Oddities

There are some interesting, completely unrelated things I've seen lately that I've been wanting to describe.

The first, a squirrel I saw on Terrace Place as I was taking 2 of the kids to a birthday party. It appeared to be carrying a garland of silk flowers in its mouth, but the strand seemed wrapped around it's neck. I was worried that the animal had gotten its head stuck in the strands, but couldn't get near it before it skittered over someone's tall wooden fence.

Now, after reading the article The Garlanded Classroom in last week's City Section, I wonder if perhaps it had escaped from one of those atelier/reggio emillia preschool programs. Do we have any of those in Brooklyn? So beautiful, so elite... The classic anecdote portraying the essence of those classrooms: children building an amusement park for birds. Fabulous. Had this squirrel escaped from a fashion show they'd designed?

My daughter's nursery school classroom is not garlanded with flowers, but garlanded with love. Oh thank you merciful ????. This morning her teacher flung open the door and warmly said hello to her, another teacher eagerly showed me the art she created yesterday, then asked, her kindness amazes me, if her brother was feeling better. They were preparing for a child's birthday "circle," which is what they call it instead of a party, and I like that. Because it points towards celebration as an intention to create wholeness, instead of partying as an intention to escape from the pain of the rest of our daily struggles and tortures.

Another thing I saw was a woman on a motorized wheelchair driving down Prospect Avenue, with 2 young children on her lap. No seat belts, of course. I stared at them for as long as I could without causing a car accident. I want the story. How? Why? Is someone crazy, desperate, care-free, determined....? I felt like I was watching a foreign film.

Here's the last thing, this morning as I parked the car I was staring into the scene of those tall laundry poles that stand in the back of many Brooklyn back yards, amidst various ghetto palms and morning glory vines. Sometimes they have rungs attached to them for climbing so you can fix the laundry cord. As I was listening to the comments Lee Bollinger made regarding the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at Columbia yesterday, my attention was drawn to a mocking bird, the way it jauntily landed on the tip of the tallest pole, one that was very aged and leaning to the left. The scene was banked by the clearest of blue skies. It didn't fly off the pole by leaping into the air, instead, it jumped of the pole and allowed itself to fall for several yards before playfully flapping it's banded wings. It did this over and over again.