Birds of Prey

A hawk perched on a stop sign at the head of the cul-de-sac flanked by the orange cones of a construction zone. I was a stranger in a borrowed Cadillac, obviously a visitor and the residents made note of it. Posts and fences and high tension wires gave the birds of prey an altered landscape and the suburbs yet another constructed reality. The neighbors spent the weekend tending lawn tossing glances at the new visitors making note of how I walked the dog leash-less and stood center street to watch the rhythm of machines graze the conquered land. I recalled the chores I did as a child. Weekends didn’t begin until the room was cleaned, the house dusted and vacuumed and, in the fall, the wood split and chopped. There were three of us to tend the latter, the boys to the wood during the season and my sister to extra house duty. Loading the station wagon five to ten loads with swamp oak and scrap wood, occasionally the cops would question the legality of it, our home planted firmly within the greater New York area where the land was either owned by others or swampy flood plain. That is, the places that were not yet mall lots and golf courses. It was hard to explore it as a wild place although in hind sight I could see it was. Humans scattered it like wolves and our trashy little borough had its fair share of failures and dramas from the flooded river banks up the mountain through to the neighbor’s secret glue sniffing habit as his wife battled the family with concealed bi-polar rage. He would eventually lose his job and mind and fall homeless sleeping for a spell in a shed behind my mother’s long since functional pool which fell dead and unmaintained a year or two before my father left embattled, as he was, with steady layoffs and other emasculating gestures of corporate strategies in the nearby cosmopolitan metropolis of Newark, there in the shadows of its glorious neighbor. Not before however my sister and I took a number of beatings for our collective failures as my brother escaped through study and general good behavior to Syracuse University with his early interest in computer technology. I chased girls and fell prey to my emotional sensitivities while maintaining a steady flow of personal drama including early bar fights and a series of near arrests. I did however have enough sense, usually at the final moment, to avoid total collapse with strategic observation of successful avoidance. And when the courts did become involved I stood my ground in clean dress and a prayer that next time I would avoid the foul. But I knew, as surely as I had seen the suburban wars around me unfurl, that I would have to fight my way out. Mostly because I couldn’t let my friends go, who also had to fight their way out, despite my uncles advice to leave them behind as I gained degrees and wisdom and facts confirming suspicions of an altered landscape just below the surface of the plane I learned to navigate in those early years.