When I was coming up on fifty, my dear husband told me, "I know I'm supposed to throw you a surprise party, but I'm no good at those things. If you like, I will try. But I could also take you on a vacation to Paris and Athens. What would you like?" That was an easy decision. In preparation for the trip, I scoured guide books for targets of opportunity. In the event, however, I was in the middle of a health crisis on top of the ongoing midlife phase (it's not a midlife crisis--it lasts too long to be considered a single crisis). The trip itself was much more difficult than either of us had expected, Still, worth having done. This photo is not from that trip, all of whose photos were on FILM, as was still the custom, mostly, and I would have to scan them, manually to post them here. Maybe someday. In any case, the only birds we saw were hungry sparrows. And, you can probably surmise that the initial words of the lines of an abecedarian follow the alphabet. This below is a double abecedarian: the last letters of each line also follow the alphabet, in reverse.
This piece first appeared in Unshod Quills in July 2013.
Abecedarian of the
Budgies
A week in Athens for my half-century birthday, sure antidote to Weltschmerz.
Believed Frommer’s: owners parade their budgies in Oneiros Park every Sunday.
Could caged canaries be freed? Imagine seeing each avian
aviatrix
dance, bound only by cotton strings that would trail
daintily below.
(Elastic cord would have launched each bird like Barishnikov,
feverish, entangled like the louche courtship dances of
Corfu.)
Greeks lock bumpers, jump from cars, snarl and brawl in
traffic, but
Hellenic birds, even on Sundays, must stay separate as
dolmades.
Icarus convinced folk you could fly too high. Greeks remember.
Joy-riding birds of Athens, loosed every Sunday from deux à cinq,
kites with tiny minds of their own, would soar while locals nap.
Limp, weepy, off-kilter, sleepy, I was not philosophical
like Plato.
My half-century found me so much less settled than even Helen,
noodling my way through midlife, out-of-step and off the
rhythm.
Olives of Athena sprouting in every park; now, this mythic marvel:
parakeets uncaged in the polis? What a custom! I was wild to
gawk.
Question that I never sent to Arthur Frommer, trusted tourist
Raj:
Remind me, who told
you this tale of tethered birds? The Oracle of Delphi?
Simple me, I asked the hotel clerk how to find the park. In fine
English,
truthful, not at all unkind: Never have I ever heard such a
ridiculous thing.
Unstoppered, fabled birds flew away. I felt my whole flock
take off,
vanishing back into the naïve guidebook of this faded layered
place,
where nods mean no,
where one conveys yes by shaking the
head.
Xenophile I might be, but that wasn’t enough in Athens. Organic
yoghurt was the only soothing part of entire days I spent silent
as a tomb.
Zeno said, Once delayed,
you can never catch up. You can bet your last drachma.
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