February 2010 Monthly Musing

The dead of winter is a time to be saved by books. I got three beauties for Christmas and it was just in the nick of time. November and December were cold and stark and I experienced a bit of a literary breakdown. I read a raft of contemporary poetry books and a young adult novel about a white magician in Queen Elizabeth’s court. For some reason, I read the kid’s book in the afternoons, in what is usually my reading time for serious books. In winter I have to fight with the cats for the sunny spot on the couch and this year, as I read about magicians and spells and curses, I was occasionally kneaded into reading aloud the parts about black, castle, cats that yowl and fly over the parapets like ravens.

Because all contemporary poetry, except Harrison’s and Kooser’s, puts me to sleep and because I almost never feel compelled to scribble in the margins, which I hate to wrestle with at night, I saved the poetry for bedtime reading. Mercifully, all that fantasy and inscrutable metaphor ended just before Christmas. But winter was closing in and December 24^th found me, a little depressed and panicked, rummaging through the book shelves for something I had missed.

I was saved on Christmas day when three new books came into my possession, though at first they didn’t look like salvation. Under the Christmas tree, which at our house this year was a sagebrush bush pulled up by its roots, were two books. From Lucas and Jilian a copy of David Allen Sibley’s 600 page tome on bird life and behavior. The second book was from a Minnesota hunting buddy: Wilderness Warrior, Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America by Douglas Brinkley. This book was 300 pages bigger than Sibley’s and the combination looked more like a semester of graduate school than a pleasant winter of reading. But I guess I don’t need to tell you that it is a mistake to judge books by their covers, or the number of pages.

Even the third Christmas gift book did not exactly leave me panting to slip away and read. It was a hand-me-down from Jill who had been reading it at night, poking me and reading partial paragraphs out of context, and rolling with laughter at the jokes that I didn’t get. It was JR Moehringer’s Tender Bar and from the trailers I’d been hearing at night it seemed like the adventures of a drunken Holden Caulfield.

So I faced the coldest and shortest days of the year with a lapful of questionable literary sustenance. I began by dipping my toe into the Roosevelt biography. I love T.R. and was sure there were a lot of facts in that book that I should know, but the test of such a book is, of course, the skill of the author – the readability of the book. I decided to try the first paragraph and I can’t be still about it.

So here it is:

On a wintry morning in 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at a White House cabinet meeting unexpectedly and with great exuberance. Something of genuine importance had obviously just happened. All eyes were on Roosevelt, who was quaking like a dervish with either excitement of agitation – it was unclear which. Having endured the assassinations of three Republican presidents – Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley – Roosevelt’s so called kitchen cabinet at least had the consolation of knowing that their boss, at the moment, was out of harms way. Still, they leaned forward, bracing for the worst. “Gentlemen, do you know what has just happened this morning?” Roosevelt breathlessly asked, as everyone leaned forward with bated breath for the bad news. “Just now I saw a chestnut-sided warbler – and it’s only February!”

Holy moly, I was hooked!

What had been the bad news about the book – that it was 900 pages long – suddenly became the good news. What I had planned for a month long slog would now, with all the margin notes and dog eared paged and stars and arrows I’d have to scribble in the text, become my winter’s escape! So the dark days are a little brighter and, like a bottle of blue label Scotch, I’m sipping Brinkley and Roosevelt.

At night I alternately laughed and cried through the Tender Bar, (more like roared and sobbed). I barreled head long through the pages, late into the night, until I found what I was looking for. The line concerning what all sons feel for their fathers, “that such sadness is part of the hard work of manhood.”

And on these suddenly glorious afternoons I lie in that patch of February sunlight and read what to most would be dry indeed. I read Sibley’s Guide to Bird Life and Behavior as if it were a novel. A cat curls on my chest, fascinated when I sound out the songs of sparrows. I’m driven on by an attempt to understand migration and molt – the secret wintering grounds of spectacled eider ducks – the relationship of storks to vultures – how red winged black birds build their nests.

This February will not last as long as most. I will barely notice winter pass into spring. And if I’m lucky, when I retire my three lovely Christmas presents to the book shelves in my office, I’ll step outside into a nascent spring day and there it will be – a chestnut-sided warbler!