"Three Sightings"

1. A Dove

For some time I had been seeing a lone dove at my feeders and in various places around the yard and along the creek. Just before dusk he was at the feeder by the bathroom window where, if the angle of the sun is just right and I don’t move too abruptly, I can observe birds closely. The dove wasn’t feeding, but just sitting there as if watching the sun go down and killing time until some natural imperative sent him home to the roost.

As for many people, doves symbolize for me conjugality, but also something not entirely wholesome, rather like codependency. I acknowledge this to be a projection of sorts, but this single dove seemed forlorn and sorrowful. There was a depressive aura about him, a quality not dissimilar to what we sometimes encounter with a person who has been summarily dumped or jilted, or simply forgotten about, by the one he or she perceived to be the very meaning of life and love. So I started talking in a low, soft voice to the dove about what I saw as something we had in common which I’d effectively processed, presuming to advise him on how to adapt to his situation and find value in it.

After a minute or so of this, which he seemed to endure with growing impatience, he flew away into the boughs of the big maple, making that staccato little whistling sound that doves make when they take flight. It was a reply, and how I received it was: “Stupid human, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” And I thought, “So stay lost in your little illusions, then. What do I care?” It was not long, however, until he was back at the feeder, this time with a second dove, a female. And then I remembered that a few weeks earlier, after seeing him frequently alone and assuming that he’d lost his mate, I watched him approach a female who emphatically spurned him. At the time I believed him to be making an unsuccessful pass at a prospective new mate. But here he was with a female dove whom he’d apparently retrieved in order to show me that I’d misread his situation. I watched as she quick-stepped toward him and, for no reason apparent to me, pecked him on the head aggressively, then casually resumed her feeding. Then he looked straight at me. “See? Do you see now why you so often observe me hanging out by myself?”

And I did see. This was the same female who had spurned him. It hadn’t been her rejecting a suitor because they were in fact mates. What I’d watched, rather, was one creature tolerating the nastiness of another out of an illusory sense of need. “So why don’t you leave her?” I asked. “As you would do?” There was something slightly mocking about the way he cocked his head. “Damn right,” I said perhaps too harshly. I didn’t like being challenged by a codependent bird. “Well, it is not in my nature to do so, which obviously has never been the case for you. Oh believe me, I have tried. I do not like being flocked and pecked and denigrated, but I cannot leave her. For me, for the kind of being I am, bonded must sometimes also mean bound. Even so, I admit I have craved freedom from this genetic constraint. So our commonality, yours and mine, does not occur where you think it does. For all my yearning to be so, I am not a solitary being. Look to your beloved heron for that, because you, by nature, are solitary even while craving - and you will not like this, human - to be bound. So it is only at this level that we are kindred: What we have in common is our foolishness in struggling against our own respective natures.” The female flew away then, and he followed.

2. A Human

Through the summer and fall months I worked as a night cashier at a busy convenience store. As a consumer, it had never occurred to me that such work might quickly become mindless drudgery of a kind just slightly removed from the conditions of indentured servitude. I quickly learned that those seemingly pleasant people making change on the other side of the stainless steel counters are often subject to unique kinds of stress and exploitation by the large companies who regard them as expendable cogs in the machinery of avarice. And yet, if one manages to hold resentment and anger in abeyance for a while, the work can lead to some interesting and perhaps valuable perspectives.

For me, that arose one summer Friday night after eight grueling hours in which a customer dropped and broke a quart of beer when I couldn’t get away from the register long enough to clean up the dangerous and stinking mess; the automatic fuel pumps were inexplicably rejecting all American Express and Discover cards and the irate cardholders were mostly, and equally inexplicably, attributing this to the cashier’s ineptitude; a woman who had a low tire and was afraid of exploding it with the air hose became indignant when I declined to leave the line of customers waiting while I inflated it for her; a group of campesinos who had just been paid and who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, speak English came in to change their hundred-dollar bills by purchasing small items; a shoving match broke out between two teenage girls at the pay phone; somebody drove off without paying for thirty dollars of diesel fuel, a fairly common event in which management assumes the cashier probably has some degree of collusion.

Finally, though, there was a short lull in this manic torrent of free trade during which I was able to drop cash into the safe, light an illegal cigarette, clean up the beer and broken glass, and then wonder in the aftermath of this typical speeding touch-and-go interaction with humanity: Are we members of the same species?

