (Another pigeon, another time.)

Hm. Maybe that’s what this pigeon is actually about. See, this is what I love about pigeons. You never know! Dull as gravel, deep as summer; it’s not just the gray gravel of the driveway before there was even concrete there that matters; it’s the individual pieces of gray gravel, white-scuffed, warm in the sun. It’s not just the pieces of gravel; it’s the delicious pain of their sharp edges toughening your boyhood feet over the course of a summer.

Likewise it’s not the pool; it’s the great dirt crater before they poured that concrete and laid in the lining. It’s not the clear, chlorinated frog-killing water; it’s the murky, teeming water (a year earlier), slowly inching deeper during the first fill. It’s not that weird fake lake of hose water; it’s the awkward kid of indeterminate age who wandered over from the other side of the real lake, peered through the fence, and said, “Looks like it’s ready to swim.” It’s not that it wasn’t actually anywhere close to ready; it’s that my one best friend and I pointedly did not offer the invitation he was not coming right out and asking for.

It’s not that I rejected that kid who had the unfortunate distinction of being even more awkward than I was, it’s that (a year later) I keenly felt the absence of those hypothetical “all your friends” when BD’s girlfriend said what she said with the best of intentions.

What I thought this pigeon was about was the fussing, the “OCD,” the interminable squirming after perfection, how that reveals a deep need to have control over something, how that continues into my present life in my own (non-pool-having) house in the form of excessive worrying about loose tiles, dirty dishes, un-hung-up towels, and, more insidiously, in the form of wasting half a day of work trying to “fix” a spacebar that isn’t broken.

Or how fussing around constantly can be a way to keep someone you love and don’t trust at arm’s length (there’s another pigeon about that; we’ll get there when we get there).

And I guess it is about all that, too, just like it’s also about my daughter being jealous of me when I was her age, and how much of a privilege it is to have any house, with or without a sliding door and a deck and a pool and frogs in a lake, and how I hope my daughters realize that, and how they probably realize it even more acutely than I do, even though I don’t always see it because they’re not always perfect about hanging up towels and washing dishes, and, let’s be honest, I’m sure I also wasn’t perfect about taking care of the pool when I was their age, and I’m sure my mom had to ask me more than once to empty the damn skimmers, I mean, come on, get real. I was weird but I wasn’t that weird.

Well, this pigeon ended up making a damn mess all over the sidewalk. Can I wrap up what this is, then, after all, about? Do I need to?

I could say it’s about how you spend your time, how fleeting summers are, how it’s OK to take care of your space for yourself, for your mom, and for your friends, even the hypothetical ones.

I could say it’s about a kind of gross feeling of relief that I can’t go back in time knowing what I know now, to see if I would or would not choose instead to invite the awkward kid over to swim.

Whatever I would say, though, I can pretty much guarantee it’d be missing the point. There’s always one more layer to those “It’s not the […]; it’s the […]” things. Only the pigeon can say for sure what the pigeon is about, and they got like one brain cell, so good luck extracting that info.

Also I have no idea what the connection with the word “accent” might be. 🤷