Icicles On Gratitude

The robins had returned when I arrived at work today. There they were, two of them, staring back at me from beneath the denuded burning bush, bright-hued in the pool of halogen light I threw on them when I pulled into my parking space. I tossed three crackers to them, and the big one closest to me never moved. He just stared at me with that semi-angry look they have. Have you ever looked closely at a robin’s face? They look perpetually annoyed, as if all their cellphone calls are telemarketers. So I threw them the crackers and left them to the frigid, black morning.

I used to make merciless fun of the misanthropic types who prefer animals to people. I saw them as socially retarded, sad, wretched. I saw them as missing something essential in their core, something the rest of us have. But the older I grow, the more I understand the comfort of animals. The reason for my enlightenment is that I have reached a saturation point with human beings. Animals are honest and pure, even the hostile ones, even the dangerous ones. Humans are treacherous beyond measure, consistently unreliable, and self-centered through and through. With the exception of my precious wife, there are no human beings I’d rather spend time with than my silent, watchful dog.

My wife and I enjoy a television program called “Lone Star Law,” which follows the day-to-day activities of a group of Texas Game Wardens. It’s a highly watchable show, compelling and exciting and tender by turns. On a recent episode, the wardens were called to a residence where a man was apparently keeping a fawn that he’d found somewhere. The warden’s investigation showed that the little deer was in fine shape and had been taken good care of, but he was forced to tell the homeowner that he was violating the law and that the fawn would have to be confiscated, rehabilitated (prepared to re-enter the wild), and eventually released back to join his cohort.

The homeowner who had been caring for the fawn, a balding little Mexican gentleman, was overcome with worry about the fawn as he assisted the game wardens in capturing the animal. He begged the officers several times not to hurt his little friend, not to scare the fawn. He became so overwrought that he began to weep when he realized that the deer would not be returned to him after it was examined and prepared for transition back to the woodlands. He sobbed as piteously as I have ever seen a man do. The senior game warden, who seemed to be a kind sort, commiserated with the distraught homeowner and offered him information to help the man become a rehab specialist, who might one day work with animals like the fawn in his own home environment. “But I won’t get my deer back,” he said in soft tones as he cried, watching the wardens load the fawn into a truck.

I spoke with a friend of mine today who lives up north. They got quite a bit of snow the last few days, and he was commenting about how snow hides the flaws of the landscape and lends beauty to even the most mundane land features. I told him that one thing I love about snow is how it dampens and muffles sound, and he agreed. When I stare up at the icicles hanging from the gutters like melted candle wax, I do so in a silence so complete I feel like the only inhabitant of the world in winter.

Even with it’s great beauty and bursting life, spring will bring an ugliness to the land, the ugliness of noise. As the sun’s power returns and the green things begin to push upwards, the humans will shed their coats and promenade about in the ugliest, coarsest of attire. They will roll down their car windows, and they will begin sharing their current musical tastes with the wide world. The quiet muffled beauty of the ice months will be gone, and the vulgar and the froward will reign. For me, I will retreat from the noise, looking for peace and nature’s sounds as a thawing world troubles and pursues me.

It is raw and colorless outside right now. My arthritic joints torment me like bees inside the bones, stinging me without mercy. And yet I love the ice months. Something in my blood reaches back to the times when the merciless cold was the daily reality. It is raw and colorless outside right now, but it is quiet. And quiet is enough for me.

~ S.K. Orr