It was close to midnight and closing time when, as if in the sometimes ironic speech of synchronicity, an answer to that not so rhetorical question started unfolding. A shabby young transient whom I had come to think of uncharitably as The Troll ambled unsteadily out of the roadside darkness into the bright glare of the canopy lights. He was on his way “home” to his makeshift nest under the bridge behind the station after, if he was true to his routine, befouling the bathroom and reviling me in slurred shouts for not extending him credit on a twelve-pack of Budweiser. Twice I had capitulated to customer complaints and evicted him from the lot for panhandling and once threatened to summon the cops if I caught him urinating again on the side of the building. In short, we did not like each other very much. But I see now that I am indebted to him for being the agent of an insight that I very much needed to acquire.

He was the last customer of the day. Uncharacteristically, he came in without speaking or making eye contact, shambled to a cooler, pulled down a forty-ounce bottle of Cobra, and paid for it with loose change that he’d already counted into the exact amount. Then he wandered on to his dark niche in the infrastructure of our so-called civilization, perhaps to obviate with his bottle of Cobra the frenetic tumult of that civilization coursing relentlessly across his roof. He stayed in my thoughts that night while I closed out the drawer, did my shift report and cleaned up. I wondered why I felt such a particular charge about this guy when, all things considered, he was much less obnoxious and challenging than many people I’d had to deal with. He posed no danger. And yet he had evoked an imbroglio of feelings which had passed from a low grade fear through anger, contempt, pity, and then, finally, something else borne in a shift of perspective. I saw how truly shallow our connections with each other tend to be. Touch and go. As if we are not really of the same species, not really members of each other’s lives.

3. A Unicorn

Biltmore Iron and Metal is the most fascinating cultural juxtaposition I have ever encountered, for it is in many ways a tangled wilderness of junk and jetsam that thrives squarely within the energy field of Asheville’s prize attraction and monument to conspicuous consumption, the Biltmore Estate. On one side of the street you can walk in awe among the gilded forms of great wealth; on the other you can prowl amid the wreckage those forms are destined, sooner or later, to become. To my mind, the latter is infinitely more interesting because even though it is the boneyard of commerce, it is somehow more alive for me, more real, magical in a gritty sort of way.

What initially led me to the place was the delight I derive in creating small sculptures out of seemingly incompatible stuff - feathers and steel, glass and string, fur and cement, and so forth. It is no more than an on again, off again hobby in which I pretend to no artistry, but it gives me pleasure. I like the experience of being startled by something that just seems to come together on my work bench. And so an acquaintance who knew of this penchant I have for affixing strange little thingies to other strange little thingies just for the joy of doing so told me about Biltmore Iron and Metal as a place bountiful with strange and innominate little thingies. And it has become good hunting grounds for me indeed, for it was there, while trying to liberate a small star-shaped piece of anodized aluminum from beneath the lip of an upturned cast iron ore bucket, that I picked up the fresh trail of a unicorn.

On some inexplicable level I must have felt its presence, for there was no sound nor scent nor glint of light that attracted my attention; I just looked around and there it was, a small drab object about nine inches long and half concealed in oily mud. What emerged after I had wiped and daubed with an old bandanna and picked at it with the blade of a pocket knife was what I think is a synthesis of glass and cinder, disparate substances apparently fused in great heat. Embedded in the core of this interesting glob and protruding incongruously from it was an old and very weathered rasp, the pointed end of which extended about two inches out of the cinder glass. It looked like a small horn, and as I worked and puttered with the object a little more a distinctly equine face appeared with eyes, nostrils and the suggestion of small ears.

I was of course very pleased with this little prize. After paying a nominal charge based on its weight, I headed for home to work on it further with the dremel, wire brushes and a polishing wheel. Only two block away, however, on Sweeten Creek Road, I was momentarily delayed by a minor accident in which the trunk of a Ford Taurus had been mildly crinkled by the front bumper of a Jeep truck that had been following too closely. I waited for traffic to clear in the left lane so I could steer around them, then as I passed I noticed the predictable postures of chagrin of the drivers who had already had their words and were awaiting the arrival of police. But I also noticed the bumper sticker on the Taurus. It read, “Warning: I Brake For Unicorns.”

I added nothing to my little found sculpture except for a small unobtrusive base so that it could stand with the horn pointing up. I only cleaned and polished until I was satisfied that it had become what it wanted to be. It stands now rather subtly displayed near my desk, and it’s there to remind me that what one finds moving around in the inner world will ultimately be found moving around in the outer one.